Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

426 140. Tartini to Maddalena Lombardini-Sirmen Padua, 5 March, 1760. At last, by the will of God, I have found myself freed of the weighty business which has so long prevented me from keeping my promise to you, a promise which was made with too much sincerity for my lack of time not to afflict me. Let us begin, in God’s name, by letter; and if you should not understand what I write here, I entreat you to write and ask me to explain all that you do not understand. Your principal practice and study should be confined in general to the bow, in order to entirely master whatever can be played or sung. Your first study, therefore, should be holding, balancing and pressing the bow lightly in such a manner that it shall seem to breathe the first note and not to strike the string. This depends on lightness of wrist, and if you make the bow move immediately after laying the bow lightly on the strings there is no longer any danger of roughness or harshness. You should master this first, very light, contact in every part of the bow, in the middle as well as at the extremities; and you must master both the upbow and downbow. To unite all these laborious particulars into one lesson my advice is that you first train yourself in a messa di voce on an open string, for example on the second or Alamire; that you begin pianissimo, and increase the sound by slow degrees to a fortissimo; and this study should be equally carried out with the motion of the downbow and upbow. In this practice you should spend at least an hour every day, though at different times, a little in the morning and a little in the evening; and remember carefully that this practice is, of all others, the most important and difficult. When you have mastered this, a messa di voce will be very easy to you: beginning with pianissimo, moving to fortissimo and back to pianissimo in the same stroke of the bow. Excellent placing of the bow on the string will by this means be easy and certain, and you will be able to do whatever you wish with your bow. After this, in order to acquire that lightness of the wrist from whence speed in bowing arises, it will be excellent for you to play, every day, one of Corelli’s quick passages that move entirely in semiquavers, of which there are three in the Opus V for violin solo; in fact the first is in the first Sonata in D major. You must play them each time a little faster, until you arrive at playing the notes detached, that is separated, with a little space between one note and the next. They are written thus & # # c &c. but they should be played as if they were written