George Frederick Pinto (25 September 1785 – 23 March 1806) was an English composer and keyboard
virtuoso
A virtuoso (from Italian ''virtuoso'' or , "virtuous", Late Latin ''virtuosus'', Latin ''virtus'', "virtue", "excellence" or "skill") is an individual who possesses outstanding talent and technical ability in a particular art or field such as ...
.
Life and career
Pinto was born in
Lambeth
Lambeth () is a district in South London, England, in the London Borough of Lambeth, historically in the County of Surrey. It is situated south of Charing Cross. The population of the London Borough of Lambeth was 303,086 in 2011. The area expe ...
and baptised as George Sanders. His father, Samuel Sanders (or Saunders) died young; his mother, Julia Sanders (née Pinto) was the daughter of
Thomas Pinto
Thomas Pinto (1728–1783) was a British violinist, who led notable London orchestras of the day.
Life
Pinto's father, Guglielmo Pinto, left a high-ranking position in Naples for political reasons, and settled in England; he married, and he and ...
(1714-c.1780), a London violinist of Italian origin. Thomas Pinto's second wife, the English singer
Charlotte Brent
Charlotte Brent (17 December 1734 – 10 April 1802) was a child prodigy and celebrated soprano singer of the 18th century.
Life
She was the daughter of Catherine and Charles Brent (1693–1770). He was a Handelian counter-tenor, and fencing-ma ...
(1735–1802), encouraged George's early musical upbringing.
[Temperley (2001)] He used his mother's maiden name as his surname throughout his professional career.
[Brown (2006)]
Pinto started taking music lessons aged 8 with the musician and impresario
Johann Salomon. Initially he was promoted as a prodigy on the violin. In 1795 Pinto, then aged 9, made his debut playing a violin concerto by
Giovanni Mane Giornovichi at the New Lyceum in
Hanover Square London.
In 1796 Salomon arranged for Pinto to play a violin concerto at Signora Salvini's benefit concert. Following this, he made frequent appearances in London and other British centres, and possibly twice travelled to Paris. In 1800 he played at a concert of Salomon accompanied by
John Field (to whom he later dedicated his piano sonata in C minor of 1803 - "Inscribed to his Friend John Field").
His
Op. 1, three
divertimenti for piano were advertised in 1801 (no copies have survived); his Op. 2, also for piano, comprising three sets of variations, was published in 1802. It is not known who taught Pinto the piano, but from this period on it would seem to have become his preferred instrument.
In January 1803 at
Phillip Corri's Edinburgh concerts, Pinto took the place of an injured Corri where he "presided at the keyboard". The writer and musician
Alexander Campbell wrote:
Young Pinto is not only an admirable violin player, but also a first-rate performer on the grand piano forte: to excel on two instruments so widely different from each other, is a proof of genius and unwearied application very seldom to be met with. If dissipation, and consequent idleness, do not impede him in his career, what may not the musical world expect in his riper manhood?
In 1804 Pinto began to suffer serious ill-health. This did not prevent him composing and between then and his death in 1806 appeared all his major works, including piano sonatas and violin sonatas, as well as two sets of violin duets. He also composed a number of songs and shorter piano pieces.
A violin concerto written by him is now lost, although the manuscript was described in an article in the ''Musical World'' of 1850 (vol. XXV, p. 2). After breaking off a planned series of concerts in Oxford in 1805, he died in London in 1806 at the age of 20, apparently of
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in ...
. Some of his posthumous works were completed by
Samuel Wesley
Samuel Wesley (24 February 1766 – 11 October 1837) was an English organist and composer in the late Georgian period. Wesley was a contemporary of Mozart (1756–1791) and was called by some "the English Mozart".Kassler, Michael & Olleson, Phi ...
and
Joseph Woelfl
Joseph Johann Baptist Woelfl (surname sometimes written in the German form Wölfl) (24 December 1773 - 21 May 1812) was an Austrian pianist and composer.
Life
Woelfl was born in Salzburg, where he studied music under Leopold Mozart and Mich ...
.
Legacy
It has been suggested that the numerous references to Pinto's "dissipation" by contemporaries may be covert hints about
homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to peop ...
. Tributes after his death included Salomon's comment: "If he had lived and been able to resist the allurements of society, England would have had the honour of producing a second
Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his ra ...
." Samuel Wesley commented "A greater musical Genius has not been known". Other tributes came from
William Ayrton and
Johann Baptist Cramer
Johann (sometimes John) Baptist Cramer (24 February 1771 – 16 April 1858) was an English pianist, composer and music publisher of German origin. He was the son of Wilhelm Cramer, a famous London violinist and conductor, one of a numerous family ...
.
Pinto's music was more or less forgotten after his death, although interest was shown by
William Sterndale Bennett
Sir William Sterndale Bennett (13 April 18161 February 1875) was an English composer, pianist, conductor and music educator. At the age of ten Bennett was admitted to the London Royal Academy of Music (RAM), where he remained for ten years. B ...
. It was not until the 1960s that interest in his works was rekindled. The musicologist Nicholas Temperley has noted that the piano works contain "astonishing anticipations of
Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical ...
,
Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert (; 31 January 179719 November 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast ''oeuvre'', including more than 600 secular vocal wor ...
and even
Chopin", and has opined that "only Schubert himself wrote more striking songs before the age of 20." The composer
Geoffrey Bush
Geoffrey Bush (23 March 1920 – 24 February 1998) was a British composer, teacher and music scholar. Largely without formal training in composition, he produced a wide range of compositions across different genres, including many songs and wor ...
has said of Pinto's G minor violin sonata that it is "passionate in mood, cogent in argument, and full of splendid thematic invention."
Pinto's piano sonatas have been recorded on CD by Thomas Wakefield,
Ian Hobson
Ian Hobson is an English pianist, conductor and teacher, and is a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and at Florida State University. His pianistic repertoire spans the baroque to the contemporary, but he specialises in th ...
, Riko Fukuda,
Mícéal O'Rourke and others, while some of his vocal works have been recorded on the
Hyperion label.
Nicholas Temperley's ''The London Pianoforte School 1766–1860.'' (20 vols. London/New York: Garland, 1985) contains much of Pinto’s piano music, including the two Grand Sonatas Op.3 and the Fantasia and Sonata amongst others.
References
Notes
Sources
*Brown, Clive (2006).
*
External links
Review of CD of Pinto's piano music, played by Thomas Wakefield*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pinto, George
1785 births
1806 deaths
English classical composers
English classical pianists
English classical violinists
British male violinists
19th-century classical pianists
19th-century English musicians
English people of Italian descent
British male pianists
19th-century British male musicians
19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis deaths in England