Chamber Compositions

Abstract if the majority of verdi’s chamber works are of marginal interest only, the fault lies not so much in his lack of aptitude for the medium as in the musical tradition of his time and place. In Italy, since the beginning of the century, only opera was considered to have any importance. The few remaining practitioners of instrumental music pursued their activity abroad—Cherubini in France, Boccherini in Spain, Clementi in England. The last descendant of the great violin school of Corelli and Tartini was Niccolô Paganini whose art was of a very different kind: taut, memorable themes extended with a maximum of technical display and a minimum of musical thought. Liszt, his pianistic counterpart, who had no such melodic fertility, made far more of Paganini’s themes than Paganini himself.