Sep 24, 2026 · 52 min · 10 segments
How did a fatherless boy from a small village in northern Italy become one of the most influential composers in European history? In this episode, we follow Arcangelo Corelli from Fusignano to the…
Chapter 1 Childhood and Youth To understand Arcangelo Corelli, you first have to understand that he was named after a dead man.
His father, also called Arcangelo Corelli, died on the 13th of January, 1653, five weeks before his son was born.
The baby arrived on the 17th of February into a household that was already in mourning and was given the name of the father he would never know.
The Corelli family was not poor.
They were, in fact, quite prosperous.
By 1662, the various branches of the family jointly owned nearly a fifth of Fusignano's entire territory.
Hundreds of plots of farmland and woodland near Ferrara and Ravenna, plus significant livestock.
Among Arcangelo's ancestors were priests, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and poets.
There was not a single musician among them.
He was, from the very beginning, an anomaly.
His mother, Santa Raffini, was left widowed with five children, of whom Arcangelo was the youngest.
She raised them alone, and the evidence suggests she was an intelligent and determined woman.
When her youngest son began to show an unusual attraction to music, she did not dismiss it.
Instead, she made a decision that would change the course of European musical history.
She sent him to Fianza for his first lessons, with a local priest who taught him the basics of violin playing, then to Lugo for more study.
And then, when it became clear that ordinary teaching was not going to be enough, she allowed him to go to Bologna.
It was a city of academies, of universities, of rigorous debate and fierce pride in craftsmanship.
And it was also, at that moment, the world center of a new and thrilling musical culture, the violin school.
The Bologna violin school sought to give instrumental music the same expressive depth and singing quality as the human voice.
Violinists were trained to make the instrument sing, to find in it something approaching the warmth and meaning of a soprano.
Corelli arrived in Bologna around 1666, at the age of 13, and he studied with Giovanni Benvenuti, one of the leading violin teachers of the city.
He also found a way, characteristically, through his own resourcefulness, rather than through formal instruction, to absorb the technique of another virtuoso, a brilliant Venetian violinist named Leonardo Brignoli.
According to an account preserved by the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna, Corelli secretly and carefully observed Brugnoli's manner of playing, learning it through watchful observation rather than direct tuition.
Whether this amounts to the kind of shrewd talent scouting we would admire today or something closer to musical espionage depends on your point of view.
Chapter 1 Childhood and Youth To understand Arcangelo Corelli, you first have to understand that he was named after a dead man.
His father, also called Arcangelo Corelli, died on the 13th of January, 1653, five weeks before his son was born.
The baby arrived on the 17th of February into a household that was already in mourning and was given the name of the father he would never know.
The Corelli family was not poor.
They were, in fact, quite prosperous.
By 1662, the various branches of the family jointly owned nearly a fifth of Fusignano's entire territory.
Hundreds of plots of farmland and woodland near Ferrara and Ravenna, plus significant livestock.
Among Arcangelo's ancestors were priests, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and poets.
There was not a single musician among them.
He was, from the very beginning, an anomaly.
His mother, Santa Raffini, was left widowed with five children, of whom Arcangelo was the youngest.
She raised them alone, and the evidence suggests she was an intelligent and determined woman.
When her youngest son began to show an unusual attraction to music, she did not dismiss it.
Instead, she made a decision that would change the course of European musical history.
She sent him to Fianza for his first lessons, with a local priest who taught him the basics of violin playing, then to Lugo for more study.
And then, when it became clear that ordinary teaching was not going to be enough, she allowed him to go to Bologna.
It was a city of academies, of universities, of rigorous debate and fierce pride in craftsmanship.
And it was also, at that moment, the world center of a new and thrilling musical culture, the violin school.
The Bologna violin school sought to give instrumental music the same expressive depth and singing quality as the human voice.
Violinists were trained to make the instrument sing, to find in it something approaching the warmth and meaning of a soprano.
Corelli arrived in Bologna around 1666, at the age of 13, and he studied with Giovanni Benvenuti, one of the leading violin teachers of the city.
He also found a way, characteristically, through his own resourcefulness, rather than through formal instruction, to absorb the technique of another virtuoso, a brilliant Venetian violinist named Leonardo Brignoli.
According to an account preserved by the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna, Corelli secretly and carefully observed Brugnoli's manner of playing, learning it through watchful observation rather than direct tuition.
Whether this amounts to the kind of shrewd talent scouting we would admire today or something closer to musical espionage depends on your point of view.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
