Niccolo Paganini 's The Piano And The Mandolin By The Elder Paganini

Vivaldi grew up in a Catholic family. His father was a talented violinist and would be his first teacher. This allowed them to perform together. He also took lessons from a choral teacher who knew violin. Vivaldi loves speed. At age 15, he began studying for the priesthood, which gave him 10 years to study and develop the musical and composing talents that is displayed in his works. Vivaldi spent his entire life, other than the last six or so years, with his father. As a child, they toured Venice together. Then, later on as a man, he toured Italy and later Europe. Vivaldi and his father were a pair and it seems that they held a good relationship. His father helped to write out some of the pieces that Vivaldi would think of. He preferred a combination of the choral religious music, dramatic-operatic, and classics of Italy. His most influential works were written for the orchestra of a Venetian girls’ orphanage where he was music director. It was for them that he wrote his famous concertos. Vivaldi also invented the concerto-grosso.

Famed violin pedagogue, Leopold Auer, provides a detailed account of his experience in violin playing. It is written as an autobiography with personal observations and anecdotes from his career as a violinist and teacher. Later in the book, Auer gives advice about violin technique and performance that reads like an instruction manual.

It is during one of the residences he had in Milan when “he played at Verona, Padua—where the "prison" stories seem to have originated” [Paganini, rumored to have spent eighty years in a dungeon for a murder] (Stratton). He composed fifteen Quartets for Violin, Viola, Cello, and Guitar during this period (Lloja). Ironically, it wasn’t until 1825 that Paganini felt he had developed his skills to put them on display throughout Europe (Lloja). Paganini’s reputation would, at times, proceed him on these travels. When he visited Naples for the first time in 1819, he found the local musicians had composed a tricky and incredibly difficult piece for him to perform sight unseen (Stratton). Nicolo played it flawlessly the first time through, even after it became apparent that the other musicals had practiced the piece earlier (Stratton). His reputation continued to growing outside of Italy, Paganini decided to leave for fame and wealth

Composer of Per La Gloria D’Adorarvi, Giovanni Battista Bononcini(1672-1748) was born into a family of composers. Both his father and brother were composers. Although he was orphaned at age 8, he still followed in his fathers footsteps, releasing instrumental music by age 15. Throughout his life, he moved around to many different European countries, but he was born and died in Italy. This shows through in his Italian baroque style, which he helped spread around Europe in his travels.

All humanists made an alliance with power by acting as spokespeople for the patrician class. Their writings were effusive towards the everyone and everything inside of the cities they lived in. All of their works were written to favor the aristocrats. Leonardo Bruni was an Italian Humanist during the Renaissance. In his Panegyric to the City of Florence, Bruni illustrates his version of what Florence was like for the purpose of inspiring his and future generations of what an ideal city-state should embody.

Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer born in 1554 and wrote many works in the ‘in between’ stage of Renaissance and Baroque. He was a composer and

The renowned baroque composer, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, was born on the 4th of March, 1678, in Venice, Italy to Giovanni Battista Vivaldi and Camilla Calicchio. During childhood, he found himself surrounded by his five siblings, Margarita Gabriela, Cecilia Maria, Bonaventura Tomaso, Zanetta Anna, and Francesco Gaetano Giovanni Battista. Francesco, like Vivaldi, would find music to be his calling. He would later teach a young Vivaldi the art of the violin. Vivaldi’s younger years were hard for him; he suffered from strettezza di petto, tightness of the chest; in other words, he had asthma. His asthma would prevent him from playing any wind instruments for the rest of his life. When Vivaldi became a young adult, he pursued priesthood, finally being ordained in 1703 when he was 25.

Andrea Amati was born in Circa in 1505, and resided in Cremona, Italy for several years. Some scholars dispute the claim of him being the first violin creator because he was trained by lute makers. A. Amati’s first violins composed of only three strings on them, resembling the characteristics of the rebec. This possibly could be another explanation as to why scholars discredit his claim of the first violin maker. Regardless of that there is proof that he did create a four string violin and it was made in 1555, and the eldest serving one is dated 1560. There is even proof of violins being sold to Charles IX of France in the form of documents (Bartruff, William).

