Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review

This article addresses the development of the violin in eighteenth-century Spain from an esthetic point of view. This was a complex history, full of nuances and dramatic turns, until the instrument finally opened up to the Italian way. First we analyze its Iberian background in parallel with contemporaneous developments in other countries. Likewise, we analyze the reasons for the slow acceptance of purely instrumental music and the continued use of the instrument in Church services. These discussions are based on aesthetic controversies between theorists, composers and instrumentalists. We consider in more detail, the Aposento Anticrítico, by Francisco Corominas, as an aesthetic reference book in the defense of the use of the violin in the cathedrals and churches of eighteenth-century Spanish. Parallel to this, we engage on a discursive controversy emanating from the contrariety of underestimating the instrument, and in turn, accepting the music of Corelli and the Italian masters. An aesthetic diatribe that persists in the Iberian Peninsula until the end of the century of lights.