Immortal · One Track at a Time · No. 3

The Dance That Outlived the Dancer

Track three of our slow walk through Immortal. The last two composers you know by name. This one you almost certainly do not — and that is exactly the point.

Track 03 — Veracini’s Giga: the Baroque superstar the world forgot, and the dance that refused to

15 July 20264 min readby The Strings Society Editorial Team

Immortal · One Track at a TimeNo. 03GigaFrancesco Maria Veracini

In his own lifetime he was a sensation. Halls filled to watch his bow arm; rival violinists studied him in something close to fear. Three hundred years later, you can love this track for weeks and never once learn who wrote it. His name was Francesco Maria Veracini — and by every measure of his age, he was a superstar.

Born in Florence in 1690, he carried the violin across Europe — Venice, London, Dresden — with a technique so brilliant it unsettled people. The finest players of the day measured themselves against him, and often came away shaken. There is a famous story about one of them:

In 1712 a young Giuseppe Tartini heard Veracini play — and was so shaken by that bow arm that he left the very next day for Ancona, to shut himself away and learn to bow all over again.

That was the effect he had. But the brilliance and the temperament came in one package, and Veracini’s was volcanic. In Florence they took to calling him Capo Pazzo — roughly, ‘the madcap’; less kindly, ‘the head lunatic’. He had earned the name. Here is how:

♪ The legend of «Capo Pazzo»

Dresden, 13 August 1722. Veracini — the star soloist — is humiliated when a back-desk violinist, quietly coached by the concertmaster Pisendel, is handed his concerto and plays it in his place. Veracini locks himself in his room for days. Then, in a fit of shame and fury, he throws himself from an upper-storey window into the street below. He survives — with a shattered foot and hip, and a limp he will carry for the rest of his life. The violinist who could silence any room could not, it seems, silence himself.

He limped for the next thirty years — kept composing, kept dazzling — and slowly the world moved on. By the time he died in Florence in 1768, the fashion had already changed. The brilliant Op. 1 sonatas he had published in Dresden in 1721 — the set this track is drawn from — drifted quietly out of the repertoire. The superstar became a footnote.

And yet. Listen to track three. The Giga — the leaping dance that closes the Sonata in A major — still runs, still jumps, still shows off exactly as it did when Veracini tore through it to frighten his rivals. The man is three centuries gone. The dance never limped. It never aged. It simply kept moving.

There is a rightness to David reviving it — one flamboyant, boundary-breaking virtuoso reaching back three hundred years to another, and recognising a kindred spirit. In the arrangement by David and Franck van der Heijden — for violin, piano, guitar and orchestra — the giga gets its fire back, and Veracini, for a few minutes, is a superstar again.

«Art, and music above all, transcends time,» David says of the album. Track two was a melody so famous it outgrew its composer’s name. Track three is the mirror image: a composer the world forgot, kept alive by a single, unkillable dance. Immortality, it turns out, does not always remember your name — sometimes it just keeps the music moving.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

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