Arcangelo Corelli

Six published collections form the core of Arcangelo Corelli's music for strings and continuo. Trained in Bologna, he made his career in Rome, where Queen Christina of Sweden, Cardinal Pamphili and Cardinal Ottoboni employed him to lead large ensembles — on feast days, orchestras of a hundred players and more, directed from the first desk. The four books of trio sonatas use sequence, suspension and clear tonal direction; the violin sonatas of Op. 5, ending in the variations on La Folia, became models for later violinists; and the Concerti grossi Op. 6, published the year after his death, use the contrast of concertino and ripieno that Handel and Geminiani took up directly. He died in Rome in 1713 and was buried in the Pantheon. He was born at Fusignano in the Romagna on 17 February 1653 and had his first lessons from a priest at Faenza and then at Lugo before Bologna took him in 1666; the Accademia Filarmonica there admitted him by 1670, when he was seventeen. He had entered Queen Christina's service by 1679, led the festival music she mounted in 1687, and later conducted the weekly concerts in Cardinal Ottoboni's palace, where he lodged until late 1712. Geminiani, Locatelli, Castrucci and Gasparini carried his manner of playing forward, and he left a fortune behind him along with a collection of pictures and violins.