How Veracini Broke His Leg

Music making was highly competitive in the Baroque era. We have two accounts of Francesco Maria Veracini’s last days at the court in Dresden. Both of them spell disaster.

Veracini was a world-famous violinist. He had come from Florence hoping to get a high-paying position at the Dresden court. According to one story written 63 years after the fact, King August wanted to hear Veracini play a violin concerto. The court concertmaster, Johann Georg Pisandel, suggested that Veracini give his audition concerto to the accompanist for rehearsing. But the self-assured Italian supposedly had no confidence in any German accompanist. The performance for the king went badly. Veracini maintained that a German accompanist could have made it no better.

Then, according to the story, Pisandel asked the king for permission to perform the same concerto with the violin part played by a German. Pisandel had a trick up his sleeve. He called on one of his least important violinists to perform the work–a player with whom he had secretly rehearsed the concerto. The king and the unwitting audience much preferred the Germans’ performance.

An account written only a month after the incident corroborates what happened next. The humiliated Veracini sulked in his room for several days. Then, on August 13th, 1722, he jumped from his second-floor window, landing forty feet below in a Dresden street, breaking his leg and his hip. Veracini also wound up with a “considerable scar” on his head, and a limp that resulted from a hasty treatment.

One of his contemporaries was afraid that the violinist might never regain his good sense and blamed the incident partly on lack of sleep and partly on Veracini’s “all too great application to music.” But Veracini wasn’t finished. He went on to Prague and London, where he retained the reputation as the greatest violinist of his time.