Pietro Locatelli

Pietro Antonio Locatelli (3 September 1695 in Bergamo – 30 March 1764 in Amsterdam) was an Italian Baroque composer and violinist.

In his early youth, he was the third violinist and held the title of virtuoso in the cappella musicale (musical establishment) of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo.

[3] Locatelli began studying in Rome in autumn 1711, probably under Antonio Montanari or Giuseppe Valentini and perhaps for a short time under Arcangelo Corelli, who died in January 1713.

[4] In a letter of 17 March 1714 Locatelli wrote to his father in Bergamo that he was a confirmed member of the compita accademia di vari instrumenti, the household musicians of Prince Michelangelo I Caetani (1685–1759), where Valentini had worked as a violinist and composer since no later than 1710.

[5] Between 1716 and 1722, Locatelli was also a member of the congregazione generale dei musici di S. Cecilia, and thus under the protection of the noble prelate and future Cardinal Camillo Cybo.

On 26 June 1727, the "foreign virtuoso Locatelli" was paid twelve double golden guilder by the elector's director of music.

[13] A notice about Locatelli's performance before Frederick William I anecdotally describes the musician's self-assurance and his vanity in wearing gorgeous, diamond-studded clothes.

The Dutch musicologist Albert Dunning speculated that the aristocratic listeners may have preferred Johann Gottlieb Graun's violin playing to Locatelli's.

[14] According to an entry in a rich autograph collector's records, Locatelli was living in Frankfurt on 20 October 1728.

[15][16] Locatelli's last known stop was in Kassel, where he received the very high payment of 80 reichsthaler after his visit to Charles I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, on 7 December 1728.

The organist Jacob Wilhelm Lustig stated in 1728 that Locatelli had astonished his listeners with hugely difficult passages while scraping at his violin.

[18] His sparsely documented public and semi-public performances were open only to music lovers, not to professional musicians.

An Englishman who heard him in 1741 wrote "he is so afraid of People Learning from him, that He won't admit a Professed Musician into his Concert".

[20] Including taxes he earned about 1500 guilders in 1742 alone,[clarification needed (see talk)] the highest income of any musician from Amsterdam.

Among the large quantity of printed and unbound sheet music, there are the collected works of Corelli.

[26] As a consequence of the privilege, Locatelli had to give free copies to the Leiden University library; thus, the first prints have been preserved up to the present.

[28] It was probably through French violin schools that musicians such as Niccolò Paganini discovered Locatelli's music.

[29] Locatelli's virtuosity is reflected in the Capricci through the use of high registers, double stopping, chords and arpeggios with wide fingering and overextension of the left hand, harmonics, trills in two-part passages (Trillo del Diavolo), double trills, varied bow types and variable bowings.