A virtuoso (from Italian virtuoso, Late Latin virtuosus, Latin virtus meaning: skill, manliness, excellence) is an individual who possesses outstanding technical ability in the fine arts, at singing or playing a musical instrument. The plural form is either virtuosi or the Anglicisation, virtuosos, and the feminine form sometimes used is virtuosa. Virtuosi are often musical composers as well. During the age of Baroque music many composers were also virtuosi on their respective instruments.
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Famous quotes containing the word virtuoso:
“I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn’t pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”
—Christopher Hampton (b. 1946)