Luigi Boccherini

Italian composer

• Born: February 19, 1743
• Birthplace: Lucca (now in Italy)
• Died: May 28, 1805
• Place of death: Madrid, Spain

Boccherini was one of the most prolific composers of all time, creating almost five hundred instrumental compositions, from trios to symphonies. With Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he helped to establish the style and structure of the classic string quartet and concerto.

Early Life

Luigi Boccherini (lew-EE-jee bohk-kay-REE-nee) was the third of five children of Leopoldo Boccherini and Maria Santa Boccherini. His father, one of the first musicians to play solos on the double bass, noticed that Luigi displayed a remarkably sensitive ear at an early age. Leopoldo therefore hoped that his son would develop musical talent and began giving him cello lessons when he was five. After a few months, Luigi’s father sent him to Abbate Domenico Francesco Vanucci, maestro di cappella at Lucca’s cathedral. This composer, cellist, singer, and choirmaster taught the young Boccherini cello, harmony, and composition, as well as Latin and Italian, at the seminary of San Martino. When Boccherini was thirteen years of age, Vanucci realized that his pupil knew at least as much about music as he did.

After Boccherini gave his first public performance during the Festival of the Holy Cross in September, 1756, his father sent him to Rome. He auditioned for the celebrated cellist and composer Giovanni Battista Costanzi and was immediately accepted. Boccherini and his father were appointed cellist and double-bass player in the orchestra of the Imperial Theater in Vienna in December, 1757. In 1760, Boccherini wrote six trios for two violins and cello obligato, his First Opus, and its admirers in Vienna included Christoph Gluck. Other family members also found success in Vienna, as one brother and two sisters danced in the ballet. His other brother, Giovanni-Gastone, after failing as a dancer, a singer, and a violinist, became a librettist, eventually collaborating with Joseph Haydn.

Despite the advances he made in Vienna as cellist and composer, Boccherini wanted to spend the rest of his life in his native town and, in August, 1760, petitioned the Grand Council of Lucca for a position as cellist in the council’s chapel; he received no reply. After a major success with a 1764 concert of his works in Vienna, he finally won his Lucca appointment, but the inexperienced Boccherini had expected too much and was disappointed to discover that the council would not pay for his compositions except for the expenses of getting the music copied. On December 9, 1764, attracted by the renown of Giovanni Battista Sammartini, he left for Milan.

In Milan, Boccherini wanted to exchange views with other talented composers and musicians. Such contacts led in 1765 to what historians of classical music consider to be the first formation of a string quartet for regular public performances. This quartet, which consisted of Boccherini (apparently the originator of the idea), Filippo Manfredi, Pietro Nardini, and Giovanni Giuseppe Cambini, played compositions by Haydn and Boccherini.

In the spring of 1765, Boccherini returned to Lucca and to his official duties. Later that year, Boccherini missed two performances, the first sign of an incurable condition that may have been tuberculosis and that grew steadily worse, forcing him eventually to abandon his ambitions as a virtuoso concert cellist. When his father died in 1766, the young composer became anxious over assuming sole responsibility for his career. Needing an experienced adviser, he went to the violinist Manfredi, fourteen years his senior, who invited Boccherini to tour with him.

Life’s Work

Early in 1767, Boccherini and Manfredi arrived in Paris, where Boccherini’s music had already been published. Boccherini was soon befriended by the baron de Bagge, an influential patron of the arts, as well as the music publisher Jean-Baptiste Vénier and Madame Brillon de Jouy, a prominent harpsichordist, for whom he composed his Op. 5 (opus 5). Through the baron de Bagge, Boccherini met the intellectual elite of France and became aware of the musical avant-garde.

In 1768, the Spanish ambassador to France invited Boccherini and Manfredi to Madrid, where they hoped for the patronage of the prince of the Asturias, the heir to the Spanish throne, and were lured by the legend of the favorable treatment of artists in the court of Charles III and by the illusion of wealth possible in a country enamored of Italian music. The king and the prince, however, had little musical judgment and were guided entirely by the Italian violinist and composer Gaetano Brunetti. After receiving helpful advice about composition from Boccherini, Brunetti became jealous of this potential rival and decided to prejudice the court against him.

