Antonio Bazzini: Bavardage (Op. 35 no. 4)
Edson Scheid and Will Crutchfield
Bazzini is remembered today almost exclusively for one encore piece, the fiendishly difficult “Ronde des lutins,” kept alive by violinists like Heifetz and Perlman. In his lifetime, though, he was a major figure in Italian music, and his compositions are worth a full-scale revival. He was born in Brescia in 1818 and won a local post as organist at age 17. A year later he heard Paganini and (with that virtuoso’s encouragement and support) dedicated himself fully to the violin. For the next twenty-eight years he lived the life of a touring virtuoso, based at various times in Germany, Denmark, Italy, and France, and composing all the while.
Mendelssohn so admired him that he confided the first private performance of his Violin Concerto to Bazzini; Schumann praised his compositions in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; Verdi included him in the elite list of composers invited to contribute to the Messa per Rossini. From 1873 to his death in 1897 he taught composition at the Milan Conservatory, becoming the institution’s director in 1882.
Bazzini - Ink portrait by Vespasiano Bignami [photo credit - Casa Ricordi, Milano]
Bazzini’s compositions include quartets, symphonies, concertos, songs, and oratorios. La Scala commissioned an opera from him, Turanda, whose failure in 1867 left him with no taste for further adventures in the theater, but he was a revered and influential teacher for Catalani, Mascagni, and Puccini, among many others.
Meanwhile he wrote and published uncounted dozens of works for violin and piano, ranging from light-hearted virtuoso pieces to substantial essays in mid-century Romanticism. Most of them have French titles; this may mean that they date from the eleven years he lived in Paris (1852-1863), or it may simply be that French publishers had the most effective international distribution. “Bavardage” is the first of several that we’ve chosen for Teatro Nuovo’s video series.