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Chapter 6 “It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece” The Early String Quartets Bordeu: Every sensible molecule [once] had its “me” . . . but how did it lose it, and how does the conscience of a whole result from all these losses? Mademoiselle de L ’Espinasse: It seems to me that contact suffices. denis diderot, “Le Rêve d’Alembert,” 1769 In August 1804, Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published an article on the performance of string quartets, signed “Cambini in Paris.” After a series of musings in an early Romantic vein on the technical and spiritual obligations of the four musicians came the following passage: Three great masters—Manfredi, the foremost violinist in all Italy with respect to orchestral and quartet playing, Nardini, who has become so famous as a virtuoso through the perfection of his playing, and Boccherini, whose merits are well enough known, did me the honor of accepting me as a violist among them. In this manner we studied quartets by Haydn (those which now make up opp. 9, 17, and 21 [sic]), and some by Boccherini which he had just written and which one still hears with such pleasure.1 The happy time recalled by Cambini took place in 1765, in Milan. His constellation of luminaries formed the first professional string quartet of which we have any record, though that record consists in Cambini’s word alone, not being verified by any other source.2 We cannot accept Cambini’s brave claim that the group played some of Haydn’s opp. 9, 17, and 20 quartets; it is a claim ill-served by his mistaking the last of the three opus numbers, and in any case none of the works listed had been composed by 1765! The Divertimenti opp. 1 and 2, written in the previous decade and published in Paris, would have been available; presumably they are what Cambini meant. The quartets by Boccherini himself are the only repertory that we can 207 solidly identify with that 1765 meeting of masters: these would have been op. 2, Boccherini’s first six string quartets, written, according to the composer , between 1760 and 1762, and first published in Paris in 1767. Boccherini followed the six of op. 2 with no fewer than eighty-five more works in the same genre. His string quartets span his entire creative life in twenty opus numbers; one of his very last manuscripts is the unfinished Quartet in D Major, op. 64, no. 2, G. 249. The string quartets are outnumbered—though scarcely out-diversified—only by the quintets. Slightly over half Boccherini’s works in the string quartet medium are called quartettini. This is Boccherini’s own usage, perhaps even his own coinage.3 The diminutive indicates a shorter piece, often but not always in two movements. He also calls them opere piccole; other works with a more conventional three- or four-movement plan are opere grandi.4 The composer mentions this distinction, which he also employed among his trios, quintets, and symphonies, in a letter to Don Carlo Andreoli of 22 September 1780: “I divide the works into small and large, because the large ones consist of four pieces [i.e., movements] in each quintet, and the small of two and no more. From these they [the publishers, in this case Artaria] will be able to select as they please, as it is all cloth of the same piece.”5 This is an interesting claim. One might assume that in restricting himself to a shorter format, and often to shorter movements within that format, Boccherini also employed a lighter, more inconsequential style. But, just as he implies, this is not the case; the reduced length of the quartettini does not have a consistent relationship with level of invention or seriousness of tone. The only feature of the opere grandi that is somewhat rarer in the quartettini is the fully developed slow movement.6 The short format lends itself to concision and immediacy, and is a great friend of the whole esthetic of the tableau. Some of the most affecting and characteristic music in the quartets can be found among the quartettini. Boccherini’s own typically diffident acknowledgment of this complex and distinctive unity in his work—“it is all cloth of the same piece”—might not be made either by or on behalf of many other composers. style periodization In view of the homogeneity that Boccherini himself asserts, any attempt at style periodization must be...

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