1818–1897
Italian violinist, composer and teacher Antonio Bazzini (1818–1897) was among the best-known concert violinists of the 19th century. After leaving the concert stage, he became head of the Milan Conservatory, where his students included Giacomo Puccini. Players know him above all for his virtuoso violin miniature La Ronde des Lutins (“Dance of the Goblins”), also available arranged for piano.
Antonio Bazzini was born on 11 March 1818 in Brescia. He studied the violin with the local musician Faustino Camisani (1772–1830). At 17, Bazzini served as organist at a church in his home town. Around the same time, he played for Niccolò Paganini, and the celebrated violinist approved of his playing. Encouraged by this, Bazzini began a concert career and quickly became one of the notable performers of his time. In 1861, when the unified Kingdom of Italy was formed, he became one of its citizens.
From 1841 to 1845, Bazzini lived in Germany, spending long periods in Leipzig, where he devoted himself mainly to the music of Bach and Beethoven. As a violinist and composer, he was highly admired by Schumann. Bazzini was also the first to play Mendelssohn's violin concerto in a private, chamber setting.
A brief stay in Denmark in 1845 was followed by Bazzini's return to Brescia, where he taught and composed. In 1846, he was playing in Naples and Palermo; in 1849–1850 he was on tour across Spain, and between 1852 and 1863 he made Paris his home. His final concert tour took him through the Netherlands in 1864.
Returning to Brescia, Bazzini gradually withdrew from concert life and devoted himself to composition. The florid opera fantasias and character pieces that had filled most of his early work were now left behind. That same year, 1864, his String Quartet No. 1 won the first prize of the Milan Quartet Society. On 13 January 1867, his opera Turanda was staged at La Scala in Milan, to a libretto by Antonio Gazzoletti (1866) based on Carlo Gozzi's play Turandot. The opera was performed only 12 times, and reviews were mostly negative — the libretto drew the most criticism.
In the two decades that followed, sacred works, dramatic cantatas and symphonic poems came from Bazzini's pen, together with concert overtures. In 1868, Brescia's Società dei Concerti elected him president, and he lent active support to quartet societies all over Italy.
From 1873, Bazzini taught composition at the Milan Conservatory, becoming its director in 1882. His students included Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, Benedetto Junck and Alfredo Catalani, as well as Giovanni Antiga, Cesare Pollini and Nicolò Massa. He was highly regarded by his contemporaries, and his influence can be seen in the work of Giacomo Puccini, the great opera composer.
In 1868, Bazzini wrote the first section of the Dies Irae sequence for a collective Mass for Rossini, composed by twelve composers at the initiative of Giuseppe Verdi. On 10 February 1897, Antonio Bazzini died in Milan.
The most enduring part of Bazzini's output is his chamber music, now counted among the works of the 19th-century Italian instrumental revival. His contemporaries valued him above all as one of the leading concert violinists of his day, and that reputation as a performer long overshadowed his work as a composer.
Bazzini's best-known piece is the virtuoso violin miniature La Ronde des Lutins, Op. 25 (1852), also known by its Italian title La ridda dei folletti (“Dance of the Goblins”). On the site it is available both for violin and arranged for piano — a good place to start exploring Bazzini's music.
Recordings of Bazzini's virtuoso violin pieces include performances by Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin and Itzhak Perlman, as well as by Bronislaw Huberman, David Garrett and James Ehnes; Chloë Hanslip and Luigi Alberto Bianchi have recorded them too.
Bazzini's larger works include six string quartets and a string quintet. The first quartet (C major, 1864) won the first prize of the Milan Quartet Society; it was followed by the second (D minor, Op. 75, 1877), third (E-flat major, Op. 76, 1878), fourth (G major, Op. 79, 1888), fifth (C minor, Op. 80, 1891) and sixth (F major, Op. 82, 1892) quartets. In 1866, he wrote a quintet for two violins, viola and two cellos, in A major.
For the stage and orchestra, Bazzini wrote the overture King Lear after Shakespeare's tragedy (1871) and the overture Saul after Alfieri's tragedy (1867), together with the symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini — a first version in 1879 and a revised one in 1885. The opera Turanda (1867) belongs to the same period.