Antonio Lolli (c. 1725-1802): Was he really the forerunner and model for Pagani?

[Toni Bernet]

A brief preliminary remark: for linguistic reasons, Antonio Lolli could easily be confused with Antonio Lotti, the Venetian composer almost two generations older and former Maestro di Cappella of St Mark's Church. But this is about Antonio Lolli and the violin concertos of this exceptional violinist, who was famous throughout Europe in the 18th century, was born in Bergamo around 1725 and died in Palermo in 1802.

Stations of his life were:

1758-74: solo violonist at the court of Stuttgart;
1774-83: chamber virtuoso at the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg;
In between and afterwards, extensive concert tours to London, Paris (at the Concert Spirituel he composed for   the Chevalier de Saint Georges), Vienna (where he became friends with Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf), through Italy, where he also met Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart);
In 1796 he moved to Naples, then to Palermo, where he died impoverished and probably in debt because of gambling addiction, despite his always considerable income.

Lolli's nine violin concertos were all published in Paris. All of them are unknown, because Lolli was remembered more as a violinist than as a composer. In his Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna: Braumüller, 1869, p. 107), the famous music critic Eduard Hanslick called Lolli "the forerunner and model for Paganini and the spiritual father of all violin virtuosos". Even today, Giuliano Carmignola recognises moments of genius in Lolli's violin technique: "Lolli plays with bold passages, he brings octave and decimal runs, ludicrous leaps and changes of register. Some of it is reminiscent of Locatelli, and at the same time it points ahead to Paganini".

Contemporary criticism of Lolli's compositions (especially violin concertos and violin sonatas) was divided: The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung stated that Lolli's exceptional technique, well suited to the fast movements of the concertos, was not supported by sufficient musicality, which severely limited his expressiveness in the middle tempi (Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 12 June 1799, 578-584). The slow movements were full of harmonic shocks and the fast ones overloaded with bravura passages. There was a lack of strict counterpoint, Lolli was a mechanic and often left the completion of the orchestral parts to others.

More positively, the chronicles of his time describe him as a particularly elegant, refined, ironic, whimsical, art-loving and sometimes provocative man. The German poet and composer Christian Schubart described Lolli as "perhaps the Shakespear [sic] among violinists" because of the strong, poetic and determined character of his performances.

Here you can listen to the violin concertos by Antonio Lolli:



A listening companion to the Seventh Concerto in G major can be found here:

https://unbekannte-violinkonzerte.jimdofree.com/e-1/lolli/