Arcangelo Corelli

Arcangelo Corelli ranks among the pivotal names in Baroque music, having established himself as the initial authority on the modern violin. The instrument’s dominance throughout the subsequent three centuries stems directly from his advances in technique and instruction. He drew from the violin a richness of sound and lyrical vocal quality that had never been achieved before, securing him renown across Europe both through his concerts and through the many pupils who carried his methods abroad. The essential rules of present-day string performance, covering both bow control and left-hand placement, trace their lineage straight to Corelli.

Born in Fusignano in 1653 to a prosperous household, Corelli almost certainly received his first lessons from a local priest before relocating to Bologna for study at the Accademia Filarmonica. By 1675 at the latest he had settled in Rome, where he began performing as a violinist in ensembles assembled for religious and civic events. He quickly became one of the city’s leading musicians and entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, the earliest of several powerful patrons who had settled in Rome after relinquishing her crown. Some of his earliest compositions were written for her academies and dedicated to her. After her death he joined the household of Cardinal Pamphili, who supplied a handsome salary and living quarters; Corelli stayed with the cardinal until 1690, when the latter departed the city. Patronage then passed to the young Cardinal Ottoboni, who had obtained his position through his uncle Pope Alexander VIII. The arrangement proved highly advantageous: the cardinal extended friendship, generous compensation, and genuine admiration for the composer’s music. Few musicians have enjoyed so stable and profitable a bond with a patron. In this role Corelli attained both broad celebrity and substantial riches, and at his death in 1713 he was buried in the Pantheon.

Although he did not invent the concerto grosso, Corelli produced the first substantial body of works in the genre, thereby preparing the ground for the later accomplishments of Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach. The same holds for his trio sonatas and solo violin sonatas, all of which display greater formal coherence and a more developed command of harmonic direction than those of earlier composers. These pieces exerted influence not only through their novel handling of form, terraced dynamics, and major/minor tonality, but also because they appeared at the moment when the Italian music-publishing trade was expanding. Corelli’s celebrity and affluence ensured that nearly every composition was engraved during his lifetime and distributed widely abroad. Composers and performers continued to examine his scores for many years after he died.