George Pinto
An innovative English composer who did not live to fulfil his extraordinary promise.
1785-1806
An innovative English composer who did not live to fulfil his extraordinary promise.
1785-1806
George Pinto (1785-1806) was a promising talent on the violin and the piano, and an innovative composer exciting the admiration of some of the country’s most prominent musicians. His early death robbed England of a rare talent, leaving it to more famous names to rediscover some of his genius on their own.
ON March 10th 1800 Johann Salomon, who had done so much to make Haydn popular in London, hosted a concert which included a Sonata for violin and piano with a seventeen-year-old John Field at the piano, and fourteen-year-old George Pinto on the violin.*
George’s maternal grandfather Thomas Pinto had been a professional violinist, and the boy adopted his surname after his own father, Samuel Saunders, died young. He was educated by his mother Julia, herself a published composer, and his widowed step-grandmother Charlotte Brent, a professional singer, and made such rapid progress that he gave his first public concert aged eleven.
Sadly, George died in 1806 at just twenty, apparently a victim to the temptations of celebrity life. He had already begun to make a name for himself as an innovative composer, much admired by Samuel Wesley; and although he was inevitably spoken of as a new Mozart, we now know that his songs and piano sonatas foreshadowed Schubert, Schumann and the mature Beethoven.
See A Touch of Silk. Field left Britain for a European tour with Muzio Clementi in 1802, and settled in Russia four years later.
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