bocherinis body

Boccherini’s Body

Boccherini’s BodyAn Essay in Carnal Musicology

Elisabeth Le Guin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguisheduniversity presses in the United States, enriches lives around theworld by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences,and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC PressFoundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California PressBerkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.London, England

© 2006 by Elisabeth Le Guin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Le Guin, Elisabeth, 1957–Boccherini’s body : an essay in carnal musicology / Elisabeth

Le Guin.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 0-520-24017-0 (cloth : alk. paper)1. Boccherini, Luigi, 1743–1805—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Music—Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.) I. Title.ml410.b66l4 2006780'.92—dc22

2005023224

Manufactured in the United States of America

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 0610 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8

But what do my cold and exaggerated expressions mean, mylines without character and without life, these lines that I havejust traced, one on top of the other? Nothing, nothing at all;one must see the thing.

Mais que signifient mes expressions exagérées et froides, mes lignes sanscaractères et sans vie, ces lignes que je viens de tracer les unes au-dessusdes autres? Rien, mais rien du tout; il faut voir la chose.

denis diderot, “Vernet,” Salon of 1767

carnalLatin carnalis, fleshly; med. Latin, blood-relationship

1. Of or pertaining to the flesh; fleshly, bodily, corporeal2. Related by blood3. a. Pertaining to the body as the seat of passions or

appetites; fleshly, sensualb. Sexual

4. Not spiritual, in a negative sense: material, temporal, secular

5. Not spiritual, in a privative sense: unregenerate6. Carnivorous, bloody, murderous

Oxford English Dictionary

contents

list of f igures xilist of music examples xiii

cd playlist xvacknowledgments xxi

Introduction 1

The origins of this project—Boccherini’s generally acknowledged mer-its—some less generally acknowledged qualities—“carnal musicology”as based in the performer’s viewpoint—brief digests of each chapter tocome—excursus: historicizing the terms of embodiment—kinesthesia—Condillac—fact and fiction

1. “Cello-and-Bow Thinking”: The First Movement of Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in Eb Major,

Fuori Catalogo 14

Reciprocity of relationship between performer and dead composer—framing the cellist-body—a carnal reading of the first half of the move-ment in question— thumb-position—pleasure in repetition—cellisticbel canto—the predominance of reflective and pathetic affects—communicability and reciprocality—Rousseau on the role of theperformer—subjectivity as a necessity—the second half of the move-ment—relationships between musical form and carnal experience—Boc-cherini’s “celestial” topos—carnality and compositional process—theimportance of the visual—in conclusion: the necessary ambivalenceof my descriptions and analyses

2. “As My Works Show Me to Be”: Biographical 38

Boccherini’s self-representation in his letters—the lack of solid first-hand biographical evidence—the divergence of his performer and com-poser identities—period anxieties over those identities—early years inLucca—familial emphasis on dance—travels to Vienna, 1757–63—possibilities of further touring—possible Viennese influences on Boc-cherini—Paris, 1768: the musical and cultural climate—Parisianvirtuoso cellists—circumstantial evidence of meetings between Boc-cherini and Jean-Pierre Duport—Boccherini’s especial success withParisian publishers—Spain, 1769—Boccherini’s first court post,1770—the Spanish musical and cultural climate—Boccherini’s adept-ness at finding a place within it

3. Gestures and Tableaux 65

The importance of visuality to period reception—its subsequent de-cline—the effect of this decline on Boccherini’s posthumous reputa-tion—Spohr: “This does not deserve to be called music!”—a passagethat might have provoked such a reaction—Boccherinian stasis andrepetitiousness—Boccherinian sensibilité—the paintings of LuisParet—the predominance of soft dynamics—hyper-precision in perfor-mance directions—the lacuna as sensible strategy—Boccherinianabandonment of melody in favor of texture—the influence of acoustics—tableaux in period theater and painting—their relations to sensibi-lité—absorption—suppressed eroticism—tragedy and the tableau—the reform body: Angiolini’s classifications of motion styles—Spanishdance and gesture—seguidillas, boleros, and fandangos—Bocche-rini’s complex relations to Spanish style—“Instrumentalist, what doyou want of me?”: problems in the relation of performance to text

4. Virtuosity, Virtuality, Virtue 105

A theatricalized reading of the Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17—cyclicity in Boccherini’s works—inter-generic recycling of themes andmovements—unconscious recycling of subsidiary passages—the influ-ence of tactile experience on this level of composition—etymologies ofthe word idiom—the sonatas within Boccherini’s oeuvre—virtuosi—philosophical problems posed by virtuosity—virtuosity contra sensi-bilité—the grotesque—actorly virtuosity—the automatic and me-chanical—bodily training toward perfection—the paradox of the actor

5. A Melancholy Anatomy 160

Reports of the 1993 exhumation and autopsy of Boccherini’s body—TB, the “white death”—musical melancholies—Boccherinian melan-choly—Edward Young’s Night Thoughts—a melancholic reading ofthe String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, Allegro—melan-cholic labyrinths—from Galen to Descartes—sympathetic vibration asa cause of or cure for melancholy—various consumptions—life andart: some animadversions—satiric melancholy—the performance di-rection con smorfia—other consumptions—Enlightenment anxietiesabout nocturnal pollution and consumption—the Marquis de Sade—a melancholic reading of the String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4,G. 168, Grave—hypochondria as an aspect of musical hermeneutics

6. “It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece”: The Early String Quartets 207

An overview of Boccherini’s work in this genre—style periodization:Boccherini’s relatively unchanging style—woven music: his penchantfor texture over melody—recycling the idea of recycling—the problemof “repetition” in ensemble contexts—sublimated caresses—the ro-coco—address to a sforzando—two analyses of the String Quartet inE Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179—peculiarities of the work—the firstanalysis (relatively conventional)—readerly relationships to analysis—the second analysis (experimental)

7. The Perfect Listener: A Recreation 254

Boccherini and Haydn’s attempt at correspondence—period compar-ison of the two composers—using carnal musicology on composersother than Boccherini—the Perfect Listener: re-creating “listener per-formance practice”—the Perfect Listener attends a performance ofHaydn’s G-major keyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39—cadential remarks

appendix: chronological table of string quartets 271

notes 273bibliography 331

index 345

list of f igures

1. Lyra Howell, Left Hand in Thumb-Position 20

2. Italian school, eighteenth century, Portrait of LuigiBoccherini 40

3. Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Luigi Boccherini 41

4. Eighteenth-century map of Castilla y León 56

5. Francisco de Goya, Baile a orillas del rio Manzanares 63

6. Luis Paret y Alcázar, Ensayo de una comedia 72

7. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La Mère bien-aimée 84

8. Francisco de Goya, El entierro de la sardina 140

9. Francisco de Goya, “Incómoda elegancia” 142

10. Anon., Night the Third: Narcissa 164

xi

list of music examples

1. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro),first half of movement 15

2. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro),second half of movement 28

3. Transcription of music sketches in Liotard’s Portrait of Luigi Boccherini 42

4a. Cello Concerto in C Major, G. 573, ii (Largocantabile), bars 13–20 54

4b. Jean-Pierre Duport, Étude in D Major, openingbars 54

5. String Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, i(Allegro brillante), bars 11–17 67

6. String Quartet in F Major, op. 15, no. 2, G. 178, i(Allegretto con grazia), bars 104–12 73

7. String Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, iii(Allegro maestoso), bars 48–57 74

8. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 2, no. 1, G. 159, i(Allegro comodo), opening bars of first-violin part to words from Cambini’s Nouvelle Méthode 88

9. String Quintet in C Minor, op. 18, no. 1, G. 283, iv(Allegro assai), bars 67–75 89

10. String Quintet in C Major, op. 50, no. 5, G. 374, ii(Minuetto a modo di sighidiglia spagnola), bars1–13 98

xiii

11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G.17, i (Moderato) 106

12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G.17, ii (Adagio) 113

13. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 5–8 to words from Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata 115

14. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, iii (Rondò) 118

15a. Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, i (Allegro militare), bars 50–51 130

15b. Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, ii (Largo),opening 130

16. String Quintet in D Major, op. 11, no. 6, “L’uccelliera,”G. 276, ii (Allegro [I pastori e li cacciatori]), bars37–49, viola, cello 1, cello 2 144

17. Chord formations from Brunetti 151

18. String Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5, G. 275, iii(Minuetto), opening 158

19. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i(Allegro) 166

20. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii(Tempo di minuetto), trio 177

21. String Quartet in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, i(Allegro assai), bars 32–35 191

22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no 4, G. 168, ii(Grave) 197

23a. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, ii(Allegro), bars 85–96 213

23b. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii(Tempo di minuetto), bars 8–14 214

24. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i(Adagio), bars 13–18 216

25. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 8, no. 3, G. 167, i(Largo [soto (sic) voce]), bars 22–25 218

26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i(Andantino) 225

27. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii(Prestissimo) 231

xiv list of music examples

cd playlist

All selections are by Luigi Boccherini.The Artaria String Quartet is made up of Elizabeth Blumen-

stock, Katherine Kyme, and Anthony Martin, violin/viola; andElisabeth Le Guin, cello.

1. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro).Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps).Length: 6:46. Examples 1 and 2.

2. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro),bars 5–7. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman(hps). Length: 0:11. Example 1.





7. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro),

xv

bars 36–38. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman(hps). Length: 0:12. Example 2.



10. String Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, i(Allegro brillante), bars 11–17. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 0:32. Example 5.

11. String Quartet in D Minor, op. 9, no. 2, G. 172, ii(Larghetto), bars 13–23. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 0:35. No example.

12. String Quartet in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, ii(Adagio), opening. Artaria String Quartet. Length:0:36. No example.

13. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, ii(Larghetto), opening. Artaria String Quartet. Length:1:26. No example.

14. String Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, iii(Allegro maestoso), bars 48–57. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:19. Example 7.

15. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i(Adagio), bars 1–38. Artaria String Quartet. Length:2:11. No example.

16. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii(Grave), bars 28–34. Artaria String Quartet. Length:0:57. Example 22.

17. String Quartet in D Minor, op. 9, no. 2, G. 172, i(Grave), opening. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:37.No example.

18. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato). ElisabethLe Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 7:12.Example 11.

19. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bar 5.Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps).Length: 0:05. Example 11.

20. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bar 27.

xvi cd playlist

Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps).Length: 0:05. Example 11.

21. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bars33–34. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman(hps). Length: 0:11. Example 11.



24. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio). ElisabethLe Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 3:13.Example 12.

25. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 5–8.Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps).Length: 0:30. Example 12.



28. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars18–23. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman(hps). Length: 0:26. Example 12.


30. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, iii (Rondò). ElisabethLe Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 4:13.Example 14.

31. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, iii (Rondò), bars112–51. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman(hps). Length: 0:45. Example 14.

32. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, ii (Largoassai). Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps).Length: 5:58. No example.

33. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, iii (Allegretto

cd playlist xvii

assai), opening. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), CharlesSherman (hps). Length: 0:28. No example.


35. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii(Tempo di minuetto), minuet. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 2:03. No example.

36. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii(Tempo di minuetto), trio. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 1:20. No example.

37. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii(Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 46–50. Artaria StringQuartet. Length: 0:09. No example.

38. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii(Tempo di minuetto), minuet D.C. Artaria StringQuartet. Length: 1:05. No example.

39. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i(Allegro). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 5:48.Example 19.

40. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i(Allegro), bars 32–38. Artaria String Quartet. Length:0:24. Example 19.



43. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii(Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 37–44. Artaria StringQuartet. Length: 0:24. Example 20.



46. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii

xviii cd playlist

(Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 61–94. Artaria StringQuartet. Length: 0:50. Example 20.

47. String Quartet in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, i(Allegro assai), bars 29–36. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 0:17. Example 21.


49. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii(Grave). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 5:05. Example22.

50. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii(Grave), bar 2. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:09.Example 22.






56. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, ii(Allegro), bars 85–96. Artaria String Quartet. Length:0:21. Example 23a.

57. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii(Tempo di minuetto), bars 7–15. Artaria StringQuartet. Length: 0:15. Example 23b.

58. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i(Adagio), bars 13–19. Artaria String Quartet. Length:0:24. Example 24.

59. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 8, no. 3, G. 167, i

cd playlist xix

(Largo [soto (sic) voce]), bars 22–24. Artaria StringQuartet. Length: 0:23. Example 25.

60. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii(Prestissimo), bars 23–50. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 0:23. Example 27.

61. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i(Andantino). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 6:55.Example 26.

62. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i(Andantino), bars 43–54. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 0:25. Example 26.


64. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii(Prestissimo). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 2:21.Example 27.

65. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii(Prestissimo), bars 63–73. Artaria String Quartet.Length: 0:09. Example 27.






xx cd playlist

acknowledgments

Surely, the true importance of a project like this lies in the wonderful hu-man contacts for which it has served as pretext. Herewith, my heartfelt thanks,served up in alphabetical order.

To the American Council of Learned Societies, for generous fellowshipassistance, without which the book would never have been written.

To Wendy Allanbrook, whose work and mentoring profoundly and foreverchanged how I hear and understand eighteenth-century music.

To the American Musicological Society Subvention Fund, which madepossible the editing and mastering of the CD bound into this book.

To the anonymous readers for UC Press, for their meticulous and perspi-cacious reading of drafts early and late; and to one particular anonymousreader of a later, “final” draft, whose strenuous objections to the manuscript(and eventual recusal from the project) triggered major revisions; this is amuch better book as a result.

To my fellow members of the Artaria String Quartet, Elizabeth Blumen-stock, Katherine Kyme, and Anthony Martin, for their beautiful playing inthe recorded examples of quartet music and their willingness to be para-phrased and fictionalized in chapter 6; and for cheerfully putting up withyears of alternate pontificating and woolgathering on my part.

To the Junta of the Asociación Luigi Boccherini, Madrid, for welcomingme into the Asociación’s formative process, and for providing much con-versational food for thought: Josep Bassal, José Antonio Boccherini, JoséCarlos Gosálvez, Germán Labrador, Emilio Moreno, Sergio Pagán, VictorPagán, Bianca Hernández, and Jaime Tortella.

To Joseph Auner, former editor of JAMS, and his redoubtable assistantCatherine Gjerdingen. Portions of chapters 1, 3, and 4 appear in vol. 55,no. 2 (fall 2002) in an article entitled “‘One Says That One Weeps, but One

xxi

Does Not Weep’: Sensible, Grotesque, and Mechanical Embodiments in Boc-cherini’s Chamber Music.”

To Umberto Belfiore, for recording the two sonatas included on the book’sCD, and for the final editing and mastering of all of the music examples.

To José Antonio Boccherini Sánchez and Christina Slot Wiefkers, for gra-ciously welcoming my sometimes clumsy enthusiasm.

To Luigi Boccherini himself, whose music (and whose presence within it)continues to delight me profoundly, even after ten years of immersion; sinceI claim so strenuously to have a living relationship with him, I would be re-miss indeed not to thank him for it here.

To Bruce Brown, who read early drafts of several chapters, and who wasalways generous about answering questions that no one else on the planetcould have answered.

To Marisol Castillo, for the conversation lessons without which the Span-ish wing of this project could never have flown.