A prolific and most influential composer of the classical era, Mozart had been destined for “greatness” from the moment he began looking on at his sister’s lessons as a toddler. Born in Salzburg Austria, to Leopold and Marie, young Mozart and his sister were the only surviving children of 7. His father was a successful composer, violinist and assistant concert master of the Salzburg Court. Both Mozart and his sister were tutored by their father, a devoted, task-oriented teacher. Young Mozart soon excelled even above his father’s teaching ability. At the green age of six, he performed as a child prodigy in the royal courts at London, Paris, and Zurich. Mozart spent his youth constantly on tour. These tour were financed through donors and patrons. Through the years, and while abroad, Mozart met many accomplished musicians such as Johann Christian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Joseph Haydn.

Vivaldi was ordained a priest in 1703, but he did not remain with the church, citing health problems. It was common during this time to become educated by church, and as a priest Vivaldi would have time to write and compose, but his first love was music, not the church. Vivaldi spent many years as director of instrument music at the Consercatorio del’ Ospedale della pieta, a famous music school for girls in Venice. During this time he wrote many music for concerts, and these concerts became famous with visitors from around Europe. Vivaldi was extremely prolific as a composer. His reputation began to grow with the publications if violin sonatas and later concertos such as “The Spirit of Harmony” which contain some of his finest writing. These

Niccolo’ Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469 and died in 1527. Although we do not know much about his early life, we know that he was educated according to the humanist ideals of the Renaissance. He was trained at an early age by a latin teacher named Paolo da Ronciglione. He spent his youth in the

While few details are available about Petrucci's life outside of his work printing music, we do know that he was originally from Fossombrone, Italy, and that he was most likely educated at Urbino, more specifically at the court of Guidobaldo I (Bergin & Speake, 1987). He made the trip to Venice in 1490. Ottaviano Petrucci was an intelligent businessman, as well as skilled craftsman, and he was granted the right to print music in 1498. He then obtained a patent on his printing process, which gave him a monopoly on music printing in Venice for the next 20 years (Burkholder, Grout, & Palisca, 2014). The first book of masses that he published was a set of works by Josquin, a fairly significant composer of the time (Boorman, 2006). He published

Nicoló Paganini was a famous Italian violinist born in the midst of The Enlightenment. He wrote a set of 24 Capriccis for the violin in the early 1800s, the most famous of which is the final caprice, simply referred to as “Caprice No. 24”. The final caprice exemplifies Paganini’s bold style and technique, which was a natural byproduct of the musical liberation that took place during the Enlightenment. His work would inspire musicians for centuries to come.

After World War II Italy was in shambles, and the rural nation struggled to close the developmental gap between itself and other European nations. It was during this time, in 1948, that Luchino Visconti filmed La Terra Trema, or The Earth Trembles, on the island of Sicily. It was a critically acclaimed adaptation of I Malavoglia, or The House by the Medlar Tree, written by Giovanni Verga in 1881. Life on the island as depicted by Verga had barely changed in the approximate 70 years between the two works, and Visconti filmed in a true neorealist style, recruiting nonprofessional Sicilians to act out their own lives in their own native tongue. While Visconti’s political messages change the meaning of the story, he succeeds in capturing the never-ending struggle of the oppressed working class, and the futility of disjointed revolt.

Antonio Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678 in the town of Venice, Italy. His father was quite the musician and helped his son master the violin and also helped him get find lessons from some the best composers in Italy. Sadly, do to his symptoms that were similar to asthma often causing him to have severe shortness of breath he was unable to master several instruments. At one point in his early life he even became a priest but this was short lived do to his continuing health issues therefore he had to give up his priesthood. “At the age of 25, Antonio Vivaldi was named master of violin at the Ospedale della Pietà (Devout Hospital of Mercy) in Venice” (). This is where he spent in upwards of thirty years teaching his students and only having