Giuseppe Maria Tanfani, compositore e violinista del Settecento fiorentino e inventore del violino tetrarmonico

The figure of the Florentine musician Giuseppe Maria Tanfani (1689–1771) has remained so far unknown to scholars for a trivial mistake in the Music Catalogue of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, in which his surname was changed into Fanfani. The correction of the spelling mistake allow us to find out a good amount of data on the composer in archival documents, letters and newspaper articles of the time, useful for composing a multi-faceted portrait of the musician. Through this documentation we learn that Giuseppe Maria Tanfani lived his whole life in Florence, where he was aiutante di camera (gentleman of the court) to Gian Gastone de’ Medici and musicien de la chambre at the time of the Lorraines. He was a violinist appreciated in his native land and abroad, and active in the major Florentine ecclesiastical and theatrical institutions (he is also mentioned as the first violin of the orchestra in the premiere of Antonio Vivaldi’s opera Ginevra principessa di Scozia at the Teatro della Pergola during the Carnival 1736). Tanfani was respected by Quantz, Pisendel and other travelers who heard him in Florence. He composed some enjoyable sonatas for violin and basso continuo (the article offers a complete catalogue). He was also a luthier with an innovative and experimenting spirit. With his invention of the violino tetrarmonico, of which a detailed description was published after his death, he wanted to perfect the violin, endowing it with a fifth low string, resonant strings that would respond across the whole chromatic range, and especially with a mechanism that allowed the player to command with the chin — therefore without interrupting playing — a damper that enabled the violin to produce four different kinds of sound. Although the curious invention of the violino tetrarmonico had no repercussions (not uncommon in his time), Tanfani can be considered an emblematic representative of the renewed experimentalism of the later eighteenth century, by which musicians expressed their trust in the progress of their art.