Boccherini Studies 3 (review)

With three installments of Boccherini Studies now before the public, the editorial committee is clearly making good progress toward its stated goal, to close the "large gap in the music-historical and musicological studies dedicated to the composer" (http://www.luigiboccherini.org/bstudies.html, accessed 5 June 2012). While Boccherini Studies is certainly bringing much valuable research to the fore, one could hardly say that the composer has been neglected in recent years, with at least three important book-length studies dedicated to him in the past decade (Jaime Tortella, Boccherini: Un músico italiano en la España ilustrada [Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2002]; Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini: La vita e le opera [Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 2005]; and Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006]), not to mention numerous journal articles and a new, revised version of Gérard's thematic catalogue (Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, compiled by Yves Gérard [London: Oxford University Press, 1969]) scheduled for publication in 2012.

Building on the work of volumes 1 and 2 (2007 and 2009), Boccherini Studies 3 covers a broad range of topics, but with a special focus on issues of authorship and authenticity. With articles in Italian, German, and English, as well as untranslated quotations from source material in Spanish and French, much of the current volume is not accessible to an English-only reader. The two entries by Loukia Drosopoulou, source studies on opp. 10-13 and 17-21 (pp. 157-68), and on the opp. 60 and 62 quintets with two violas (pp. 169-96) are the only ones in English. Four are in German. Two of these are by the volume and series editor, Christian Speck: a foreword (pp. vii-ix) and a detailed discussion of a letter from Breslau once believed to be written by Boccherini (pp. 1-16). The other two are by Christian Orth, in which he presents his theory about Boccherini's use of unison in the two cello parts in the cello quintets (pp. 251-71) and gives some further observations on his research on Boccherini's use of thumb position and clefs in cello parts (pp. 273-76) initially presented in his 2007 article "Zum Daumenaufsatz in den Cellostimmen von Boccherinis Kammer musik" (Boccherini Studies 1, pp. 219-43). The remaining entries, all in Italian, include articles by Remigio Coli on the early catalogues of Boccherini's works (pp. 139-55); Fulvia Morabito on the rediscovery of manuscript sources for the guitar quintets (pp. 197-223); and Elisa Grossato on early critical comparisons of Haydn and Boccherini (pp. 225-50).

The most extensive article in the volume is Morabito's "La mano di Luigi Boccherini: Studio della scrittura alfabetica e musicale attraverso l'epistolario e i cataloghi autographi" (pp. 17-138), a detailed examination of the composer's handwriting, looking at both his alphanumeric and musical notation. According to Morabito the need for this study became clear with the inauguration in 2005, the two hundredth anniversary of the composer's death, of the Boccherini Opera Omnia (p. 17), a new critical edition under the direction of Christian Speck, which is also being published by Ut Orpheus. So far three volumes of the Opera Omnia have appeared (vol. 1: Concert Arias (G 544-559), 2005); vol. 29: 6 Duets Op. 3 (G 56-61) for 2 Violins, 2007; and vol. 30: 6 Sonatas Op. 5 (G 25-30) for Keyboard and Violin, 2009). In his 1969 Catalogue Gérard recognized that neither he nor anyone else had mastered the identification of Boccherini's hand (Gérard, p. xv), so he was circumspect with autograph designations that had been assigned to many manuscripts scattered among libraries in Italy, Spain, France, Austria, and Germany, as well as many items in private hands, some of them difficult to access. With the...