Luigi Dallapiccola was spurred to write his Tartiniana seconda, for violin accompanied by either piano or orchestra, by violinist Sandro Materassi; hoping for a sequel to Dallapiccola's well-received first Tartiniana, Materassi came to him with numerous photocopies of Giuseppe Tartini's works to use as source material. In the earlier venture, Dallapiccola had manipulated Tartini's diatonic themes as a serial composer would manipulate tone rows, while managing to preserve both emotional character and instrumental color. Tartiniana seconda was written according to the same plan and achieved a similar level of popular success after it appeared in 1956.

This music really does sound like Baroque music, but with modern contrapuntal sensibilities. The opening theme of the first movement (Pastoral) sounds lyrical and sad, and it intertwines with portions of itself (sometimes modified), making the theme seem private and dramatic at the same time. The following Bourree has an appropriately decisive rhythm and the full complement of Baroque violin ornaments; the third movement (Presto leggierissimo) scampers and frolics, even as the tone row-style manipulations of the theme (inversion, transposition, etc.) become more and more complicated.

The most ambitious movement is the last ("Variations"), which originally appeared as an independent work called Improvisation (after Tartini). Here, Dallapiccola stretches the limits of thematic manipulation by taking a set of variations from Tartini's Sonata in A minor and counterposing them. Tartini's ninth variation becomes Dallapiccola's main theme for the movement, while Tartini's others appear in variously manipulated guises. The second Dallapiccola variation superimposes the 18th Tartini variation on the 17th; the final variation features Tartini's ninth accompanying the tenth. The ingenious fourth variation uses Tartini's eighth variation in a crab canon.