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Chapter 7 The Perfect Listener A Recreation In 1781 Boccherini sent the following inquiry through the Viennese publishing house Artaria, with whom he had just established a working relationship: February 1781 I hope you will do me a favor, which I will value greatly, and it is that if one of you gentlemen (as is probable) should be acquainted with Signor Joseph Haydn, writer, who is held in the highest regard by me and by all others, you might offer him my respects, saying that I am one of the most passionate connoisseurs and admirers both of his genius and of his musical compositions, which here receive all the acclaim that in strict justice they deserve.1 Haydn tried more than once to follow through by writing back to Artaria but, as far as we know, to no avail. [27 May 1781] I send herewith the letter from Herr Boccherini; please give my most dutiful compliments to him in return. No one here can tell me where this place Arenas is. It must not be far from Madrid; but please let me know this, so that I can write to Herr Boccherini myself.2 [late July 1782] Accordingly I send both letters, regretting only that I cannot write to Herr Boccherini with my own hand at this time; if you will pay my most devoted respects to his honorable self at a convenient time, I shall be obliged to you.3 Despite assertions of their subsequent enduring friendship in the obituary for Boccherini that appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and elsewhere, we can be fairly sure that the two men never made direct contact .4 But Haydn would have had plenty of opportunities to become acquainted with Boccherini’s music. Boccherini first made his name in Aus254 tria through his early appearances in Vienna, and his reputation was maintained there by means of scores in Parisian editions, made available through Viennese music-sellers. As early as 1769, Boccherini’s trios and quartets (these must have been opp.1 and 2, respectively) were being sold at the Viennese establishment of the copyist Simon Haschke; from 1771 to 1776, trios, quartets, the sonatas for violin and keyboard, and some symphonies were purveyed by the bookseller Hermann Joseph Krüchten; and from 1776 Artaria itself offered for sale the Parisian prints of “an entire series of Boccherini ’s compositions.”5 Once Boccherini began to be printed in Vienna in the mid-1780s, his music, especially the string quartets, sold extremely well there, putting him “in the first rank of quartet composers.”6 Not just in Vienna, but in London too: by the time of Haydn’s first visit to the English capital in 1791–92 he would scarcely have been able to avoid Boccherini ’s presence there in editions both legitimate and pirated.7 That Boccherini ’s music had been popular in London as early as 1781 is attested by the exchange between Burney and Twining regarding its merits, which began in that year. The opportunities were there, then; in the end, however, we do not know the extent to which Haydn was acquainted with Boccherini’s music. We can be more sure of the other side of the equation. Cambini tells us that Boccherini had performed Haydn’s music as early as 1765 in northern Italy; more speculatively, we can assume that he would have had opportunities to hear Haydn’s symphonies and chamber music in Paris in 1769. But his most extended contact with Haydn’s works undoubtedly came in Spain. By 1781, the year of Boccherini’s first attempt to communicate with him, Haydn’s music was known and esteemed in Spain (“his musical compositions . . . here receive all the acclaim that in strict justice they deserve”). The channels of its arrival and distribution in that country have been thoroughly documented .8 Haydn was a pet of the afrancesados, and this more than anything else would have put his work in Boccherini’s path—and not casually either; a few years later, when Boccherini assumed the duties of music director for the Benavente-Osuna household, he became responsible for choosing, copying , rehearsing, and performing the numerous works by Haydn held in their library, which formed the most complete Haydn collection in Spain. Although we cannot be sure of the precise extent of their knowledge of each other’s work, in their virtual, printed embodiments the two composers were fellow guests in countless musical establishments large and small, professional and amateur...

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