To Gerhard Christmann, for allowing me to reproduce the Liotard por-trait of Boccherini, which he owns, and for the gift of an exquisite porcelainbust of the composer.

To Laura Davey and Edith Gladstone, who copyedited a difficult mess ofa manuscript with grace and precision.

To Denis Diderot, my other non-living companion for so much of this pro-ject, whose weaving together of intellect and sentiment remains my ideal bothas writer and as human being.

To my editors at UC Press, Mary Francis and Dore Brown, for their clear-sighted, amiable ability to head off panic attacks and keep me on track.

To Bonnie Hampton, who taught me not only how to play the cello, buthow to think about playing it.

To Daniel Heartz, who deftly advised the dissertation from which this bookemerged, and whose spacious and gracious understanding of the eighteenthcentury, and of history in general, I will always strive to emulate.

To Ian Honeyman, for early editing and mastering of the book’s CD.To my daughter, Lyra Howell, for tolerating my preoccupation with this

project through much of her childhood, when no child should have todemonstrate patience; and for her fine drawing of my left hand, which ap-pears as figure 1.

To Mary Hunter, for scholarship that I very much admire, and for herwarm support and encouragement.

To Mariano Lambea, editor of Revista de musicología. Portions of chapters1, 3, and 5 appear (in Spanish) in vol. 1 (2004) in an article entitled “LuigiBoccherini y la teatralidad.”

To my parents, Ursula and Charles Le Guin, sine qua non.To Lolly Lewis, producer, and Paul Stubblebine, engineer, for recording

and editing the Artaria Quartet’s renditions of Boccherini’s opp. 8, 9, and

xxii acknowledgments

15 in 1995 and 1996; and to Victor and Marina Ledin, for their invaluablehelp in negotiating my 2002 purchase of the subsequently mothballedrecordings from Naxos International.

To Emilio Moreno, for an ever-ready generosity, and in particular for pro-viding me with a copy of the Brunetti MS.

To Craig Russell, for helping me to establish many crucial Spanish contacts.To Charles Sherman, for his inspirational performances of Scarlatti, and

for beautifully adapting Boccherini’s basso parts to the harpsichord in thetwo sonatas included on the book’s CD.

To Elaine Sisman, for sharing with me an unpublished essay on melancholy.To Robert Stevenson, grand old man of Hispanic musicology, for his warm

interest in an extremely junior colleague, and for enlightening and alwayssurprising conversations.

To Jaime Tortella, for really extraordinary generosity and collegiality,warm friendship, and vigilant, Feijóvian skepticism in the face of my enthu-siasms and excesses.

To George Thompson and Michelle Dulak, for supplying the scores of op.15, no. 3, that appear as music examples 26 and 27.

To James Turner, who at an early stage of this project made clear to me(largely through his personal embodiment of the concept) the central im-portance of sensibilité to any understanding of the eighteenth century.

To my colleagues at UCLA, for being, quite simply, dream colleagues:

Susan McClary, for unfailing, unstinting wisdom, support,encouragement, and role-modelingRob Walser, El Jefe Supremo, for well-timed advice, and for making my academic life smooth in ways I’m sure I don’t even know aboutTom Beghin, for his own embodiments of and reflections uponeighteenth-century music; for challenging my every impulse to be reductive; and for his friendshipTamara Levitz, for generously reading and commenting on an earlydraft of the introductionMitchell Morris, Raymond Knapp, Robert Fink, Elizabeth Upton: allconversationalists of a positively eighteenth-century virtuosity, whoseinfluence bears upon this book in myriad ways.

To the following, all UCLA graduate students at the time:

Kate Bartel, Bettie Jo Hoffmann, Louis Niebur, and Glenn Pillsbury, for their elegant work in the music-processing program FinaleSara Gross, for sharing with me her unpublished work on ScarlattiCaroline O’Meara, for assistance with the bibliography

acknowledgments xxiii

Jacqueline Warwick, for her handsome translations of Diderot, andtactful advice about my own efforts at translationJonathan Greenberg, Olivia Mather, Cecilia Sun, Maria Cizmic, and the staff of Echo: A Music-centered Journal, for crucial and always amiableassistance in a variety of small matters. An earlier version of chapter 1appeared in vol. 1, no. 1 (1999)Marcie Ray, for vital and impressively efficient assistance in thecopyediting phase.

To the UC President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, for gen-erous fellowship assistance, without which the book would never have beenfinished.

To Mary Ann Vorasky, for her patience and support; she is formative atevery level of this project by virtue of her fierce insistence that no academicwork is worth doing that cannot speak to those outside the Academy.

xxiv acknowledgments

Introduction

The composer achieves nothing without executants: these must bewell-disposed toward the author, then they must feel in their heartsall that he has notated; they must come together, rehearse, investi-gate, finally study the mind of the author, then execute his works. Inthis way they almost succeed in stealing the applause from the com-poser, or at least in sharing the glory with him, for while it is pleas-ing to hear people say, “What a beautiful work this is!” it seems to meeven more so to hear them add, “Oh, how angelically they have exe-cuted it!”

luigi boccherini, letter of 8 July 1799 to Marie-Joseph Chénier

When I first came upon this passage, I had been studying Boccherini for lessthan a year. Studying him as a musicologist, I should say: as a cellist, I hadknown his work for years before musicology entered the picture, havinglearned one or two of the sonatas, as student cellists still routinely do.1 Thatcursory, circumstantial familiarity had made me frankly reluctant to under-take anything musicological on Boccherini’s behalf. He did not seem terri-bly interesting—a Kleinmeister, a music-historical also-ran, living in theprovinces and writing virtuoso (which to me meant second-rate) music; andthen there was the tiresome inevitability, the unimaginativeness, as I saw it,of myself, a cellist, using musicology, with all its grand critical and philo-sophical potential, merely to study music by another cellist.

Thus when Daniel Heartz first steered me toward Boccherini in a pro-seminar at UC Berkeley, I chose to study the symphonies, on the theory thatif Boccherini were a serious composer, he would prove it in this genre. Myinvestigation of these works had not gone far before I found that my initialreluctance had evaporated. Boccherini was indeed “serious,” but the termsof his seriousness were not at all what I had expected them to be. This gaveme some of the zeal of the reclaimer and rehabilitator; to varying degrees asimilar energy, sometimes crossing the line into passionate partisanship, canbe found in the work of most Boccherini scholars. I, and they, have consid-erable reason. Boccherini was prolific, highly regarded in his own day, and

1

a significant innovator: to name but a few generally agreed-upon matters,he was one of the first composers of instrumental music to explore the psy-chological subtleties of inter-movement cyclic construction, and his idio-syncratic harmonic language anticipates the substitutions and evasions of thetonic-dominant relationship generally attributed to later generations. Mov-ing from the symphonies to the chamber music (as I did in my own research),one can add to this list the fact that his string trios and quartets from the1760s are among the very first compositions in these genres to explore theindependent, highly characterized part-writing that was to become the hall-mark of classic chamber music; and that he confirmed the string quintet asa genre with expressive potential to rival (some would say, exceed) that ofthe quartet. There is more, documented in a modest but continuing bur-geoning of Boccherini scholarship. The bicentenary of Boccherini’s death,in 2005, has produced an interesting crop of commemorations scholarly andartistic.

By great good fortune, during the period of my initial interest in Bocche-rini’s music a period-instrument group in which I played, the Artaria StringQuartet, became involved in a project to record his string quartets opp. 8,9, and 15. Through this project, which lasted about two years, I got a peer-lessly intimate sense of what it meant to perform Boccherini. That intimacyand those works (along with the sonatas, which I was exploring on my own)were to become the conceptual core of this book, while excerpts from therecordings, included in a CD of sound examples, are proof of the concep-tual pudding, as it were. I emphasize that this CD is not incidental to my pro-ject. As well as “backing up” many of the score examples, in order to makemy work more accessible to those who do not read music, it contains nu-merous sound-illustrations of crucial points for which there are no score ex-amples. I have chosen to do this in order to assert the centrality of perfor-mance. Diderot put it neatly: “A piece is created less to be read than to beperformed.”2 My ideal reader, as I envision her, will listen with this book inone hand and the other hand on the controls of her stereo system.

In the course of the recording project, I came to feel that there were qual-ities in Boccherini’s music that intrigued me far more than his acknowledgedinnovations in style, form, and genre, qualities that made it unlike any othereighteenth-century music I had ever known, and about which no scholar hadwritten in any coherent way. Among these qualities were an astonishing repet-itiveness, an affection for extended passages with fascinating textures but vir-tually no melodic line, an obsession with soft dynamics, a unique ear forsonority, and an unusually rich palette of introverted and mournful affects.They gave Boccherini an unmistakable profile both to the ear and under thehand. Did they add up to something more? Did they reflect some forgottenaspect of eighteenth-century musical esthetics?

In pursuit of the answers to these questions, I followed two paths, paths

2 introduction

which roughly paralleled the identities of musicologist and musician. On theone hand, I began reading the works of those of his contemporaries whowrote directly about Boccherini’s music, or about matters related to it. Onthe other, I began paying very close attention indeed—note-taking, rehearsal-interrupting attention—to the sensations and experiences of playing it.

I offer some fruits of this latter approach—the “carnal musicology” of thisbook’s title—in my first chapter. According to late eighteenth-century the-orists of sonata composition, an opening should generally be bold, simple,and memorable; this wisdom also seems apt for extended works in prose.Thus in chapter 1 I demonstrate my interpretive method through one shortmovement, and I use it to make a radical assertion, which is that “carnal mu-sicology” bears witness to a genuinely reciprocal relationship between per-former and composer—even where the latter is no longer living. (The in-tention here, again as in sonata composition, is to generate interest in theexplications that will follow).

Chapter 2 is a chunk of biography in the midst of an interpretive ocean.As such it has several purposes. One it shares with a number of similar re-cent efforts: it is a partial corrective, for as of this writing there is no full-length, thoroughly scholarly biography of Boccherini available in English.3

Another purpose—which it does not share with any extant work in English—is to cast a particular emphasis upon Boccherini’s years in Spain.

Boccherini spent thirty-six of his sixty-two years there. In 1781 JosephHaydn attempted unsuccessfully to send a letter to Boccherini, who at thetime was living in Arenas de San Pedro, west of Madrid. Haydn complainedto their mutual publisher Artaria, “No one here can tell me where this placeArenas is.” A Vienna-centered view was natural enough to the Viennese, ofcourse, but one side effect of its nineteenth-century crystallization into a dom-inating music-critical position has been a remarkable dismissiveness aboutthe Spanish period (and the arguably Spanish nature) of Boccherini’s life andworks. Until quite recently, no one had written anything of much use or in-sight about this at all: no small omission. Accordingly I have given specialattention to considerations of Spanish musical culture in chapter 2 (and insundry other places in the book) on the assumption that this culture will al-most certainly be less familiar to the English-speaking reader than those ofthe other places where Boccherini lived, Lucca, Vienna, and Paris. Specificcorrectives—that is to say, work on Boccherini as a specifically Spanishcomposer—are recent, and virtually all of them are in Spanish. A full-lengthBoccherini biography in Spanish by the historian Jaime Tortella was publishedin 2002, and it throws new light on many aspects of the composer’s life.4

Tortella’s work is scrupulously comprehensive; thus I have felt free to givemy biographical essay a very particular slant, which is its third purpose. Iam concerned less with comprehensiveness than with those events and cir-cumstances that best illuminate the history of embodiment and its perfor-

introduction 3

mances, in theaters, in ballrooms and drawing rooms, on the streets of cities.How did these performances distinguish themselves? What truck might Boc-cherini have had with them?—or, in Michael Baxandall’s formulation, whattroc, cultural intercourse,

[web of] approval, intellectual nurture and, later, reassurance, provocation andirritation of stimulating kinds, the articulation of ideas, vernacular visual [andin this case aural] skills, friendship and—very important indeed—a history ofone’s activity and a heredity, as well as sometimes money acting both as a to-ken of some of these and a means to continuing performance. . . . Troc is in-tended not as an explanatory model but as an unassertive facility for the in-ferential criticism of particulars.5

A precise documentation of any life is at best problematic, and there aresome heartbreaking holes in the documentation of Boccherini’s. By focus-ing on the fabric around those holes, I choose the suggestive over the demon-strative, hoping thereby to do as astronomers do, and find better visual acu-ity by looking “off the object.”6

Looking not very far off the object at all, one finds quite a body of prose(and occasionally poetry) about Boccherini’s music from his own time; it isinteresting, complex, and far-flung. I have assembled and translated it on aWeb site in the hope that its availability will encourage further interpretivework on Boccherini.7 As usually happens when one uses historical sourcesto address latter-day questions, these writings confirmed some of my ownperceptions—the melancholy, the softness—and utterly failed to confirmothers—the repetitiveness, the eschewal of melody. However, they alsobrought to my attention another Boccherinian quality that I had not noticedon my own: they praised his music repeatedly for a visual clarity of charac-ter or expressive intent, a tableau-like quality. In the end it was this qualitythat suggested how many of the other Boccherinian peculiarities might in-deed “add up,” for it pointed to the profound visuality of the eighteenth-century relationship to music. I discuss these discourses of visuality in somedetail in chapter 3. Visuality in instrumental music meant, first and foremost,reference to the theater; but theater itself was conflated with painting bymeans of the tableau vivant, popular all over Europe but nowhere more thanin Paris. Well-known paintings were enacted by living bodies carefully dis-posed upon the stage, while painters regularly strove to convey the snapshot-like immediacy of key moments in drama. Tableaux vivants were most deeplycharacteristic of tragedy—or so Denis Diderot, theorist par excellence of thiscomplex synesthetic culture, asserts—and indeed, time and again in con-temporary criticism of Boccherini’s music we find references to tragedy. Inchapter 3, I rely on Diderot’s works, and on Gasparo Angiolini’s descriptionsof pantomime dance, as my main period tools for uncovering the picturesin Boccherini’s music. More speculatively, I pursue pictures suggested by

4 introduction

some of the music’s stylistic features, in particular its evocations of seriousopera, of sensibilité, and, on occasion, of Madrilenian musical cultures.

The visual bias of the eighteenth century is one reason why, in dealingwith a composer whose great strength was his instrumental music, I focusextensively on theatrical music throughout this book. Another is simply amatter of historicity. In Boccherini’s day, in every country in which he livedand worked, music for the stage was the fashionable, the prestigious, the re-ally interesting genre of composition; whether it was serious or comic, im-ported or vernacular, was secondary to the fact of its being staged. Instru-mental music tended to be successful with listeners and buyers of printededitions to the extent that it referred, explicitly or implicitly, to theatricalpractice. Nor did this necessarily mean medleys of questionable taste on thelatest air, popular as these undoubtedly were. In his violin treatise of 1803the violinist and composer Giuseppe Cambini, several of whose writingsproudly inform us of his acquaintance with Boccherini, puts it well: he tellsus that “the dramatic art has always inspired [the] great masters, even in workswhich are not presented upon the stage.”8 Among my other purposes here,I mean to present Boccherini’s work as an example of the subtle and inge-nious ways in which eighteenth-century instrumental composers acknowl-edged and incorporated the theatrical.

