Paolo Tommaso Alberghi

Paolo Tommaso Alberghi (Faenza, baptised on 31 December 1716; died in the same city on 12 October 1785) was an Italian violinist, composer and teacher whose career unfolded almost entirely in his native city, in the region of Emilia-Romagna. His figure is useful for understanding the musical life of a cathedral and of a civic corporation in provincial Italy in the eighteenth century, as well as the spread of the school of Giuseppe Tartini.

He trained with Tartini, probably between 1730 or 1731 and 1733. Around the latter date he appears in the lists of musicians of Faenza Cathedral as third and last violin, under the direction of his brother, Don Francesco Alberghi, maestro di cappella. By 1742 local chronicles already cite him as a teacher, and both his virtuosity and his violin sonatas and concertos were praised with great enthusiasm. In 1753 he became first violin and, following his brother's death in 1760, he also took over the post of maestro di cappella, which he held until his death.

His cathedral salary was modest, so he supplemented his income by playing at civic festivities and in the city's two academies, composing and giving lessons. His pupils included Bernardo Campagnoli, Antonio Bisoni and Cristoforo Babbi; a possible connection with Giuseppe Sarti is not confirmed. In 1747 he obtained the municipal post of depositario, responsible for collecting taxes and paying salaries, including his own. In his final years, it seems, his health declined and he gradually delegated some of these duties to his pupils and his sons. A portrait preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale of Faenza suggests that he suffered from blindness in one eye.

His instrumental output is largely late Baroque in character: it retains the essentials of mid-eighteenth-century practice and shows clear ties to Tartini before 1760. His concertos follow Tartini's tripartite model, with ritornellos in the outer movements and slow instrumental arias, and demand highly demanding technique, with integrated ornamentation and passages in double stops. His sacred music, more conservative, is dominated by counterpoint, although his later works gain in expressiveness. His son Angelo Ignazio Alberghi, a tenor and composer of sacred music, performed in theatres in Italy and Germany and served the Elector of Saxony in Dresden for twenty years.

Alberghi did not achieve the fame of his contemporaries, but his work in Faenza, as performer, teacher and director of the chapel, sustained the Tartinian violin tradition in the region and trained several musicians who carried it forward.