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A figured-bass exercise — typically a single staff with a bass line and figures — used as the basis for improvised keyboard composition in the Italian conservatory tradition. The student realizes the bass into a complete keyboard piece, often with elaborate figuration in the upper voices.
The partimento tradition flourished in eighteenth-century Naples — Durante, Fenaroli, Sala, Insanguine — and trained generations of opera composers. Where the German thoroughbass tradition emphasized strict voice-leading, partimento emphasized fluent, idiomatic keyboard improvisation. Mozart, Bach, and Handel all engaged with partimenti and thoroughbass; the disciplines overlap heavily.
Insanguine's 156 partimenti from late-eighteenth-century Naples; Handel's Lessons for Princess Anne sit between the two traditions, drawing on his Italian apprenticeship while teaching in the English idiom.
Partimento is one of 228 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary, where every definition is written around how composers actually use the word.
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