Yet even as the centrality of a visual listening was becoming evident to me,I was increasingly convinced that certain qualities in Boccherini’s music werebest explained, or even solely explicable, through the invisible embodiedexperiences of playing it. No music I have ever played seems so to invite anddwell upon the nuances of physical experience as does Boccherini’s: one cancount on tiny variations of position, weight, pressure, friction, and muscu-lar distribution having profound structural and affectual consequences. Asa path of inquiry within this book, this appeared to lead toward a class of ex-perience the very names of which are unwieldy and unfamiliar: kinesthesia,proprioception, tactility. In its intense subjectivity, the be-right-here-right-now-ness of phenomenology, it seemed also to resist a historical approach.

Ultimately, however, this sense of being torn between the two opposedmethodologies of the visible and the invisible proved to be itself historical,indeed a key preoccupation of Boccherini’s day. I explore this in chapter 4,which pursues the topic of Boccherini’s virtuosity as it manifests in his solosonatas. Virtuosity would seem to be the epitome of unity between inner im-pulse and outer execution: performative perfection. Yet of course it was pre-cisely his virtuosity that initially caused me to mistrust Boccherini as a com-poser worthy of study; and in this I was not anomalous but typical. Why isvirtuosity so often and so roundly dismissed by critics both of Boccherini’sage and of ours? As Diderot so memorably articulated in his “Paradoxe surle comédien,” the virtuoso’s visibility raises uneasy questions of where sin-cerity resides in performance—and ultimately this entails the larger ques-

introduction 5

tion of whether, in the human realm, what we see is ever really what we get.Remarkably, Boccherini exhibits unmistakable signs of being aware of thephilosophical stakes here. In certain sonatas, he distances and ironizes theperformer in specific regard to his virtuosity, thereby making a sophisticatedcontribution to the Enlightenment dialogue between self and appearance;I explore these works in some detail in chapter 4.

Chapter 5 repeats the outward-to-inward trajectory of chapter 4, but in amedical mode. In 1993, rising moisture in the burial vault at the Chiesa diSan Francesco in Lucca necessitated the exhumation of Boccherini’s corpse.However, in a singular observation of the fact that 1993 was the 150th an-niversary of the composer’s birth, a team of medical examiners at the Uni-versity of Pisa performed a paleopathological autopsy on the body. The fas-cinatingly macabre reports of this work are my starting point for a discussionof tuberculosis (which the autopsy proved Boccherini to have had) and itscomplex cultural associations with melancholy (one of his signal qualities asa composer, both in my opinion and in that of his contemporaries). I spendsome time in chapter 5 discussing period medical theories about both con-ditions. In the late Enlightenment, consumption and melancholy repre-sented, by means respectively physical and psychic, the deadly moment wheresubjectivity begins to consume itself in solipsism; for that reason they raisedthe question of the mind-body relation with particular urgency. Instrumen-tal music by its nature—forever partially invisible, the terms of its influencedifficult to assess, yet resisting solipsism through the ancient metaphor ofsympathetic vibration—had a lively relationship to such questions. In chap-ter 5 I use a number of quartet movements to demonstrate the delicacy andingenuity with which Boccherini’s consumptive/melancholic music exploresthe “fault zone” of mind-body relations.

excursus: historicizing the terms of embodiment

The mind-body problem is by no means resolved in contemporary culture;we have many of the same preoccupations and blind spots as our eighteenth-century colleagues. But not all of them. An eighteenth-century sense of em-bodiment is a realm both familiar and unfamiliar to us now. Thus we mightnote certain basic commonalities of response—it’s a given, for instance, thatpeople react to an unexpected pinprick today exactly as they did in Bocche-rini’s time, by reflexively jerking away—but we must equally note that thesensation itself is not describable in any objective way. We can only resort toanalogies, images, associations, all of them historically and culturally bound.In the end what a bodily sensation is, as an experience, can only be ap-proached through what it means within the culture that introduced that bodyto itself in the first place. Diderot acknowledged this relativity succinctly:

6 introduction

“Change the whole, and you necessarily change me. . . . Men are nothing buta communal effect.”9

As acculturated humans we have the capacity and every motivation to in-terpretively modify even our most basic responses: one era’s, one social class’s,one profession’s irritating jab might well be another’s inviting piquancy. Ofcourse, the source of the pinprick will have something to do with this. Wewill tend to attach human significance to sensations that arise from causesoutside of human agency (tuberculosis being a good example here) and asagents we will more or less deliberately pursue certain sensations as modesof relation. There are more still that we pursue on our own behalf, as modesof self-acculturation. A chief arena for this many-layered sensory engagementwith identity, then and now, is the arts.

Throughout this book I generally refer to the sense of embodiment withthe term kinesthesia, which comes from the Greek, and seems to have beenfirst used in a doctoral dissertation defended in 1794 in Halle. The author,Christian Friedrich Hübner, spelled it cenesthesia; a similar spelling persistsin modern French (cénesthésie) and Spanish (cinestesia). Hübner defined theterm as that faculty “by means of which the soul is informed of the state ofits body, which occurs by means of the nerves generally distributed through-out the body.”10 His use of the word was new; but by 1794 the concept hadbeen bruited about for some decades as a kind of “sixth sense”: roughly, theindividual’s sense of himself as sensing. The Abbé Du Bos, in his Réflexionscritiques sur la poésie et la peinture of 1719, posited a “sixth sense which is inus,” and he specified its physicality: “The heart is made, it is organized [to beaffected by] . . . touching objects.”11 The Abbé Étienne Bonnot de Condillac(1714–80) expanded on this model in his Traité des sensations of 1754. Thiswork proposes a statue made of marble, to which we, the experimenters,may vouchsafe one sense at a time, the more clearly to observe the opera-tions and the consequences of each in the formation of a self. This thought-experiment is both lengthy and rigorous; Condillac’s scrupulous compart-mentalization of the human sensorium, his insistence on tracing each sensefrom its origins through to its results, the economy of his language, are allearnestly scientistic. His statue provided me with a well-articulated histori-cal model for my initial intuition that physical sensation was a key to Boc-cherini’s music. What Hübner and I call kinesthesia, Condillac called “fun-damental feeling.”

Our statue, deprived of smell, of hearing, of taste, of sight, and limited to thesense of touch, now exists through the feeling she has of the action of the partsof her body one upon the other—above all the movements of respiration: andthis is the least degree of feeling to which one may reduce her. I will call it fun-damental feeling, because it is with this play of the machine that the life of theanimal begins; she depends on it alone. . . . This feeling and her I are conse-quently the same thing in origin.12

introduction 7

The idea of fundamental feeling seems to have run through the Parisianintellectual community like an electric current during the 1750s. D’Alem-bert, writing only a few years later, tells us, “This internal sense would seemabove all to reside around the region of the stomach.”13 And after Condillac’sTraité, the “sixth sense” was given a rather less abstract articulation by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in the Encyclopédie.

I make of these sensations a particular class, by the name of interior touch orsixth sense, and among them I count those pains which one feels sometimesin the interior of the flesh, in the extent of the intestines, even in the bonesthemselves; nausea, the malaise that precedes fainting, hunger, thirst, the out-ward motion (émotion) that accompanies all the passions; shivers, whether ofgrief or of voluptuousness; in fine, that multitude of confused sensations whichnever abandon us, which circumscribe our body in some way, which make italways present to us, and which for this reason some metaphysicians have calledthe sense of bodily coexistence.14

The “sixth sense” is the body aware of itself without external interventionof any kind, and the self located squarely in that body: the matrix of all En-lightened embodied experience. To this fundamental state Condillac me-thodically adds each of the qualities that in his view define embodiment: thefive other senses; pleasure; pain; relation to an outside world; desire; self-consciousness; selfhood; and finally language. All of these qualities comeabout through the succession of sensory impressions, and the interaction ofmemory with that succession. Selfhood is thus essentially temporalized inCondillac’s system, and this gives it a particularly interesting kinship with mu-sic. The absolute, atemporal experience of musical sound, however, is morelike that of smell: “When her ear is struck, she will become the sensationwhich she experiences. She will be like the echo of which Ovid says, sonus estqui vivit in illa; it is the sound which lives in her.”15

But allow the statue the experience of hearing first one sound, then an-other, of experiencing one as pleasant, another as less so, and of conceivingdesire from her memory of the difference (this being a rough digest ofCondillac’s progression), and “the desires of our statue will not be limitedto having a sound as their object: she will wish to become an entire air.”16

Thus, in Condillac’s model, does music effectively model the very processof self-constitution.

As soon as Condillac permits her bodily movement, things become moreinteresting still for the statue. No sooner does she move than she begins toencounter pleasure and pain and their entrained, entwined reactions. InCondillac’s system, pleasure is always in some way expansive, pain always con-tractive; this was in accord with current theories of nerve action. But at thevery moment of granting his statue the ability to react to sensation with mo-

8 introduction

tion, Condillac pauses, holding her in abeyance, to note the following: “If[Nature] gives her an agreeable sensation, one imagines that the statue willbe able to enjoy it by keeping every part of her body exactly where it was,and this would tend to maintain repose rather than produce movement.”17

This conservative or inertial tendency, resident at the very heart of hermobility, suggests that the motionless “fundamental feeling” might itself bepleasant, and so poses a crucial question. In a motionless state, the statue iscomfortable. Why should she want to move?—the existential challenge posedby the slugabed in her tangle of warm blankets, supremely unwilling to getup. Though this state is the epitome of idleness, the question it poses is notidle at all. What is implied here is eudaemonism, the assumption that whatfeels good must be good. As a social theory, eudaemonism turns upon itselfcannibalistically and in short order; but as a theory of music-making it pro-vides a framework for some nice insights. In particular, and at long last, itprovided me with a way of historicizing Boccherini’s repetitiveness and histendency to write passages devoid of the narrativity of melodic impulse, pas-sages that unmistakeably and deliciously recall the statue’s happy inertia. Inchapter 3, I offer an alternative explanation of these passages as a sonic formof of the visual tableau; but kinesthetically, they are the closest a player cancome to enacting eudaemonism (what John Locke called “indolency”) fromwithin a necessarily moving and desiring body. Through them Boccheriniimplies what the slugabed and the statue know: the matrix of embodied ex-perience is a comfortable place to be.

Comfort is the ideal state. It does not expand or contract, nor seek to be-come greater or to alleviate itself. Perhaps because it is immune to desire,comfort as artistic currency is a notion that has gone somewhat out of style—art, or at least good art as we are accustomed to think of it, not being a neu-tral or an indolent matter. But an older meaning of the word comes fromthe Latin root com + fortis: it once meant “Strengthening: encouragement,incitement, aid, succour, support, countenance . . . that which strengthensand supports,” a usage which died out in English in the very period in ques-tion here.18 This is an active and an interactive state. A persistent effect ofBoccherini’s music in and upon the hands of a performer is delight in thissense of comfort; not only is the mute and helpless text upon the page givenessential support through our living performance, but we, performing it, areourselves strengthened, encouraged, incited, and not infrequently given aidin the course of grappling with the demands of performance.

Both Condillac and Boccherini exemplify the hopefulness of their era bypresenting the self ’s fundamental state as a pleasant one. Such a cheerful andtrusting view of the world could perhaps only have come into its own duringa period of general prosperity, such as was enjoyed in much of Europe dur-ing much of the eighteenth century. The period of Boccherini’s maturity was

introduction 9

also that of capitalism’s first flush, the sanguine belief that letting people pur-sue their natural bent toward pleasure (most especially, of course, in the formof free trade) would result in every good—refinement, peace, virtue, justice.The easy sensualism of galant music was this infectious, commercially fueledoptimism quite literally making itself felt. Most of Boccherini’s chamber mu-sic was published for the swelling amateur market that had grown up withthat capitalism. His fame was literally built upon it. Such music needed to ex-hibit a pretty clear relationship to comfort, or it simply would not sell.

In this eighteenth-century culture of pleasure and the pleasant, paintended to be ignored whenever possible: natural enough, given the neuro-logically unavoidable reaction, modeled for us by the statue, of shrinkingfrom it. As Elaine Scarry puts it, “The first, the most essential aspect of painis its sheer aversiveness. . . . Pain is a pure physical experience of negation,an immediate sensory rendering of ‘against,’ of something being against one,and of something one must be against.”19

But the conceptual intractability of pain is key to its main cultural func-tion: pain is the limit, the edge, the defining moment of embodied experi-ence. The location of that edge has changed significantly between the lateeighteenth century and today: it is easy for us to forget the complete un-availability of anesthetics and the relative scarcity of what we now call pain-killers in the eighteenth century. For the readers of this book, relief fromeven a very low level of pain is as near as the bathroom cabinet, in the formof readily available, safe medicines whose only purpose is palliation. By andlarge, physical pain does not, cannot loom as large in Western culture nowas it did two hundred years ago.20 The very commonplaceness of pain in theeighteenth century must reframe our understanding of what all sensationmeant, what potential it held, for those living at that time. It obliges us allover again to acknowledge the continuity between pain and abuse—that is,pain used punitively (a sense built into the very word, which derives frompoena, punishment)—and its logical end in torture.

In the France and Spain of Boccherini’s maturity, the authorities, whoeverthey might be at a particular time and place, regularly used torture both phys-ical and psychological. Parisian public punishments, both before and duringthe Revolution, have been copiously documented.21 Public executions stilltook place in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor until 1790. In 1783, two years before Boc-cherini moved back to Madrid after years in the provinces, three counterfeiterswere garroted there, while a fourth was made to watch; “directly they werepronounced dead, their bodies were burned to ashes. . . . The execution lasted[from ten thirty] until half past five in the afternoon.”22 These public displaysof torture constantly and terrifyingly implied the many more that were con-ducted in the secrecy of Revolutionary or Inquisitional tribunals.

And then there was war, a nearly constant reality in late eighteenth-centuryEurope. To name only those most likely encountered by Boccherini, the

10 introduction

Seven Years’ War (1756–63) between Prussia and Austria took place duringthe years in which he was visiting Vienna, while in Spain he could scarcelyhave avoided the many violent uprisings and counter-uprisings in reactionto the French Revolution. Their culmination in the heartbreaking popularresistance to Napoleon, conducted by underequipped, starving, ferociouscommoners—the original guerrillas—took place on the streets of Madrid dur-ing the last period of Boccherini’s life.

The dire extremities of agony would appear to be all but absent from theexpressive world in which Boccherini’s music moves; certainly we look in vainfor their direct representation. In galant music-making the definitional ca-pacity of pain had a delicate threshhold indeed. I want to propose, however,that this delicacy was in no way a denial or evasion of the realities of agony,which need not be directly inflicted nor even directly recalled to be power-fully evoked through the exquisite sensitivity that it leaves in embodied mem-ory. Agony, filtered through that memory, perpetually contains and calibratessensibilité.

Returning to the statue, we see that she models this for us. Her originalexperiential polarity of pleasure/pain interacts with her memory to shapea range of experiential and performative possibilities.

Because she encounters in turn solidity and fluidity, hardness and softness, heatand cold, she gives her attention to these differences, she compares them, shejudges them, and these are the ideas by which she learns to distinguish bodies.The more she exercises her judgment upon this subject, the more her touchwill acquire delicacy; and little by little she will be rendered capable of discern-ing the finest nuances in a single quality.23

So does sensation inform action; by this same basic process, reiterated andexpanded over years, does the journeyman become a master musician, andthat musician eventually become a composer utterly characteristic of his age.

