ABSTRACT
Giovanni Battista Viotti was one of the greatest violinist–composers to have lived. The pupil who was most influential in disseminating Viotti's technique was Pierre Rode. Viotti has had many biographers. These can be roughly divided into three groups. Firstly there were his French contemporaries. Secondly there were the late nineteenth–early twentieth-century biographers, of whom the most important was the French musicologist Arthur Pougin, who wrote the first book-length biography of Viotti. In the third group are the twentieth-century scholars Remo Giazotto, Chappell White and Boris Schwarz. The Chinnery Family Papers (CFP) are the private papers of a late eighteenth–early nineteenth-century English family. They are the most important, and by far the most voluminous source of Viotti manuscript material to come to light in the last 100 years. The CFP collection consists of over two thousand letters, journals, poetry, education material and other miscellaneous papers, with a date range from 1793 to 1843.
