Romanesca Schmelzer

Born in 1624, Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli was brought up partly in Venice and ended up in Innsbruck as a member of the Court Band. His name crops up later as a violinist in churches and at court in Messina and finally in Madrid, where it is likely that he died in 1687. There were two important stylistic periods for violin literature in the 17th century. In the early decades, a corpus of instrumental music appeared in northern Italy, with the first solo music explicitly for violin being written by composers such as Castello, Fontana and – most of all – Marini. Towards the tail-end of the century, we see the flowering of a refined culture of instrumental music in Austria, dominated by virtuosi such as Biber, Walther and Schmelzer. Pandolfi Mealli was caught in the middle, not being a follower of either school, and may have been somewhat lost from view among all these star performers.