In chapter 6 I return to what was, for me, an original experiential site of thesehistorically embedded processes that I think make Boccherini so utterly char-acteristic: the string quartets opp. 8, 9, and 15. I begin with a loose overviewof those features of the quartets that first caught my attention and set meupon the path of writing this book, and then proceed to a pair of linkedanalyses—one more or less conventional and one experimental—of a shortquartet in E major, op. 15, no. 3. The “conventional” approach attempts ablend of the visualistic ideas I develop earlier in the book with considera-tions of musical rhetoric, topoi, and a smattering of harmonic analysis: I meanit to show the kinds of insight that can result from combining various meth-ods. The experimental approach originated in my desire to develop a kines-thetic analytical framework. It is based on a number of informal interviews

introduction 11

with the members of the Artaria Quartet, in which, working within para-meters loosely derived from Condillac, I asked them to describe the expe-rience of executing the piece in terms of pleasure or unpleasantness, easeor difficulty, beautiful or ugly results, and connection or disconnection withother ensemble members.24

The results of the interviews were complicated and ambiguous; I had notexpected that they would be otherwise. The polarities I used in the inter-view questions are susceptible of endless conflations and negotiations be-tween supposedly opposite terms. In the end I opted to present the inter-view results in the semi-fictionalized dialogue form that Diderot used somarvelously when he wished to make a point while retaining a sense of itsfull complexity. Thus, like Condillac, I am scientistic, but scarcely scientific.How could I be scientific when one member of the group that I interviewedwas none other than myself ?

It seemed appropriate that my inquiries into Boccherini’s music shouldconclude with such a demonstration of the equivocalities that must arise ingeneralizing from individual embodied experience. Intellectual open-end-edness is in large part both my means and my goal. By these lights, indeed,I had one more question to address: what would happen if I tried to gener-alize further, and apply my ideas to music other than Boccherini’s? In chap-ter 7 I hypothesize a “Perfect Listener,” an eighteenth-century counterpartto myself and my reader, in order to address a single, real-time performanceof a keyboard sonata by Haydn.

Thus each of the final two chapters of this book contains an essay in his-torical fiction: in chapter 6, the results of an informal interview process arepresented as a dialogue that in fact never happened, and in chapter 7 an ex-perience that did happen (my hearing of a performance of Haydn) is pre-sented as the experience of an invented, composite listener. While I havetaken care to tie their every substantive assertion to historical sources bymeans of that ultimate anti-fictional device, the footnote, these chapters arenonetheless departures. I have put my words in the mouths of real people;I have invented someone outright, and put words in her mouth in order tomake points of my own. I might seem to be asserting here that scholarshipis an act of fiction.

And in a sense, that is what I mean to assert. In everyday speech, Fictionis often juxtaposed with Truth; and so, perhaps inevitably, we tend to thinkof fiction as another word for falsehood. Obviously this not the sense in whichI am interested. Rather, in the sense in which I use it here, fiction is whathappens after the assemblage of data is complete; it is the drawing of eventhe most cautious inferences, the root of any original idea at all. Etymolog-ically, fiction comes from the Latin fictus, past participle of fingere (to shape,invent, feign); while fact comes from factus, past participle of facere (to do or

12 introduction

make). The level of word-origins suggests a relation much subtler and moreproblematic than the weary old opposition, Fiction or Fact; for in the end,how do we determine where making leaves off and becomes invention?

It was only late in the project that I returned, more or less accidentally, tothe remark by Boccherini that opens this introduction. Coming to it the sec-ond time, I was struck by its quiet radicalism. This had passed me by com-pletely the first time because the statement had seemed so obvious: of coursethe composer achieves nothing without executants!25 But in the period be-tween my two encounters with the passage quoted, I had written an entirebook based pretty exactly on the premise Boccherini states so neatly. In theprocess, I had gained a much more detailed sense of why what he says is, infact, no longer obvious. To put the performer always first, front and center,inverts an established order of musicological thinking; and that order wasestablished for some good reasons. Taking the performative point of viewprofoundly complicates the whole enterprise of talking coherently about mu-sic. Again and again during this project, I had found myself inventing amethodology—and sometimes dis-inventing one, throwing out days orweeks of labor because the results had proven untenable. Again and againI had felt called upon to explain why I was doing what I was doing, and then,in reading my explanations to myself, had been taken aback at the un-wieldiness and stridency that such explanations can impart. Thus I had alsogained an intimate—I might even say, a raw—sense of how difficult it is tounite performance and musicology into one discourse. It is not news, thisdifficulty, being something to which any habitué of either a conservatory ora university music department can readily testify. But in rediscovering Boc-cherini’s dictum, I was gratified to find in it so genteel a confirmation of myenduring conviction that this unification is, nevertheless, vitally important;and of my some years’ labor on its and on his behalf.

introduction 13

Chapter 1

“Cello-and-Bow Thinking”The First Movement of Boccherini’s

Cello Sonata in E b Major, Fuori Catalogo

Anyone who performs old music or who has written about its history can at-test to identifying with composers. The identification can be a haunting oran irritating experience, containing as it does the potential for possessionor invasion; shot through with sorrow, since, in Western classical music, sooften the composer is long dead; revelatory, voyeuristic; at its best and sweet-est we might call it intimate, implying that it is somehow reciprocal. I willcontend two things here: first, that the sense of reciprocity in this process ofidentification is not entirely wistful or metaphorical, but functions as real re-lationship; and second, that this relationship is not fantastic, incidental, orinessential to musicology. It can and should be a primary source of knowl-edge about the performed work of art.

In making such a claim I can do no better than show the reader the sceneof one of my own trysts with Signor Boccherini, the very sheets and the stainsupon them, as it were. (See example 1; CD track 1.)

Because the performer’s relationship to the work of art must have an ex-tensively explored bodily element, a performing identification with a com-poser is based on a particular type of knowledge which could be called car-nal. It is the rendering of this knowledge, which by its nature contains anextremely fine grain of detail, into concepts that are usefully transferable toother works, to other points of contact with the composer, and eventually topoints of contact with other composers altogether that will concern me forthe remainder of this book. In this chapter, however, I remain at the granu-lar level of translation from sensation to concept.

Confronted with the necessity of executing the first part of a sonata, theperformer will engage in a brief preliminary assessment of what she is aboutto do. The necessity, or at least advisability, of such an assessment has beenacknowledged for a long time: it corresponds to the intellectio of classical

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Example 1. Cello Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), first half of movement.

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Example 1. (continued)

rhetoric, a mulling-over and consideration of the topic at hand. When theperformance involves a score, this is at first a visual act. Lodovico Viadana,writing in 1607, offers a reading musician’s version: “It will be good if theorganist has first looked over the concerto which is to be sung, because inunderstanding the nature of that music, he will always play a better accom-paniment.”1

“The nature of that music” can mean quite a few things. There may besome kind of who-what-when, a rough and ready musicology: the composer,Luigi Boccherini, lived in the second half of the eighteenth century; whatwe have before us is the first half of a first movement of a sonata for celloand “basso,” the latter in this case being an unfigured bass line. Further con-text may arrive with this information. For instance, Boccherini is generallyremembered today as having been a great virtuoso cellist. He is also gener-ally remembered as some sort of precursor to the style of Haydn and Mozart.By these lights, we might expect a sonata-form procedure, and a certain de-gree of showiness.

For a prospective performer, “the nature of that music” is also inescapablyphysical. On this level, perusal of the score becomes an anticipatory kines-thesia, a sub-verbal, sub-intellectual assessment of questions such as, Whatdo I need to do in order to play this? Where will I put my hands, and howwill I move them? The most basic physical terms within which this questionoperates—the framing of a cellist-body—are fairly easy to articulate. Many,in fact most, physical possibilities are excluded, such as standing up, leg mo-tion of any kind, waving the arms in the air, vocalization, and so on. A cer-tain basic position is mandated: seated on a chair, with the instrument be-tween the legs, its neck to the left of the face, and the bow held in the righthand.

It is in the act of playing the instrument, the engagement of that cellist-body in movement and doing, that the enterprise becomes fraught with com-plexity. Suddenly we are involved with implications such as the following:

fixity vs. mobility (arms, fingers)competing muscle groups (hands, arms, back)

“cello-and-bow thinking” 17

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muscular extension and contractionjoint extension, contraction, and rotationmotion of limbs or digits toward or away from the center of the bodyfriction and the release of friction (left-hand fingers on string; bow hairon string; between muscle groups)use of or resistance to weight, gravity

These matters, detailed as they are, are still general. What of the piece athand, and its specific demands? How will the cellist’s body configure itselfaccording to the solo line of this sonata? And—an integral part of myproject—how may we read these configurations for meaning?

the first half of the movement

The first specific thing the performer is likely to notice in assessing this pageof music may well come with a little lurch of alarm: the piece begins “outthere,” technically speaking, not in the cello’s more ordinary bass or tenorregister, but in the soprano range, unfamiliar enough that most cellists willhave to find and secure the position for the left hand before beginning toplay. (For the latter-day cellist, accustomed to reading treble clef at pitch,the lurch of alarm will be unnecessarily intense: it was Boccherini’s custom,as it was the custom in most solo cello music of his day, to read this clef downan octave.) From this somewhat precarious starting point comes a measured,steady descent for two bars, and then two more an octave lower. Topicallyspeaking, such descending lines connote withdrawal, while the dottedrhythms of bars 2 and 4 connote something of the martial. From this topi-cal mixture one might construct a scenario of a rapidly subsiding bravado,being resisted with brief shows of rigidity. But then add to this the physicalexperience of playing this passage, which is a kind of drawing-in toward acenter: from its initial extension, the left arm moves steadily in toward thechest, and, psychologically, toward home, the familiar pastures of the tenorand bass ranges. Simultaneously, the right hand holding the bow must moveminutely inward as well. In order to play with a clear sound in a high regis-ter, the bow hair is positioned on the strings rather close to the bridge, wherethere is quite a bit of frictive resistance to the bow; as the pitches descend,the bow can be moved “in,” again toward the body’s center, a half-inch or so,and the strings’ resistance diminishes considerably. For both hands this isan experience of increasing ease and relaxation, and probably relief. Thusthe retreat from the screwed-up courage of the opening is, physically speak-ing, pleasant, welcoming, grateful.

If we combine the physical experience of the passage with its topical/

18 “cello-and-bow thinking”

gestural significations, we get a complicated little picture: retreat and sub-siding manifest as desirable. Gratification is associated with a withdrawingmotion. Meanwhile the persistent dotted rhythms, which become increasinglygruff in sound with the descent in pitch, militate against this esthetic of in-troversion. (Yet they are subtly comforting as well: the execution of dottedrhythms such as these involves minute rooting-inward motions of the righthand on each thirty-second note followed by slightly longer releases into theair after each sixteenth, allowing the right hand to repeatedly confirm its po-sition, short-long, short-long, with each thirty-second–dotted-sixteenth pair.)

At this point, having made the piece’s first full statement, the performermust return abruptly to the high place in which the piece began—this time,without the luxury of being able to find the position outside of musical time.In negotiating this leap, muscle memory will help, but should that memoryprove less than perfect, and the two-and-a-half-octave jump to the sopranoregister go awry, Boccherini immediately offers two opportunities to regroupand correct the intonation. The minor third G–Bb, on which the new phrasebegins, is most sensibly played by the left thumb and second finger,2 the up-per-neighbor third, Ab–C, by first and third fingers. Each upper-neighborthird provides a brief moment in which to lift and adjust the position of thethumb. Unless there has been a really gross initial miscalculation, this shouldpermit everything to be all set, by the third beat of bar 5, for the passage-work that follows. This starts out brilliant, if formulaic, with its cascadingtriplets, but begins to droop by bar 7, the thumb position reset a step lower,and then another, finally by halfway through bar 8 landing on a dominantdrone, which murmurs itself away into a cadence.

Much of this passagework—the figuration of bars 5 and 6, and bars 83–10being examples—is written so that one can just twiddle around within a po-sition, oriented around the fixed and immobile left thumb. Since thumb-po-sition is a technique used only by cellists and virtuoso contrabassists, and sinceit is central to Boccherini’s idiom, a brief reversion to the level of framingthe basic cellist-body may be in order here. Thumb-position involves plac-ing the right side of the left thumb across two strings, usually the top two, asa “bar,” or artificial nut (see figure 1).3 The pitches produced by a pair ofthumb-stopped strings will always be a perfect fifth apart, since the stringsthemselves are tuned in fifths. Thumb-stopped notes will also have a tonequality somewhat different from those stopped by the other fingers, since itis the side of the thumb that makes contact with the string; joints are con-siderably less flexible under sideways pressure, and there is less flesh on theside of a digit. Vibrato becomes more difficult. Thumb tone could be de-scribed as rather hard and bald.

This sonata is rather unusual for Boccherini in the amount of thumb move-ment implied in its first eight bars; but it is perfectly characteristic of him in


Figure 1. Lyra Howell, Left Hand in Thumb-Position. Charcoal, pencil, chalk.Copyright Lyra S. Howell, 2003. Photo copyright Lyra S. Howell, 2003.

the fact that this movement is always downward in pitch. Boccherinian tech-nique more typically involves “planting” the thumb in a convenient locationfor part or all of an extended passage, thus fixing register for that passage’sduration. With the thumb planted, the remaining fingers can fill in thepitches of a diatonic or chromatic scale around and within the thumb’s bar-fifth, and can, in the upper registers, extend to a tenth or even further abovethe bottom note of the bar. Typically, Boccherini will signal both the begin-ning and the end of a fixed-thumb-position passage with a clef change, andhe often uses a different clef to signal the placement of the thumb.4 The el-egance of this system of implying (without ever dictating) the most conve-nient or appropriate means of execution, together with the sense it gives,on the page as well as to the ear, of a substantial cast of characters, each withits own voice, is lost in every modern edition I have encountered, since allavoid the rich variety of clefs an eighteenth-century cellist was assumed tobe able to read. In addition to bass and “old tenor clef” (treble-clef-down-an-octave) this included all the C clefs (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto,tenor), as well as the rather daunting invention of tenor-clef-up-an-octave,to my knowledge unique to Boccherini.

Because thumb technique orients the left hand around a stopped fifth, italso lends itself to the addition of a drone or pedal point, an addition Boc-cherini often exploits, as in bars 83–10 here. Double-stopping and dronesare written-out resonators, ways of increasing the harmonious vibrations com-ing out of the instrument (and disguising the bald tone of the thumb-stoppednotes!) but they will function in this way only if the performer is very con-scious and deft with the balance of friction and release in the right hand. Interms of sensation, playing two strings at once will offer increased resistanceto the right hand and arm; further resistance takes place between musclegroups: the deltoid and biceps, which are responsible for the pronation (in-ward rotation) that sinks the arm weight into the strings, war subtly with thetrapezius and back muscles that are responsible for the lateral motion acrossthem. If the performer gets this balance of resistances right, it will result ina warm, bright, carrying sound, one which is definitely pleasant to work at.

