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A riveting, Romantic work well worth dusting off
The much loved and virtuosic violin piece known as the Vitali Chaconne is not really a chaconne and most likely is not by Vitali. Its origins are rather murky, and the closest thing to an urtext is an 18thcentury transcription housed in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden.
On its first page are the words "Parte del Tomaso Vitalino," written the hand of Dresden scribe Jacob Lindner, who penned the manuscript sometime between 1710 and 1730. Thus arose the attribution to Vitali.
With an eye toward uncovering what lies behind the 19thand 20th-century versions of this chaconne, popularized by everyone from Jascha Heifetz to Sarah Chang, let's dust off the work to explore its origins and evolution.
'A Mystery'
As for Tomaso Vitalino, according to Michelangelo Abbado, editor of the 1978 Ricordi edition of the piece: "No musician of this name ever existed." But there was the Vitali family of Bologna and Modena, whose members included the composer Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632-92) and his son Tomaso Antonio Vitali (1663-1745), a gifted violinist and composer. Some people have surmised that the diminutive "Vitalino" meant the younger Vitali, who ended up getting credit for the chaconne in printed editions.
Violinist and scholar Robert E. Seletsky calls the piece "a mystery. Given its style, it could be almost anything. Its crazy modulations have nothing whatever to do with the style in which Vitali worked." Seletsky supports his view by citing Diethard Hellmann's notes in the 1966 Bärenreiter edition, claiming that "the work is really German in origin ... possibly ascribing it to a virtuoso in Dresden like Pisendel."
The 18th-century manuscript...