Conference on Giuseppe Tartini

Paneuropa Italia organised the international conference ‘Giuseppe Tartini: The Theory on Harmonic System and composition of differences’ on 24 and 25 June 2024 in Gorizia and Trieste.

The conference was dedicated to the first and most famous European violinist of his time. Giuseppe Tartini was a fascinating and eclectic personality, not only as a musician, but also for his cosmopolitanism. It is fair to say that the European spirit permeated his entire life, which was spent between Piran, now in Slovenia, and Padua, then part of the Serenissima Republic of Venice, a city where he often stayed.

His frequent travels to play in music academies or to teach prove that he was a ‘citizen of the world’. In particular, he travelled to Prague for the coronation celebrations of Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg as King of Bohemia, where he stayed for three years.

His artistic, didactic, philosophical and scientific legacy is vast: his vocation for teaching music is demonstrated by the creation of a cosmopolitan violin school in Padua, called the ‘School of Nations’, which welcomed pupils from all over the world. ‘But he also wrote treatises on the physics of sound: the ‘discovery’ of the third sound is still the subject of discussion and study among experts today.

It was precisely the universal message of music, which he believed should lead man to perfection (harmony being the basis of all things), that made Tartini a pro-European ‘ante litteram’, because he was rooted in a dimension that was at once territorial (Padua and Veneto), national and international.

Programme (EN) (PDF)