In the sonata movement at hand, Boccherini invites an exploration of thepleasure of making resonant sound through the amount of repetition he pro-vides; this gives the performer plenty of time in which to find the requisitemuscular balance. This appears at many levels: from the micro-repetitionsof bars 5–6 (CD track 2), to the pastoral musette music of bars 83–10 (CDtrack 3) and its slightly more dreamy cousin in bars 183–223 (CD track 4),to the sonorous momentum of bars 263–27 and 293–30 (CD track 5). Therepetitions in the pastoral mode are introverted and calm; they invite a soundthat seeks resonance without seeking much projection. This plays out as phys-ical calmness, since making such a sound involves a greater submission togravity, less effort by the arm and shoulder muscles. The repetitions toward


the end of the movement are more urgent, implying a crescendo of soundand muscular activity. Both passages in their different ways incite and en-courage the performer to explore different pathways toward a frictive phys-ical pleasure. This is not friction toward a climax, however. Even the tumultof bars 263–27, and then again 293–30, issues only in a delicate, lazy de-scending line and a rather indolent cadence.

There is in fact only one complete phrase on this page that is not writtenin thumb-position, and which is not based on layered repetitive gestures. Thisis in bars 113–182 (CD track 6). Here the left hand must move up and downthe neck of the instrument to follow the line of the melody, a much morecommonplace cellistic technique. The whole passage falls within the mostgrateful, “singing” register of the instrument, and its vocality is further em-phasized by the fact that, without the thumb on the strings, it is much eas-ier to use vibrato, producing a warmer, more “natural” tone. In his violintreatise of 1787, Leopold Mozart tells us that

tremolo [his word for vibrato] is an ornament that springs from nature itself,and not only a good instrumentalist but also a skillful singer can make it anappropriate adornment for a long note. Nature itself is the teacher for this:when we strike a loose string or a bell sharply, we then hear a certain wave-likebeating (ondeggiamento) of the tone we have struck, and we call this shudder-ing aftersound tremolo or tremoleto.5

Shifting up and down the instrument’s neck, by progressively shorteningand lengthening the strings, mimes the melodic “shapes” created by the in-visible shortening and lengthening of vocal cords. This ability of our bodiesto generalize such an activity from one situation or body part to another,our marvelous self-analogizing propensity, can be experienced by the stringplayer nowhere so intimately as in the physical analogies of tone productionfor voice. To be launched upon a melody, airborne among the expressiveand muscular demands of shaping it, seems only to be adequately describedby reference to the experience of singing. David Sudnow remarks that a cen-tral process in learning an instrument is the acquisition of “a general styleof bodily movement . . . of a complexity that in no way can be readily reducedto some existing equation” and which has the signal feature of generalizabilityto (and from) the rest of the body, rather in the manner of a hologram.

Put a person with a piano-knowing hand above major-scale pedals on the floorof an organ, and the feet learn their ways and the pedal’s spaces faster thanthe feet of a body without a piano-knowing hand. Put the piano-knowing handover a child’s-sized toy keyboard, and in a few moments the piano-knowinghand displays perfect familiarity in moving about.

Put a pencil in the knowing hand and watch a scale get played, a melodypicked out. That scale and its distances are thoroughly incorporated for the


body, an inner acquisition of spaces somehow arrayed all over as an ever-presentpotential. And when fingers in particular learn piano spaces in particular, muchmore is in fact being learned about than fingers, this keyboard, these sizes.

A music-making body is being fashioned.6

And as in singing, every instrumental “voice,” however produced, will haveits own stamp; a mature string player develops a tone that is identifiably herown, as flexibly characteristic as the sounds that issue from her larynx. Thisis not wholly dependent upon the particular instrument being played, noron the apparent type of body playing it: fine players can produce “their”sound on a wide variety of instruments, small people sometimes have a huge,robust tone, and so on.

Boccherini’s exploration of cellistic bel canto delivers the most personal partof the piece so far. CD track 6 contains an abrupt turn into the minor mode(bar 133), with a number of its topical attendants: pathos, in the form of de-scending chromatics (bar 14) and an augmented second (bar 15); and anxi-ety or unrest, conveyed by the syncopations (bars 16–17). The passage thatbegins at bar 133 uses plangent chromaticism to confirm the inward bent ofthe whole movement: in order to play this descending line—to make a G be-come a Gb—the left hand must move, however minutely, toward the heart.Kinesthetically, this is a motion toward the center of balance; and gesturally itreferences the motion associated in classical oratory with heartfelt sincerity.

Pathetic connotations to chromatic passages and descending lines arescarcely peculiar to Boccherini, of course; what is so characteristic is the wayin which those associations are physically welded, as it were, to one of themost fundamental acts of playing the instrument at all. Such drawings-in arealways toward a center, not only of sentiment, but of physical efficiency andbalance. We can confirm this reading again and again in the course of ex-ploring this sonata; and it is a notable feature in all its kindred works. It seemsthat for Boccherini as he manifests himself to us in the sonatas for cello andbasso, the performer’s basic aplomb upon his instrument tended to be man-ifested in pathos or sentimental reflection, even in a major-mode Allegro.

To recapitulate and summarize these combinations of physical experiencewith topos and affect, then: a daring beginning proves to be the beginningof a retreat; in bar 5, potential discomfort (the large leap upward) is miti-gated by some musically simple but technically sophisticated repetitions;something showy follows that is not at all difficult to play; this too subsides,step by step; in the drone passages, both reflective and cumulative, there areinvitations to explore pleasure in the sliding and resistance of muscle fibers,and in the instrumental resonances that go into developing tone; in the pas-sage from bars 113 through 182, the minor-mode affects of pathos, melan-choly, and anxiety are set apart and emphasized through their vocalistic ex-


ecution, evoking that central eighteenth-century understanding of the voiceas the ideal marker of a feeling selfhood.

communicability and reciprocality

In a live performance (and to some extent in a recorded one) not only willthe performer feel things such as those I have described, but the listener-observer will feel them too, or will at least feel that the performer feels them,through the subtle physical identification that comes with proximity andclose attention to another human being. Such matters communicate them-selves entirely without the benefit of a verbal exegesis, and are a proper, ifalways only contingent, part of the performed work of art. None of thesekinesthetic associations can ever be really free, on account of Western cul-ture’s powerfully normative, powerfully tacit understandings of embodiment;hence, much of the verifiability and transferability of this carnal approachto musicology must rest upon unpacking and discussing those norms.

The first norm we encounter here is the one that says, in a very reason-able voice, you cannot have a physically reciprocal relationship with someoneno longer living.

Yet I do claim it as reciprocal. My role constitutes itself as follows: as livingperformer of Boccherini’s sonata, a work which he wrote for himself to play,I am aware of acting the connection between parts of someone who cannotbe here in the flesh. I have become not just his hands, but his binding agent,the continuity, the consciousness; it is only a step over from the work of main-taining my own person as some kind of unitary thing, the necessary dailyfiction of establishing and keeping a hold on identity. The act is differentperhaps in urgency and accuracy, but not, I think, in kind. As this composer’sagent in performance, I do in this wise become him, in much the same man-ner as I become myself. And my experience of becoming him is groundedin and expressed through the medium of the tactile.

As for Boccherini’s role in this endeavor, I turn to Rousseau’s Dictionnairede musique, the entry on execution; this book was published in Paris in 1768,the year in which Boccherini visited that city. Rousseau is addressing the per-former of vocal music in terms that mandate a radical identification with thecomposer.

Begin then by a complete knowledge of the character of the air which you aregoing to render, of its connection with the sense of the words, the distinctionof its phrases, the accent which it has peculiar to itself, that which is supposedin the voice of the executant, the energy which the composer has given to thepoet, and those [energies] which in turn you also can give the composer. Thenrelax your organs to all the fire which their considerations may have inspiredyou with; do the same as you would, were you at the same time poet, composer,actor and singer.7


The recommended trajectory of attention is from an educated listeninginward, through a grasp of conventions, and toward a level of experienceneither conventional nor well understood, here introduced by that extra-ordinary phrase: “that which is supposed in the voice of the executant.” Whatcan this mean but the composer’s reliance on knowledge of, or assumptionsabout, the performer?—who can only make the acquaintance of this ghostlyversion of themselves “supposed” in the work through a careful evaluationof what it is like to execute it. This is, I would suggest, not primarily an au-ditory matter. Rather, it resembles the process I have been describing in thischapter: initially abstract, then visual, increasingly kinesthetic, evolving indetail and precision through the course of learning to play a piece. InRousseau’s native French, the primary meaning of sentir, to feel, was “to re-ceive some impression by means of the senses . . . It is never used for simpleperceptions of sight and hearing.”8 In the Italian that he championed as theideal, the musical, the most fully human language, sentire had a crucially dif-ferent usage: “A generic term with which one commonly expresses the suf-fering or receiving of . . . impressions . . . It is used for some senses in par-ticular, and first and most frequently for hearing.”9 Rousseau explicitlyinvokes sentire in performance. Through this, then, I come to know what thecomposer supposed me to be.

This is a vivid experience, full of poignance.10 As I practice sentire in Boc-cherini’s music, I become aware of a poignance of presence, the unmistak-able sensation of someone here—and not only here, but inhabiting my body.It is a commonplace in any kind of physical education that intensive in-volvement with certain bodily configurations will change one’s habits, changeone’s choices, change the very way things feel. Here, as I educate myself phys-ically about the highly characterized work of this composer, these changesoccur in the image, or rather the feel, of someone else. They delineate himwith an uncanny and entirely un-visual clarity, and it is this vivid experienceof being pierced and pervaded by Boccherini, I maintain, that constitutesthe reciprocity of our relationship.

And what of its subjectivity? Despite my carefully generic locutions aboutthe experiences of “the performer,” plainly that performer is myself; the de-tailed assessments of possible physical experience in playing this page of mu-sic derive directly from what I felt (both sentir and sentire) as I learned toplay it. It may appear that I have chosen only fingerings and bowings thatreinforce my interpretive points; that every such point I have made is thor-oughly arguable as to its generalizability, its usefulness; and that what appearsabove is not musicology, not history, but an exercise in narcissistic free as-sociation by a particularly verbose performer.

To take only one example, is it not possible to construe the opening ofthis sonata as a triumphal, rather than a retreating, trajectory? Doesn’t thedescent into the lowest register bring with it connotations of increasing mas-


culinity and thus authority, supported by the attendant increase in resonanceand volume from the instrument? And doesn’t the gradual progress of theperformer’s left hand from soprano to bass registers inflect this with an ad-ditional rigidity, involving as it does a motion upward, against gravity, whichactually requires more muscular contraction in the upper arm as the phrasecontinues?

The answer, of course, is yes. It’s a rather nice reading of the passage, infact. The prerogative I have taken of interpreting it in another light wouldgo unquestioned in performance. I propose performance and analysis as twofaces of interpretation, an act which is both art and science. If we accept this(and doing so is fundamental to the epistemology of a carnal musicology)the whole simplistic and ultimately rather boring notion of an authoritativereading simply auto-digests, leaving us with its compost: that complex lay-ering of interpretations that builds up around any work of art, and, cultur-ally speaking, constitutes the nourishment it must have in order to survive.

Eschewing authoritativeness, however, we must still have plausibility; andit comes readily enough if we focus more historically on the composer athand. Explorations of his music’s placement within its cultural milieuconfirm these executional readings, as well as suggesting further terms forand conceptions of the Boccherinian character, with its marked tendency togravitate toward ease and comfort—there is something positively gentle-manly about the way he refuses to sacrifice the performer’s ease to virtuosicexcitement—toward introversion, toward melancholy, and, in and throughall of these, toward an unorthodox kind of goal-less pleasure. Through themusic, one intuits an appealing and most interesting character. Much of thisbook will be given over to placing that character, and those intuitions, in his-torical context.

the second half of the movement

To return to the sonata: if the section we have considered so far suggests Boc-cherini’s character to us through its physical and experiential elements, howdoes its second half continue or build upon this process?

Special caution is required here. Twentieth-century ears, even highly ed-ucated ones, will have been raised on a diet of Viennese conventions in lateeighteenth-century music; a particular “template” of first-movement sonataform, laid out in elegant practice by Haydn and Mozart, theorized in lovingdetail by German critics of the first part of the nineteenth century, and taughtas a kind of gospel ever since, has a hold over modern expectations thatshould not be underestimated. One of its side effects has been a certain deaf-ness to earlier or non-Viennese models, resulting at worst in their interpre-tation as incomplete or clumsy attempts at the “real thing”—an inevitableresult of elevating a certain stylistic moment as classic. Boccherini is one of


a number of eighteenth-century composers whose instrumental music sug-gests other pathways to coherence. Late Viennese sonata form makes a sadlyProcrustean bed for the piece under consideration here, as it does for muchof his music.

It is safe enough, however, to locate our expectations within some broadlydefined parameters of the way sonatas behave. By this halfway point in themovement, our outlook as listeners (or as the kind of sublimated or deferredlisteners that readers of musicological description perforce become) will dif-fer from what it was at the outset. We no longer confront the piece with theimplicit question, “What do you have to show me?” since that “what,” in theform of the sonata’s theme or Main Idea, has been shown. In the process, ithas become more or less personified, so that we will be likely to regard it notas “what” but as “whom” (such personification is of course especially clear ina solo sonata). Our listening interest and engagement will henceforth centeraround the progress of this sonic being through certain vicissitudes, and ourexpectation will focus on an eventual return to or reconciliation with its ini-tial aspect. Thus our question has become, “What is going to happen to you?”

In contrast to the listener, however, the prospective performer, whose pri-mary concern is physical exigency, keeps asking the same question as at thebeginning: “What do you have to show me?” Thus the performer continuesto engage with the second half of a sonata in its expository capacity. Is suchexposition even susceptible of development? Do narrative structures of char-acterization and expectation operate on a kinesthetic level?

Some of the possible intersections between a listening and a performingengagement with a work play out in the opening bars of the second half ofthe sonata, which begins at 4:14 on CD track 1 (see example 2). This half ofthe piece begins with the opening theme in the dominant (upbeat to bar33), serving as a kind of rubric to announce the beginning of a new section.It is melodically familiar, and its very familiarity may encourage us to “takeit as read,” directing our attention toward what is to come: presumably a sec-tion of vicissitudes.

Executionally, meanwhile, the descending trajectory of the tune, its smallrepetitions and its pitch confirmations rounding off into quasi-martial dot-ted rhythms are likewise familiar; but to the hand, there is much more thatis familiar than that is new about the register in which they appear, for it isthe same register and the same position in which the preceding fourteen anda half bars have taken place—the thumb has been planted across the Bb–Ffifth ever since bar 183. Such familiarity is in danger of breeding contempt,or at least hand-strain: maintaining a fixed-thumb position for extended pe-riods is not particularly comfortable, and by this point not only attention butconsiderable desire is likely to be focused on getting somewhere else. Thelonged-for exit from the fixed-thumb position takes place gradually in thecourse of the phrase’s descent (a characteristic piece of Boccherinian tech-


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(continued)

nical courtesy, its stepwise motion downward allowing a gradual release ofthe accumulated hand tension). Thumb-position is finally abandoned alto-gether in the last half-beat of bar 33, just in time for the martial gestures ofbar 34.

