Tarantella (Beaumont): A Song History

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The tarantella is an Italian folk dance for couples, set to brisk music in 6/8 and danced with quick, flirtatious footwork, often with tambourines in the women's hands.[1] Its name, like the words tarantula and tarantism, goes back to Taranto, a town in Italy.[1] Tarantism was a disorder, described as a kind of hysteria, that appeared in Italy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century; it was popularly blamed on a tarantula's bite, and sufferers were believed to be cured by wild dancing.[2] Britannica is cautious about the spider, saying the illness was "obscurely associated" with the bite, though it still connects the dance's origin with tarantism.[1][2] Chopin, Liszt and Weber are among the composers who wrote tarantellas for the piano.[1]

Colored card of a woman in Italian costume dancing with a tambourine raised overhead

Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company, Tarantella, from National Dances, commercial color lithograph, 1889. A picture of the dance itself; it has no connection to this piece.

This particular Tarantella, a short piano piece in A minor, was published under the name Paul Beaumont, and IMSLP catalogues it as the work of Sydney Smith, writing under a pseudonym.[3] IMSLP's page for Smith, an English composer who lived from 1839 to 1889, lists Paul Beaumont and Victor Delacour among his alternative names.[4] The Library of Congress gives Smith the same dates but keeps "Paul Beaumont" as a separate name, based on pieces dated 1899 and about 1901, both after Smith's death, and neither of its records links the two names, so the identification rests on IMSLP rather than on the Library of Congress records consulted here.[5][6] The sources consulted here give no composition date, and the year 1914 that appears with the piece in some listings cannot be one if Smith wrote it, since he died in 1889.[3][4][7] Editions on IMSLP include an undated printing by Schott in London and a 1940 G. Schirmer edition edited by Albert von Doenhoff.[3]

Dana Gruber includes it in Classical Melodies For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer, a book of thirteen classical melodies arranged for chromatic mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]

Our book that contains the song "Tarantella (Beaumont)"

Sources

  1. Britannica: "Tarantella".
  2. Britannica: "Tarantism".
  3. IMSLP: "Tarantella (Smith, Sydney)".
  4. IMSLP: "Category:Smith, Sydney".
  5. Library of Congress Name Authority File: "Smith, Sydney, 1839-1889".
  6. Library of Congress Name Authority File: "Beaumont, Paul".
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Dana Gruber, Classical Melodies For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer".
  8. Image: Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company, Tarantella, from National Dances, commercial color lithograph, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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