At the end of 1769, Boccherini received a major boost to his career when he met the Infante Don Luis, brother of the king, and composed six quartets (Op. 8) in his honor. Luis was much more sophisticated about music than were his brother and nephew and delighted in supporting musicians slighted at court. Impressed by Boccherini’s talent and his personal charm, Luis appointed him cellist and composer of his chamber on November 8, 1770. Boccherini was to be paid thirty thousand reals annually, more than Luis’s confessor and his personal physician, and the composer’s art flourished for the next fifteen years.

Sometime after entering the service of Luis, Boccherini married Clementina Pelicho—sources do not provide a date—and their first child, a daughter, was born in 1776. When Luis also married and moved to Las Arenas, Boccherini and his family followed. The composer settled down for the next nine years to work on chamber music almost exclusively, since only a small number of musicians were available in Las Arenas.

By 1783, the Boccherinis had three daughters and two sons, but Clementina died suddenly in 1785. After Luis died later that year, Charles III continued the composer’s salary, appointing him cellist of the Chapel Royal. Boccherini never actually performed this duty, however, because of his illness. The death of Don Luis left Boccherini free to dedicate his works to any patron, and Frederick William II, king of Prussia, appointed him composer of his chamber, although Boccherini continued to live in Madrid. Frederick William, also patron to Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was fond of the Italian’s works, since he himself was an amateur cellist. Among the many pieces Boccherini presented to the Prussian monarch was La Tirana (1792), his most famous quartet.

Boccherini’s most important Madrid patrons during this time were the countess-duchess of Benavente-Osuna and her husband, the marquis. The countess-duchess made him director of a sixteen-piece orchestra that performed in her palace. Because the marquis was an ardent guitarist, Boccherini transcribed several of his piano pieces for his benefactor’s instrument. At the request of the mother of the marquis, he composed La Clementina (1786), his only opera, with a libretto by Ramón de la Cruz.

In 1787, Boccherini married Maria del Pilar Joaquina Porreti, daughter of his late friend the cellist Domingo Porreti. He then ceased composing and performing for the countess-duchess of Benavente-Osuna and withdrew into isolation. He may have decided to devote himself entirely to composition, since his productivity increased, despite ill health, between 1787 and 1796. Almost no documentation exists for the events of Boccherini’s private life during this period. While some sources place him at the court of Frederick William, there is no substantial evidence that he ever left Madrid.

Boccherini’s fortunes began to take a bad turn in 1798. After Frederick William died, his son halted the composer’s pension. Boccherini was then forced to accede to the instructions of his Paris publisher, Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, also a composer. The correspondence between the two reveals that Boccherini had many problems with this demanding, perhaps envious, publisher. When Pleyel advertised himself as the sole proprietor of Boccherini’s works, the composer demanded to know if he was still alive. Pleyel’s published Boccherini scores were full of errors, and many pieces languished in drawers until the publisher deemed the time right for his own financial benefit.

Boccherini was nevertheless highly regarded in France, and in 1799 he dedicated six quintets, Op. 57, to that nation. As a result, he was invited to become one of the five directors of the Conservatoire in Paris, but he did not want to leave Spain, which he had come to regard as his native country. When Lucien Bonaparte arrived in Madrid as France’s ambassador in 1800, he became Boccherini’s final patron. The composer was paid richly for organizing the music for the ambassador’s parties in the palace of San Bernardino.