At the end of bar 34, therefore, both listener and performer will be chieflyfocused on the question, “Where now?” But the desires motivating that ques-tion in the two parties are quite different, as bars 35 and 36 make clear. Tothe listener, the abrupt return to the opening idea in the tonic and in a fa-miliar register may constitute a disappointment: this is scarcely new! Or itmay be a puzzlement: is this some sort of premature recapitulation? But forthe performer, it is both relief and pleasure in that relief: how thoughtful ofthe composer to continue the phrase in a known place, in a known manner,giving a few seconds of additional time for the muscles of the left hand andarm to recover themselves! Thus for the performer the first novelty offered,the first quantity to be developed, is a new level and extent of comfort orcomfortingness. Novelties, developments—vicissitudes, in a word, as we en-counter them in this piece—will tend to be of this elusive type.

Meanwhile the ear’s eagerness for newness, intensified by having beenchecked, seems to be acknowledged in the omission of the double-stops, withtheir settling effect, at the end of the phrase (bar 362) and then, most promis-ingly, in the two-octave arpeggio that sweeps upward out of the closing ges-tures. Now we would appear to be going somewhere!—and so we do, gestu-rally speaking: straight off a cliff. Bar 37 is unprecedentedly static, anunexpected dominant of A b major, hanging over the third in the bass, sus-pended for an endless-seeming half a bar, resolving leisurely in the secondhalf, and marked piano (CD track 7).


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What has happened to the sense of momentum? The hand, especially theright hand, has been summarily arrested; a much slower bow speed than hith-erto required in the piece will be necessary to sustain this double-stop foran entire bar.11 Too much momentum in that rising arpeggio in bar 36, andit will be difficult to brake with the larger muscles that control a slow bow.The performer will be inclined to make the arpeggio decrescendo and per-haps slow down slightly, measure and collect itself, at precisely the momentwhen the listener is primed to desire the opposite.

These are indeed vicissitudes; one could call them development of a sort,for to the extent that it is accomplished through execution, it proceeds in aclear and characteristic direction. In this second half of the piece, it has takena scant five bars for the same scenario to play itself out twice: at precisely thatpart of the piece where an appetite for newness might be keenest, momen-tum is checked, boldness restrained, desire firmly redirected inward. As aconsequence of this, the listener receives the modulation to C minor thatcloses in bar 38, and the new tune that begins at 384, in a chastened spirit.Clearly, in the context of this sonata, we are not to expect some sort of pio-neering foray away from the introversions of the first half of the piece, butrather an intensification of them.

In the next six bars the left hand is given an enjoyable respite from fixedpositions of any kind, and allowed to maneuver around the neck of the in-strument in its best register, in much the same manner as in bars 113–182

(CD track 6) in the exposition. To the ear, there is no obvious thematic re-semblance between these passages, but to the hand the resemblance is verystrong; this type of writing is scarce enough in this piece to feel really dis-tinctive when it arrives, distinctive enough that we might speak of it as an ex-ecutionally constituted theme. Both passages generate pleasure through themoving-inward gestures involved in executing descending melodies and chro-maticisms: in the earlier passage this was most clearly shown in the shift tothe minor mode that began in bar 133, while in this episode trajectories ofdescent can be traced through bars 39–40, and again in 41–42. Harmoni-cally, too, a “moving inward,” or at least homeward, has been achieved by thetime we arrive at the cadence in bar 44, which makes a firm statement in theoriginal dominant, thereby sending a strong formal signal. We are primedto hear . . . something. Dare we expect a reprise?

Perhaps the question ought to be, a reprise of what? The passage that be-gins in bar 45 implies that the left thumb will be positioned on the same bar-fifth as the one used at the beginning of the piece, Eb–Bb above middle C (afact somewhat obscured by the use of “old tenor clef” at the beginning andsoprano clef here). The exigencies of finding this position, and Boccherini’searlier compositional gyrations around those exigencies, will be prettystrongly ensconced in the player’s muscle memory, especially if the first-halfrepeat has been taken. Kinesthetically, positionally, this does indeed feel very


much like a return; the “out-thereness” of this high position will have beensupplanted by a sensation of familiarity peculiar to this piece. In the execu-tional sense this position, merely as a position, could be said to constitute atheme, an interpretation supported by the fact that the left hand does notmove from it again until the final two chords of the movement: once this re-turn has been accomplished, it is decisively maintained. In this sense, bar 45is very much a reprise.

Meanwhile, the audible features of the passage mitigate the kinetic reprisein a way that is psychologically astute. Too unanimous a sense of return atthis point, in the context of a piece so characterized by myriad little pullings-in, repetitions, and confirmations, and things would shut down altogether;the sonata would die of premature closure. And so in bar 45 Boccherini desta-bilizes the harmonic return by the use of a G, and not an Eb, in the bassopart, while from the left hand’s “home position” issues a brand-new melody(CD track 8).

Its features are in themselves telling. The use of an unprecedented clef isnot casual: in any vocal score of the period, it would imply that a new char-acter is singing. And sing she does: this is the first and only time in the en-tire piece that the soprano register is used with no hint of retreat. Bars 45–46and 47–48 constitute a beautifully balanced antecedent-consequent pair, andbars 49–51 sail out unabashedly cantabile over a newly rich and flowing ac-companiment texture. The whole passage receives the only explicit expres-sive marking of the whole sonata: dolce. Affectually, it is not only sweet butserene.

In his book on Boccherini’s symphonies, Luigi Della Croce includes a shortsection entitled “Il ‘cielo’ di Boccherini” in which he offers a collection ofpassages reminiscent of this one, with the following commentary, itself of acuriously eighteenth-century flavor:

The suavity of Boccherini’s melodies . . . sometimes assumes the “open” formof a celestial message announced in the middle of a work, independent of thecontext and in any case not part of a preordained system of statement, re-sponse, and repetition such as is usual in the music of the Classical period.They are phrases at once elaborate and simple, every note, every rhythmic valuetouches the right chord, beginning a discourse that finds an immediate echoin the soul.12

The whole passage distinguishes delicately between the acts of returningand of retreating, for the hand’s enactment of return to the Eb–Bb bar-fifthbrings to the ear a brief, calm vision of new horizons. That it comes at ex-actly the point where, physically, the experience is of a cessation of newnesssuggests a subtle meaning: the sweetest, most Arcadian face of the new is lo-cated in what we know best.

But we know that earthly paradise is also inevitably unstable and tempo-


rary. In this case its disintegration comes precisely at the moment that theear detects a familiar melody, in bar 52: and what should return here, butthe most anxious, unstable gestures of the whole piece? Being thus recalledto “reality” is an uneasy sensation, both to hand and to ear: the minute syn-copations are not gratifying to execute, evading as they do the centering andsettling of the right hand involved in emphasizing a beat; nor does the earhave a happy time making melodic sense of the apparent whole-tone scaleproduced through chromatic alterations in the first half of bar 52.

Only in the second half of bar 54 do these nine bars of fruitful disparitybetween auditional expectation and executional sensation come to an end,when the piece’s second theme arrives in the proper and expected tonic, itsbagpipe-like, fixed-thumb stability making a fitting resolution to the insta-bility of the preceding section, as well as an earthier version of the Arcadianideal. From here to the end of the movement, repetitive flourishes and ac-cumulations of resonance proceed along exactly the same lines as in the firsthalf, from bars 183–32. Enough of exquisitely conflicted subtleties: this clos-ing material both sounds and feels facile, spinning forth and blithely repeatingcadential formulae, and being gratefully written to sound considerably moredifficult than it is.

carnality and compositional process

This sonata is but one of more than thirty such works which hold a specialpride of place in Boccherini’s oeuvre by virtue of their beauty, originality,and distinctive technical demands, and through their centrality to an un-derstanding of him as a composer. They are central in the sense that theyare probably mostly early works, and of a formative nature: Boccherini wasperforming in public by the age of fourteen, and his main stock in trade asa youthful concert artist seems to have been sonatas of his own composition.Certainly they are in a personal vein: one so entirely personal, in fact, thattheir composer did not include any of the pieces in the catalog of his ownworks that he made retroactive to 1760.13

For the purposes of a carnal musicology, Boccherini’s sonatas are centralbecause of the way they evoke the physiognomy of the personal, and throughthe evidence they offer of the influence of physical action and sensation uponartistic production. “An earlier process has been internalized into thefinished forms of the figures . . . His figures act out his creative process inthe shape they have taken; and this displaced performance of the self feedsan idiosyncratic vitality into his depictions.”14 This characterization of thepaintings of the elder Tiepolo (an elderly resident of Madrid when the youngmusician arrived there in 1768) seems uncommonly apt for Boccherini, evenas it begs important questions.

In the case of Boccherini’s music, that “performance of the self” displaces


itself directly onto or into the living performer, to whom there is suchpoignant experience available through attention to physical sensation. Vividit may be, but it is also momentary, leaving much about Boccherini’s processstill opaque, particularly as it pertains to the issue of the way one idea arisesfrom another, particularly the way continuity and contrast are achieved. Ifthe themes in this sonata movement are conceived through a process of phys-icalistic association and transmutation of gesture, how was that process ini-tiated and sustained? Did Boccherini just imagine playing, a kind of cellis-tic subvocalization informing his decisions—writing seated at a desk, the celloacross the room, his process one of a more or less deliberate reflection onand reprocessing of earlier cellistic forays? Or did he improvise, experiment,fool around on his cello while seated next to a writing desk, and when some-thing fine came to his fingers, quickly grasp a pen and write it down? Eachapproach would be likely to produce different results, especially in the wayone theme or gesture moves into another.15

There is evidence of both these kinds of composerly engagement with ex-ecution in this sonata. The first, a kind of macro-level, corresponds to theprocess of dispositio described by musical rhetoricians: the positioning andtranspositioning of themes into certain places in a movement, a conscious,desk-seated process of deliberation and design, with the design in this casestrongly suggested by certain conventions of first-movement form. The sec-ond level is of more interest to me; it is the level of inventio, a micro-level,having to do with why themes are the way they are, and how and why otherthemes might relate to them. Because this process was, for this composer, sokinesthetic, I will submit that it was also usually not conscious. Its re-creationinvolves fixing our imagination and our surmise upon what were at best elu-sive states, fugitive acts, and it is of its essence that its most characteristic man-ifestations occur in what are, formally speaking, subsidiary passages. Oneimagines, for instance, how a passage like bars 5–6 of this sonata might haverushed into the composer’s fingers (first upon the instrument, later trans-lating that touch through a quill pen) as the suitable, the comfortable thingto do in just such a place. The little repetitions, the lightly descending scales,sound and feel like those grateful turns of the hand that instrumentaliststypically do unthinkingly as part of warming up: habits, little gestural ingrain-ments. That this passage is not memorable melodically and never recurs (ex-cept in the taking of the repeat) is of its physicalistic essence: it consists ofnoodling. As such, it is entirely defined by its function, which is to settle thehand to the more public business of the piece.

The sonata’s opening bars are much more difficult to execute and, onesurmises, to generate: such gestures do not rush to the fingers for their com-fort or their obviousness, but would have to emerge from some kind of dia-logue between kinesthetic inventio and deliberate reflection upon the require-ments of distinctiveness and a clear character in a good opening theme. One


can postulate that, seated at the cello under this mandate, and respondinggesturally to the implicit need for boldness, Boccherini reached high andfar down the neck of the instrument; but once the act of playing began, un-dertook the physical enactment of a different mandate, that of sentiment—neither bold nor fond of difficulty, but consoling and compassionate—thusdrawing from that initial flamboyance an artful but unmistakable trajec-tory of retreat. One can further postulate from such a scenario a particularlyBoccherinian set of tensions among the sensible esthetic of mid-eighteenth-century music, the virtuoso’s natural impulse to show off, and conventionalexigencies of form, affect, and presentation.

There is similarity here between the carnal description of music that I amproposing, and an account of a dance or set of oratorical gestures. Themessometimes become pictures of themselves, their particular characters readthrough a series of visual associations with physical gesture, such as “movingthe arms in toward the torso connotes heartfeltness.” This invites our con-sideration of a third level of compositional process: besides unconsciouskinesthetic invention and conscious aural deliberation, the composer-per-former contends, more or less consciously, with the self-consciousness at-tendant upon the near inevitability of being seen. (Organists and offstagetrumpeters are the only soloists regularly exempt from this aspect of per-formance.) In terms of compositional process, the visual images created bythe physical gestures of playing will tend to be by-products, and not sources,of aural and kinesthetic impulses; but it is important to distinguish betweentheir functional secondariness in the creative process, and their very consid-erable problematization in latter-day understandings of instrumental mu-sic. Our disdain of theatricalization and visualization in instrumental per-formance runs deep, a legacy of the German idealism that was developingduring Boccherini’s own day, and of the powerful notion of absolute musicthat emerged from it; more even than physical sensation, the notion of vi-sual effect as intrinsic to the instrumental work is likely to seem excessive,even repellent. Yet the fact remains that all experienced performers developconsiderable awareness of what they look like in performance, even if onlyin order to restrain themselves from gestural excess and thereby simulatetransparency; and it is also a fact that the visible element of a musical ideawill function in varying degrees for the listener-observer, confirming or re-sisting that idea’s sonic presentation. In Boccherini’s case, it will generallytend to do the former, and will frequently do so with real artfulness; in thecase of, say, Beethoven, it will often do the latter, and for reasons no less art-ful. A performance- and body-oriented musicology is positively obliged toaccount for the visible, especially in the case of a composer like Boccherini,who as an Italian of his generation was only minimally under such restraintsas we have subsequently invented.

There is one place in the movement under discussion where the visual el-


ement is particularly striking and goes some distance toward explaining apassage that is simultaneously aurally static and physically awkward: this is inbars 233–262, and again in the commensurate place in the second half ofthe movement, bars 593–622 (CD track 9). The arpeggiation pattern set upin 233 (the ensuing shorthand notation implies that it should continuethroughout the passage) is not a simple one. Simple arpeggiation acrossstrings alternates upward and downward motion, allowing the right arm tomove fluidly and continuously away from and back toward the torso. But onthe even-numbered beats of this passage, the arpeggios move only from highto low, and omit the other direction, obliging the performer to make twodifferent, rapid grabbing or stabbing motions outward, in order to “catch”a downbow and then an upbow motion from the top down.16 This alterna-tion of the pattern is admittedly more interesting to the ear than would betwelve solid beats of sawing away, up and down, up and down, at a simpletonic-dominant arpeggiation; but it finds further justification in the fact thatit is really arresting visually. Twice on each second and fourth beat in thesepassages, the tip of the bow—if it is a bow such as Boccherini used, it has asharp, swan-like head—moves through the air like an épée. These alarminglyflashy gestures alert us to the arrival of the cadential material.

in conclusion

The act of describing and interpreting this aggregate of fleshly phenomenacalled a sonata is a complex one, perceptually, epistemologically, linguisti-cally. The shading over of sentir into sentire implied by Rousseau, its contin-uation into interactions with auditional expectation and visual spectacle,mean that I can never be sure whether the experience I am describing is pri-marily heard, or primarily felt, or primarily seen. (The question must andshould arise as to how far it is meaningful to subscribe to the notion of theirseparability in the first place).

It is certainly appropriate that such ambivalent language should be usedto propose the habits and features of this man with whom I have arrived at sopeculiar an intimacy, a man who cannot be here to confirm or deny my ac-curacy. Because of the huge privilege I enjoy in this situation—that of beingalive—I am obliged to assert here that at no time do I wish my descriptionsto imply that Boccherini’s creative choices were made for him by his habitsor his character, however powerful or ingrained these things might appear tohave been. I have been using this sonata movement for the traces it offers ofthe way choice may have been encountered, considered, and engaged.

