Biography (read more)
Francesco Xaverio Geminiani (baptised 5 December 1687 – 17 September 1762) was an Italian violinist, composer and music theorist, born in Lucca, where he took his father’s place in the Cappella Palatina in 1707. He received lessons from Alessandro Scarlatti and studied the violin with Carlo Ambrogio Lonati in Milan and afterwards with Arcangelo Corelli in Rome. From 1711 he led the opera orchestra in Naples, and in 1714 he settled in London, where he arrived with the reputation of a virtuoso and quickly found aristocratic patrons; in 1715 he played his violin concertos before the court of George I with Handel at the keyboard. He lived by teaching, publishing and dealing in art, spent periods in Paris and in Dublin, and died in Dublin in 1762, his remains later being reburied in the church of San Francesco in Lucca.
Geminiani is best known for his three sets of concerti grossi, Opp. 2 (1732), 3 (1733) and 7 (1746), which add the viola to the concertino group and extend the deeply contrapuntal Corellian manner that London audiences still loved. He also arranged his teacher Corelli’s Opp. 1, 3 and 5 as concerti grossi, and recast his own instrumental music in other formats, including collections of harpsichord pieces. His treatise The Art of Playing on the Violin, Op. 9 (London, 1751) is the best-known summary of the eighteenth-century Italian violin method and remains an indispensable source for late Baroque performance practice. Among his pupils were Charles Avison, Matthew Dubourg and Michael Christian Festing, and Tartini is said to have nicknamed him “Il Furibondo” for the expressive freedom of his rhythms.
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