After Lucien Bonaparte left Madrid in 1801, Boccherini had nothing on which to live except what he earned from the sale of his works. The pension continued by Charles IV was meager. Despite increasingly bad health, he composed as much as before. Two of his daughters died during an 1802 epidemic, and his wife and another daughter died in 1804. Boccherini began a set of six quartets around this time but was too weak to continue after writing the first movement of the second. He died, apparently of pulmonary suffocation, on May 28, 1805. A century later, Lucca asked Madrid for the composer’s ashes, and they were transferred to his birthplace in 1927 and interred in the Basilica of San Francesco.

Significance

Luigi Boccherini was considered second only to Haydn as a composer for cello and violin in the late eighteenth century, but, as tastes shifted from classical to Romantic music, he became, despite proponents such as Frédéric Chopin and Aleksandr Borodin, somewhat passé. Boccherini’s rococo style was thought too delicate and ornate, too superficial and monotonous. Because his music is charming, gentle, and even effeminate, he was called “Haydn’s wife” by the violinist Giuseppe Puppo. Still, Mozart is thought to have been influenced by Boccherini, and Ludwig van Beethoven adapted many of his methods and idioms.

Boccherini was all but forgotten when what is still his best-known work, the minuet from the String Quartet in E Major, Op. 13, No. 5, was rediscovered in the 1870’s as a jewel of the rococo art. In 1895, the Dresden cellist Friedrich Grützmacher published his free arrangement of the Cello Concerto in B-flat. Boccherini was known primarily for these two works, partly because most of his music was available only in flawed editions, until after World War II, when he began to be reevaluated. The Quintetto Boccherini, formed in Rome in 1949, helped renew interest in the composer, touring throughout the world as well as making many recordings.

As a result, Boccherini has finally been recognized as a significant pioneer in the development of chamber music. He helped the technique of string instruments to progress from an almost primitive simplicity to a subtle sophistication. With Haydn and Mozart, he clarified and solidified the sonata form. He contributed to the maturity of the string quartet by writing as if for four blended soloists rather than for a small orchestra, and he virtually invented the quintet and sextet. He has most often been praised by critics for the balance, symmetry, and lyricism of his compositions. Of Boccherini, Sir William Henry Hadow, an English critic and composer, wrote,

So long as men take delight in pure melody, in transparent style, and in a fancy alert, sensitive and sincere, so long is his place in the history of music assured.

Bibliography

Cowling, Elizabeth. The Cello. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. History of the instrument and its composers and players from the sixteenth century to 1960. Includes an excellent brief biography of Boccherini combined with analysis of his contribution to the literature of the cello.

Gérard, Yves, ed. Thematic, Bibliographical, and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini. Translated by Andreas Mayor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Compiled to supplement Germaine de Rothschild’s biography, and corrects errors in earlier catalogs of Boccherini’s compositions.

Griffiths, Paul. The String Quartet. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983. Traces the development of the string quartet from 1759 to 1913. Evaluates Boccherini’s contribution to this development and compares his chamber music to that of Haydn and Mozart.

Heartz, Daniel. “The Young Boccherini: Lucca, Vienna, and the Electoral Courts.” Journal of Musicology 13, no. 1 (Winter, 1995): 103. Profile of Boccherini, describing his personality, musical education and development, and public performances.

Le Guin, Elisabeth. “’One Says That One Weeps, but One Does Not Weep’: Sensible, Grotesque, and Mechanical Embodiments in Boccherini’s Chamber Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 2 (Summer, 2002): 207. Examines the characteristics and performance of Boccherini’s chamber music.

Newman, William S. The Sonata in the Classic Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. History of the sonata from 1740 to 1820. Provides an overview of Boccherini’s life combined with a brief but detailed analysis of his contribution to the sonata form.

Rothschild, Germaine de. Luigi Boccherini: His Life and Work. Translated by Andreas Mayor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. The only biography in English is very brief but contains all the relevant information known to exist. Emphasis is on Boccherini’s life, with little analysis of his work. Includes a bibliography and an appendix with all extant Boccherini letters, all to his publishers.

Sadie, Stanley, and John Tyrell, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2d ed. Vol. 3. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Biography and descriptions of Boccherini’s compositions. Also available online.