It is not that his designs are in any strong sense medium-determined. He hadchosen and developed this inventive medium after years of experiment with


options. . . . Yet clearly in these inventions there is an element of pen-and-washthinking, of reflecting through the wrist. . . . Such forms are at least medium-reinforced.17

Of course there are differences. When he wrote his sonatas, Boccherini,unlike the Tiepolo described here, was a young man; in them one cannotrightly credit him with the mature artist’s “years of experiment” so much asa healthy and versatile faculty of experimental intuition. The following chap-ters will trace some of his processes in the years of experiment that were tocome, and the evolution and attenuation of his “cello-and-bow thinking” intoother compositional media.


Chapter 2

“As My Works Show Me to Be”Biographical

On 18 March 1799, at the age of fifty-six, Boccherini sat down to write a let-ter to his publisher Ignaz Pleyel, who had asked him to produce works thatwere simpler, briefer, and more accessible to the amateur. (We must infer thisfrom Boccherini’s reply, since Pleyel’s letters are lost.) Pleyel had been pub-lishing Boccherini’s music in Paris since 1796. By 1799 their relationship hadbecome strained; it seems that Pleyel took increasing numbers of professionalliberties, sending payments late or incomplete, failing to return manuscripts,and requesting changes in musical style to suit the market.1 This last pre-sumption was apparently the most difficult for Boccherini to stomach; it ex-asperated him out of his habitual retiring manner to write the following:

I have been a writer for nearly forty years, and I would not be Boccherini if Ihad written as you advise me to do; no more would you be Pleyel, the Pleyelthat you are. . . . Bear in mind that there is nothing worse than binding thehands of a poor author—that is, putting limits on his ideas and imagination.2

A little more than a year earlier, on 4 January 1798, also responding toPleyel—this time, we infer, to an accusation of “unfriendliness” and incon-siderateness—Boccherini had written,

All those who know me and who have dealings with me do me the honor ofjudging me a man of probity, honest, sensitive, sweet-natured and affection-ate, as my works of music show me to be. It would be truly strange if for Pleyelalone I had changed my nature. No, my friend, I am the same for all.3

These self-declarations are striking in the context of Boccherini’s corre-spondence, most of which is politely reserved in tone. They are further strik-ing in their absolute and uncompromising welding of selfhood to art. Whatwe are to understand from this is that Boccherini does not write music the

38

way he does because he likes to, or believes it to be the best way, or thinks itwill have the best effect; Boccherini is Boccherini because he writes the wayhe does. What he is, his works show him to be.

This chapter is an account of forces and events that corroborate Boc-cherini’s summing-up of his life into musical works. This turns out to be aroundabout affair, for we have no reliable, first-hand records of Boccherini’sperson and character. Yves Gérard, who has a more comprehensive and thor-ough knowledge of Boccherini sources than anyone else alive, laments “thefundamental difficulties inherent in the problem of providing documenta-tion and also compiling a biography of Boccherini,” characterizing them astwofold: locating original documents, and finding first-hand corroborationof what he calls a “solid mass of second-hand information.” (Later, he callsit an “infernal labyrinth.”)4 Of the occasional self-revelations in Boccherini’sletters, those quoted above are by far the most complete.

More surprisingly, first-hand accounts of Boccherini’s cello playing are al-most entirely lacking. While there are plentiful indications of its having beenheld in high esteem—“much applauded,”5 “an exquisite cellist, who en-chanted especially through his incomparable tone and expressive singingon his instrument,”6 “this most worthy proponent of the cello,”7 and the like—only one writer who heard Boccherini play thought to write down any de-tails of what he heard; and that writer, the Parisian memoirist Louis Petit deBachaumont (1690–1771), was terse and quite unflattering. In his Mémoiressecrets, in an entry for 2 April 1768, Bachaumont gave Boccherini’s friendand traveling companion the violinist Filippo Manfredi a mixed review andthen remarked, “M. Boccherini played the violoncello to similarly little ap-plause; his sounds seemed shrill to the ears, and his chords inharmonious.”8

Anything more illuminating on his playing we must more or less imagina-tively infer from Boccherini’s idiomatic writing for his own instrument.

In the matter of portraiture we have been rather more fortunate. In ad-dition to a number of engravings, there exist two fine, expressive oil paint-ings of Boccherini. The most famous of these now hangs in the NationalGallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia (see figure 2). Long attributedto Boccherini’s fellow Lucchese, Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), it is now moresafely described as “Italian school, eighteenth century,” and dated 1764–67.9

The long-limbed young man with his cello is about to begin an upbow stroke;his left hand is positioned somewhere in the alto register, getting ready toplay F above middle C with his second finger, by the look of things. Dressedand wigged very elegantly, he gazes out at the viewer with a poised and invit-ing expression.10

Another portrait in oil, dated 1764–68, has recently been authenticatedthrough the energetic efforts of Dr. Gerhard Christmann of Budenheim, Ger-many, its owner since 1991 (see figure 3). It is by Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–89), a Swiss portraitist in pastels and oils.11 The painter’s signature hovers

“as my works show me to be” 39

Figure 2. Italian school, eighteenth century, Portrait of Luigi Boccherini,c. 1764–67. Oil on canvas, 133.8 × 90.7 cm. Everard Studley Miller Bequest,1961. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

faintly over the subject’s right shoulder; and that subject has been identified,with some degree of certainty, as Luigi Boccherini.12 He appears in soberfinery; his gaze is assured; his face seems to be the same face as the one inthe first portrait, though slightly more filled out and possibly a little older.But his cello is nowhere in sight. In those long, tapering fingers he holds sev-eral sheets of music manuscript. The extroversion of the first portrait, its senseof being at the very point of making sound, the arched, expectant eyebrowsof the young man’s gaze, are replaced by something graver, less mobile, more


Figure 3. Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Luigi Boccherini, 1764–68. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm. Private collection of Dr. Gerhard Christmann,Budenheim, Germany. Photo copyright Dr. Gerhard Christmann.

self-contained. He holds in his hand not his tools but his works, or works inthe making, for these scraps of melody and accompaniment look likesketches (see example 3).

The differences between these two portraits suggest a crucial distinctionin the identity of this artist. Even as he produced music that beautifullydemonstrates the interdependence of performer and composer, the termsof this interdependence were being reconfigured in European musical cul-ture. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the printing of music andits distribution to a swelling middle-class amateur market was redefining whata composer was. Most importantly, he no longer had to appear in person asa performer to be perfectly familiar—a household guest, as it were—to avery large public indeed. This was only one arena of society in which ideasof performance (whether theatrical, musical, or social) and its proper rela-tionship to personal identity were shifting with worrying rapidity. How andwithin what parameters was the performance evidence of the person? Towhom was any given performance properly directed? Many circumstancesof Boccherini’s career, as well as details of his music, suggest that his rela-tion to questions of this kind was neither casual nor unexamined.

lucca

At the time of Boccherini’s birth there in February 1743, Lucca was, muchas it is today, a medium-sized, somewhat out-of-the-way city; its populationin the 1744 census was about twenty thousand.13 Civic documents from theeighteenth century attest to a well-developed and well-supported musical cul-ture.14 During the late summer and early autumn, the offerings were at theirrichest; this period marked the annual Festa di Santa Croce, in which ven-

42 “as my works show me to be”

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Example 3. Transcription of music sketches in Liotard’s Portrait of Luigi Boccherini.

eration of an impressively hoary wooden cross, said to date from Romantimes, provided the pretext for city-wide spectacles. Over the first part of thecentury it had become Luccan tradition to stage an opera seria by Metastasioat Lucca’s Teatro Pubblico during the festa. Leopoldo Boccherini, Luigi’s fa-ther, was a “contrabbassista soprannumerario,” a supplementary bass playerin the civic orchestra, and consequently he played in some of these pro-ductions. We can thereby suppose that the Boccherini children attendedthem, hearing mostly pasticcio operas that featured arias by some of the fore-most composers in the serious style (Hasse, Gluck, Traetta, and, in 1757,Galuppi, whose 1751 setting of L’Artaserse was given whole and without in-terpolations) performed by distinguished singers (Gaetano Guadagni in1757 and Caterina Gabrielli in 1758 and 1761, to name only the superstars),and seeing ballets by leading choreographers of the time (Antoine Pitrot in1757, Giuseppe Salomone in 1758, Vincent Saunier in 1761) performed byfine soloists (in 1755, Francesco Turchi, Pitrot himself, and his consort MimiFavier in 1757; and in 1761, Onorato Viganò). Boccherini would later en-counter a number of these luminaries in Vienna and Paris, while a few ofthem would appear later still in Madrid.

The choice of a bass stringed instrument for Luigi makes perfectly con-ventional sense as a passing down of a valuable skill from one generation tothe next. There seems to have been quite a bit more at stake, however.Leopoldo had seven children, of whom Luigi was the third, and he was en-ergetic about training all of them in the performing arts.15 Luigi and his el-der brother Giovanni Gastone (b. 1742) began singing, as soprano and con-tralto respectively, in the chorus for Lucca’s yearly festa in 1751.16 Maria Ester,the eldest (b. 1741), and Giovanni Gastone appeared once each, in 1755and 1761 respectively, as dancers in the corps de ballet at the Teatro Pubbli-co.17 Both the two eldest children and two of the youngest, Anna Matilda(b. 1744) and Riccarda (b. 1747), were later to appear as dancers duringthe family sojourns in Vienna.

Given the familial emphasis on dance, it is not unlikely that Luigi himselfreceived some early exposure to dance training.18 This cannot be proven,but it is a possibility worthy of mention in view of the hyper-conscious, highlyvisualized management of bodily gesture that such training ingrains—a con-sciousness that can be seen to inform, and that most usefully explains, manyaspects of his compositions. In any case, the training of all of the Boccherinibrood was pretty squarely focused on arts pertaining to the theater. In do-ing this, Leopoldo was directing his children toward the maximally presti-gious careers modeled for them every year by the singers and dancers im-ported into Lucca for its opera productions. He was thereby also encouraginghis children to leave Lucca, since such careers were built upon touring.

Luigi’s instrument would not ordinarily have lent itself to a career eithertheatrical or prestigious in any way. At mid-century, in all but the very largest


musical centers, the cello was at best inconsistently distinguishable from thebass in matters of size, construction, and role within ensembles; it was onlybeginning to be considered a virtuoso instrument in the hands of a few ex-traordinary players. Yet we see Luigi bidding fair to join their ranks from avery early age.19 There is a record from August 1756 of the thirteen-year-old’s performing a “Concerto di Violoncello” of his own composition for Gia-como Puccini, Lucca’s maestro di cappella, organist of the cathedral, and anancestor of the more famous bearer of that name.

On 4 August 1756 Mass and Vespers set to music at the monastery of SanDomenico, for the feast of that saint. . . . Luigi Boccherini [was paid] for avioloncello concerto which he played on the day[,] after the first psalm, andplayed again to oblige me at Mass and Vespers.20

In addition to other solo appearances in his native city, Luigi was clearlybeing introduced to the itinerant life of the virtuoso. He may have performedas far afield as Rome and Venice;21 in March 1761 he performed a cello con-certo “in an entirely new style” to enthusiastic applause between the two partsof an oratorio by Jommelli in Florence,22 and there is a further mention ofhis appearing in Modena in 1762.23 Meanwhile, in December 1757, Luigiand Leopoldo ( joined, at different times, by various of the other children)made the first of what would eventually be three forays over the Alps to workin Vienna. They returned to Lucca in September 1758, departing again forVienna in April 1760 and staying until March 1761; and they were there againfrom April 1763 to April of the following year.

vienna

The financial basis of these journeys was theatrical work: for the other chil-dren, dancing, and for Leopoldo and Luigi, playing in the orchestra of theGerman theater at the Kärntnertor. This latter was fairly humble employ-ment: “We can assume that they were . . . among the lowest paid musiciansin an orchestra that ranked second to the orchestra of the Burgtheater inprestige, and in remuneration.”24 However grueling and inglorious, this workmaintained father and son in Vienna, a place of enormous potential for any-one with ambitions in the performing arts. All the Boccherini children madegood use of that potential, especially the three eldest. Maria Ester was to be-come one of the Burgtheater’s handful of featured dancers, appearing reg-ularly in pas de quatre and pas de deux.25 She subsequently toured as a soloistto Bologna and Trieste. Giovanni Gastone did not pursue his initial careeras a dancer, but became a theatrical poet; he continued to live in Vienna,where he was to achieve considerable success. This can be seen in a strongendorsement of his talents by Raniero de’ Calzabigi;26 in Giovanni’s stint aschief poet and artistic director at the Burgtheater from 1769 to 1775; in his


eventual election to the Arcadian Academy in Rome; and in the fact that hislibretti were regularly used by the court composer Salieri, among others.27

As for Luigi, there are four extant Viennese records of solo performancesat the Academien, concerts of non-theatrical music given every Friday (andthree times a week during Lent) on the stage of the Burgtheater. The firstis in a letter written by the Luccan ambassador to Vienna, Giovan BattistaSardini, on 9 March 1758: “[Leopoldo’s] son who plays the bassetto in theconcerts at the court theater is much applauded.”28 Two other records datefrom April and October of 1763, and another from 1764.29 Such appear-ances before the Viennese public were a good source of both prestige andincome, and, not incidentally, of contact with some of the leading virtuosiof the day. At the time of Luigi’s visits to Vienna, some of these were fineplayers indeed: the violinists Pietro Nardini and Karl Ditters,30 the horn player(and friend of the Mozart family) Joseph Leutgeb, and—interestingly in theirpotential as role models—the Italian cellists Francischello (Francesco Al-borea) and Antonio Vallotti. The prima donna Caterina Gabrielli was regu-larly featured during these years, and the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, whopremièred the role of Gluck’s Orfeo, sang in the April 1763 Academien inwhich Boccherini also played, while Florian Gassmann “appeared as an ac-companist for the first time,” replacing the usual director of these events,Christoph von Gluck himself.

Boccherini may have used Vienna as a base for further touring as a soloist.In a letter of 1760 he boldly asserts that he “visited all the other electoralcourts of the Empire, where he received great compliments on his violon-cello playing.”31 This is a very impressive claim, for it takes Boccherini toPrague, Dresden, Hanover, Berlin, Munich, Mannheim, Mainz, Trier, andCologne by the age of eighteen; since there is absolutely no corroborationfor it (and since Boccherini states in the same sentence that from Lucca hehad been “twice called to Vienna,” rather a dressing-up of the circumstancesof the Vienna journeys) it must be treated with caution. Daniel Heartz hasexamined this claim meticulously;32 with him we may at least allow that by1760 Boccherini might have toured from Vienna as far as Munich, wherehe would have been heard by members of the Dresden and Cologne courtstaking refuge there from the Seven Years’ War.

