Lesson 2

The Early Solo Violin

c. 1600–1650 · Northern Italy, especially Milan and Venice · Early Baroque / early Italian violin tradition

A laughing seventeenth-century violinist holds a violin and bow in one hand and raises a wineglass in the other in Gerard van Honthorst’s painting The Merry Fiddler. — The Merry Fiddler1623 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object SK-A-180Gerard van Honthorst, The Merry Fiddler, 1623. Painted during the same decade in which composers such as Marini were expanding what could be written for the violin.Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (opens in a new tab) · Public Domain

At the end of Lesson 1, the violin was still largely an ensemble and dance instrument. In the early 1600s, that starts to change. Italian composers begin putting a single violin in a more prominent role and writing music that increasingly takes advantage of what the instrument itself can do.

There was no single day when the violin became a soloist. The change appears across several composers and cities. In Milan, Giovanni Paolo Cima published a sonata in 1610 that specifically names violin and violone. A little more than a decade later, Biagio Marini was exploring rapid passagework, altered tuning, and writing across more than one string.

This is where something familiar begins to emerge: music written not simply for a high instrument, but for the violin. We’ll follow that shift, see what the word sonata meant before Beethoven, and hear Cima and Marini side by side.

School / tradition: Early Italian violin tradition
Primary city or region: Milan, Venice, and northern Italy
Active period: Early 1600s, especially the 1610s–1620s
Known for: The violin begins to step out of the ensemble and into music written increasingly around its own voice and technique.