Amico: The Life of Giovanni Battista Viotti by Warwick Lister (review)

There has been something of a Viotti industry over the past couple of decades, with the appearance of Chappell White’s thematic catalogue in 1985; Denise Yim’s Viotti and the Chinnerys: A Relationship Charted through Letters in 2004; monographs in Italian by Rosy Moffa (2005) and Mariateresa Dellaborra (2006); and the rather more contextual multi-author volume Giovanni Battista Viotti: A Composer between Two Revolutions, edited by Massimiliano Sala and published by Ad Parnassum in 2006. Still, reliable modern editions remain few and far between, among them the four concertos edited by White for the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Pre-Classical, Classical, and Early Romantic Eras (1976) and a set of string quartets edited by Cliff Eisen in 2003. Fortunately, various parts and piano scores are now available in either original or nineteenth-century editions from IMSLP and the Collection of Historical Annotated String Editions at the University of Leeds. Recordings have followed, and in some quantity, including the complete set of concertos by Franco Mezzena, although for a more stylish performance of that favourite of Joachim and Brahms, No. 22 in A minor, the version by Elizabeth Wallfisch is far preferable.

But we have lacked an authoritative modern account of Viotti’s life as a whole, and this monumental book certainly fills that gap, in its own way. Scholars should not be put off by the faintly coy title, which was how his patroness Margaret Chinnery and her whole circle referred to him in correspondence (irresistibly summoning up for this reader the image of the pretentious Lucia in E. F. Benson’s delightful novels). Even here a certain preciousness towards the idolized artist, ever solicitous and thoughtful but prone to outbursts of anger and frustration, leaches out from quoted correspondence into the text, which from time to time—usually when hard information is lacking—assumes the tone of an easy-going novel. However, as a biography this is as vast and comprehensive an account as we are likely to enjoy for a very long time, unless some unexpected new cache of documentary materials turns up. It is also clearly the fruit of long years of painstaking archival research (mainly in Turin, Paris, and London), as well as an extensive trawl of periodicals and memoirs; and consequently a good deal of this material is entirely new. Exactly what is new is not always immediately evident, it should be said, even though the text, somewhat unusually for a biography of an instrumental virtuoso, is extremely thoroughly footnoted throughout.

The book is explicitly a Life, and what it attempts to do is twofold—to wrestle with some of the biographical enigmas of Viotti’s varied career and to illuminate the web of relationships that underpinned and sometimes obstructed the diverse forces behind this fascinating story. For the second half of Viotti’s history there is of course a great deal of overlap with Yim’s account, which drew extensively on the Chinnery family papers (now in Sydney) and on the Viotti correspondence in the New York Public Library. Amico does not greatly alter our picture of his relationship with the Chinnerys—a ménage à trois in which the husband was frequently absent, especially after his disgrace in 1812 through a scandal about public finances (Lister only permits himself to speculate further on Viotti and Mrs Chinnery in the very final paragraph of the book). But there is much new material here on Viotti’s professional life in this later period, especially a thorough investigation of his managerial duties at the Opéra and the usual tortuous dealings with singers, instrumentalists, and officialdom in general.

A good deal of the information on Viotti’s early years, as well as his decade in Paris, has already been published (including an article in this journal in 2002). Nevertheless it is good to have it all in one sequence; and Lister has assembled evidence enough to...