But to return to Vienna proper: what sort of public were these famously,formidably sophisticated Viennese, before whom Boccherini had a notabledegree of success for one so young, and among whom his ideas of musicaleffectiveness were shaped during a formative period of his life? Viennese mu-sical culture in the 1750s and 1760s was very centralized; its “theatricalityand cosmopolitanism” was enacted almost entirely in the court theaters andin a handful of noble salons.33 This culture was in part a reflection of Im-perial preferences, in part evidence of resistance to them: the Empress MariaTheresa was given to strenuous interventions in her subjects’ taste. Evidence


places Luigi in the intense rehearsal and performance schedule of the Kärnt-nertortheater; troc places him also at his sister Maria Ester’s side, hearing heraccounts of the spectacles in which she took part, and, time permitting, ac-companying her there to listen and observe from the parterre noble of theBurgtheater.34 The Burgtheater alone offered an overwhelmingly eclecticmixture of the musical, the dramatic, and the terpsichorean: French classi-cal spoken drama; Parisian opéra-comique adapted by Gluck for a Vienneseaudience; the occasional Metastasian opera seria, used ceremonially to markImperial birthdays, important marriages, and the like; bold experiments indance by Starzer and Gluck, Hilverding and Angiolini (of which more be-low); and, after 1759, Italian comic opera presented by itinerant troupes.

The German theater in which Luigi worked operated in particular ten-sion with Imperial taste. Maria Theresa had “cracked down” on its offeringsin 1752, restricting the number of performances and censoring the Germantheater’s main repertorial fodder, the Stegreifkomödie, as it was called: im-promptu comedy. By the time of the Boccherinis’ employment there onlyfive years later, however, there was little sign of this attempt at elevating Vi-ennese taste through restriction. This vulgar, topical, semi-improvised genrehad roots as deep in popular affections as in the commedia dell’arte, and noamount of Imperial censorship was going to suppress it for long. The musicwas pasticcio drawn from Italian comic opera and German and Austrian folkmusic, and so most of the records of the Kärntnertor performances do notname a composer.35

It is not easy to assess the nature of the influence of the Stegreifkomödie onLuigi’s choices as a composer. With the exception of a few explicit evocationsof Spanish peasant music and his generic affection for drones and bagpipe-like effects (which I have linked to certain technical aspects of string playingin chapter 1), he rarely composed in any folk style, let alone in the bauerischmode used with such gusto by Haydn and other Viennese composers. But hewas certainly well versed in its dramatic strengths, which are the strengths ofthe comic style everywhere: rapid, deft characterization, ambiguity, potentialirony, self-referentiality, virtuoso physicality, and grotesquerie.

The most interesting and profound Viennese influence on Luigi’s artis-tic development, however, came through happy circumstance: the very yearsof his family’s involvement with the Imperial city’s dance culture were alsothose of this culture’s most famous reform, a reform that consolidated someradical shifts in the whole idea of embodied performance. If we judge bysheer number of representations, the ruling Viennese passion of the day wasfor ballets. Silly and serious, short and long, they accompanied performancesin every other genre, even spoken drama. (The records of Philipp Gumpen-huber specify that “two ballets are performed every day on which there is ashow in each of the two theaters.”)36 Speaking merely quantitatively, then,Luigi would have played, seen, and heard more dance music than anything


else, whether in the course of his duties at the German theater, or in the hy-pothetical position we have assigned him, observing rehearsals or perfor-mances from the parterre noble of the French theater.

During Luigi’s first visits to Vienna, virtually all ballets in both theaterswere choreographed by Franz Hilverding, with music composed by JosephStarzer. These men had begun developing the stately, abstracted French dansenoble toward some degree of narrative coherence and coordination of dra-matic action with musical events (necessitating, on the near side of the foot-lights, an unprecedented coordination of choreographer and composer).37

Hilverding and Starzer’s reforms were to some degree a practical responseto their audiences’ less-than-abstracted taste. This was a taste that ran towardthe improvised buffoonery of the German comedy, but in so doing ran alsotoward an embodied stage practice based upon everyday human gestures,and consolidated in “a true bond of affection between the actors and theiraudience.”38 The relationship sought by the audience, then, was one of a per-sonal identification with the dancers. In developing the pantomime ballet,as they called it, these Viennese reformers built upon this identification be-tween performer and audience, and transformed bodies from symbols toprotagonists: suffering, changing fellow selves whose embodiment, displayedupon the stage, evoked or provoked the bodies watching and breathing insympathy from under wigs and within corsets.

Hilverding and Starzer’s work was continued in the later 1750s and intothe 1760s by the dancer and choreographer Gasparo Angiolini and the com-poser Christoph von Gluck. Their first thoroughly coordinated collabora-tion, the full-length narrative ballet Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre, premièredin October 1761; Maria Ester Boccherini danced in it. Luigi was not in Vi-enna at the time, nor did he return there in time for any of the recorded re-peat performances that season. Yet it is certain that he knew this piece, be-cause he later based a movement of a symphony upon the striking musicwith which Gluck portrays Don Juan’s entry into Hell.39 Despite his absencefor the première of Don Juan, it would not have been difficult for Luigi tomake the work’s acquaintance: its immediate and lasting success meant thatscores circulated widely and that instrumental performances—of its demonicmusic in particular—continued to be very popular in Viennese venues bothpublic and private.40 One can readily imagine parodied or vulgarized ver-sions of it appearing on the boards of the Kärntnertortheater itself.

Nor was Luigi present in Vienna for the next and most famous première,that of Orfeo in October 1762; but in this case we may infer his knowledgeof what was arguably the most influential stage work of his generation fromthe fact that it was still in repertory when he arrived in Vienna the followingApril.

The embodied implications of pantomime ballet were to inform Luigi’ssubsequent development as an artist; his eventual realizations of some of


these implications are, I would argue, among his most important contribu-tions as a composer. As it happens, his works could be counted among themore direct realizations of the pantomime reform that we now possess, forfrom these red-letter years in the history of dance scarcely any choreogra-phy survives.41 In large part, reform choreographers seem to have relied onelaborate descriptions in which the gestural process of an entire ballet is laidout in prose.42 These descriptions testify to the very developed powers of phys-ical observation and gestural reading-in being cultivated at this time, ac-knowledged by Angiolini when he speaks of the necessity of choreographythat analyzed “the meaning of gestures, observed their connection and cor-respondence, recognized their value and harmony.”43

The mark of dance in general can be felt in the steady, confident peri-odicity of Boccherini’s music, its reliance on the foursquare phrase con-struction that is the dancer’s touchstone.44 The mark of the pantomime stylein particular can be felt in the telegraphic, visualistic expressiveness of manyof his melodies, harmonies, and timbres, which suggest that he precisely “ob-served [gestures’] connection and correspondence, recogniz[ing] theirvalue and harmony” just as Angiolini recommended. Thus Boccherini’s oc-casional abandonment of periodicity is never casual, but always in search ofheightened dramatic effect, implying a curtailed or extended physical ges-ture that could more vividly convey an emotional reality.

By 1764 the Boccherinis, father and son, had returned to Lucca, wherean official post as “eletto suonatore di violoncello” (for which Luigi had beenangling from as early as the 1760 letter quoted above) had materialized. Thatthe two continued to be energetic about regional touring is evident fromrecords of their participation in orchestral concerts in Pavia and Cremonain 1765 under the direction of Giovanni Battista Sammartini. For theseevents, organized to honor a visit by the Habsburg Archduke Leopold andhis wife, an orchestra of sixty musicians from all over northern Italy was as-sembled; among them, Luigi and his father were distinguished by havingcome the farthest, and by the honorary designation “Professori.”45

Leopoldo Boccherini died suddenly of a stroke in 1766. His son continuedto perform all over northern Italy. One of Luigi’s most interesting activitiesduring this period was attested to many years later by the violinist GiuseppeCambini, who tells us that he played and toured in a string quartet with Boc-cherini, Pietro Nardini, and Filippo Manfredi—the very first recorded in-stance of this configuration of instruments as a discrete ensemble with its ownspecial repertory and expressive powers. Boccherini’s own catalog tells us thathis first opus of string quartets, op. 2, was written in 1765; they seem to bearwitness to a process of composition that refers to the specific talents of hiscolleagues. Their virtuosity is acknowledged in a degree of independence andshowiness of all four parts that was very unusual for the time, and they attainat times a dramatic, quasi-Angiolinian vividness of expression.


paris

Throughout these years of his early manhood we can assume that Bocche-rini’s ambitions also turned toward Paris. Parisian influence had been strongindeed in Vienna since 1759, when the impresario Durazzo and the poetand playwright Favart established a “pipeline” through which Parisian bal-lets and opéras-comiques made their way directly to the Austrian capital. Inthe 1760s, moreover, Paris was probably the largest city in Europe,46 and apoint of intersection and cross-pollination for all the major musical styles ofthe day. From the viewpoint of an ambitious young cellist, it was the seat ofa veritable dynasty of peers, the greatest concentration of cello virtuosi inany one place at that time. Perhaps most importantly, however, in view of thesubsequent development of Boccherini’s career, Paris was the undisputedcapital of music publishing. In late 1767 Boccherini made the journey toParis via Genoa, traveling with his fellow Luccan, the violinist Filippo Man-fredi.47 He stayed there until the following April.

Boccherini had had the good fortune to be present in Vienna during oneof the most interesting passages in its illustrious musical history. The periodof his visit to Paris was scarcely less interesting. Although the famous Querelledes Bouffons had taken place more than a decade before Boccherini’s arrivalin Paris, its negotiations between social classes and political positions, stagedas a polarity between French and Italian style, remained emblematic of theParisian cultural climate: a climate filled with urgent inquiries into the rep-resentation of human nature, which were finding much of their best and clear-est expression through explicit reference to music-making. The Parisian scenewas far-flung and heterogenous, despite the inevitable royal efforts at controland centralization of musical culture.48 Both performance and discourseabout performance had broad reception, with musical events to suit the tasteof every social class, and an impressively high rate of literacy to accommodatethe attendant flood of discussion.49 For anyone engaged in performing mu-sic, this meant that what one did was never safely “just music,” but always po-tentially a statement, assertion, move, or counter-move in an unstable, pas-sionate arena of public discourse about human nature and human rights.

For “official” musical theater in Paris, the 1767–68 season of Boccherini’sarrival was one of especial precariousness. Since the previous year, the Aca-démie Royale de Musique—the redoubtable Opéra—had been performingin a temporary structure built upon the stage of the huge, box-shaped Salledes Machines in the Tuileries Palace. The company’s old home had burnedin 1763; the reconstructed theater was not to be finished until 1769.50 TheThéâtre-Italien was struggling with dwindling audiences and attendantfinancial problems, and was performing in the sixteenth-century theater ofthe Hôtel de Bourgogne, which was generally acknowledged to be an inad-equate and awkwardly located space.


Meanwhile the boulevard theaters, so named because they were being es-tablished along the outlying boulevards of the fast-growing city, consolidatedand brought indoors many of the grass-roots events of the ancient outdoorfair theaters. Their offerings were, to say the least, eclectic: commedia dell’arte,vernacular drama with interpolated singing, acrobatics, stunts, contortion-ists, animal acts, wicked satires of current offerings at the Opéra, and—thanksto continual efforts by the royal academies to restrict any infringements ontheir monopolies in opera and spoken theater—increasingly serious exper-iments in narrative ballet.

Even as the officially sanctioned theaters attempted to put limits on thepopular theaters’ burgeoning success, they imitated them. While skirtingfrank spectacularity, the offerings at the Théâtre-Italien in the mid-1760scertainly favored variety: a typical evening’s entertainment contained a comicplay in Italian, one or more of the various kinds of opéras-comiques, and, moreoften than not, an entertainment in the new pantomime style of dance aswell. These offerings changed nightly, maintaining a loose rotation of fiftyor more works over a period of several months. During the 1767–68 season,Luigi might have paid a franc for entry to the standing-room in the parterreand seen new works such as Les Moissonneurs of Favart and Duni, or L’Île son-nante of Collé and Monsigny, both of which were premièred during this pe-riod; or popular older works, some of them perhaps familiar to Boccherinifrom their appearances on the Vienna stage: Rose et Colas, On ne s’avise jamaisde tout, or Le Roi et le fermier.

While the Théâtre-Italien recycled its repertory energetically, nothingmuch more than ten years old appeared on its boards during the 1767–68season. But the Opéra was a different story, going well beyond the practi-cality of revivals into profound retentiveness. Very much older repertorieswere offered along with the new, in a strange Parisian mixture found nowhereelse in musical theater of the time. Not only Rameau’s but also Lully’s century-old tragédies-lyriques were still in repertory at the Opéra in the 1770s, albeitwith certain features (notably the dance music) updated.51 If Boccherini tookthe opportunity to join the parterre crowd during one of these perfor-mances, he would have heard and seen something quite different from any-thing in his previous, or indeed subsequent, experience. Tragédies-lyriqueswere deeply old-fashioned by 1768, and their critics spared no invective insaying exactly why.

The dragging character of the language, the inflexibility of our voices, the toneof lament which reigns perpetually in our opera, give nearly all the Frenchmonologues a slow tempo; and since the beat cannot be felt in the song, norin the bass, nor in the accompaniment, nothing is as dragging, as lax, as lan-guishing as these beautiful monologues which everyone admires while yawn-ing; they would be sad, and are boring; they would touch the heart, and onlyafflict the ears.52


That tragédie-lyrique remained in repertory was emblematic of Parisianconflations of the musical and the political: tragédie-lyrique had been inventedto glorify royalty, and it continued to represent it almost to the bitter end of1789. So polarized and polarizing are the critical terms here exemplified byRousseau, that their opposite number can be pretty precisely inferred by sim-ple reversal: Italian style (and by this he meant Italian comic style) was lively,rhythmic, touching, and expressive of the voices of real people—which is tosay, implicitly republican. Whether politically supercharged, as in Paris, ormore generically symbolic of social class, as in Vienna, the serious-comic po-larity was arguably the central axis of musical tastes in Europe in general atthis time. However, polemics about it tended to simplify or even bypass thesound of the music involved. Politically speaking, Rousseau could not affordto acknowledge Rameau’s peerless ear for dramatic excitement and instru-mental color, or his genius for matching musical motions to danced ones, agenius perhaps rivaled only by Gluck. Boccherini, on the other hand, wasunder no such deafening obligation, and was to draw on both serious andcomic traditions throughout his life.

Although lacking the politically volatile potential of staged narrative, instru-mental music was also immensely popular in Paris. The Concerts Spirituels,the main showcase for instrumentalists in the 1760s, existed as a counter-part to the Opéra, frequently using its soloists and orchestra, and functioningonly when the Opéra did not. At the time of Boccherini’s visit to Paris, theconcerts were notably dominated by cellists, especially Jean-Baptiste Janssonl’aîné (1742–1803) and the Duport brothers Jean-Pierre (1741–1818) andJean-Louis (1749–1819), all of whom played their own compositions. Therecords of programs given at the Concerts Spirituels and the reviews of thempublished in the endlessly garrulous Parisian press provide some sense ofthe hornet’s nest of cellistic competition into which Boccherini had plunged.Jansson, who had debuted at the Concerts Spirituels in 1755, was at the peakof his very considerable success there by the mid-1760s, playing solos of hisown composition six or seven times a season; a review from 1767 stated that“[he manages] the violoncello with such a degree of superiority that he al-ways surprises and charms at the same time.”53 Jean-Pierre Duport had de-buted at the Concerts Spirituels in 1761, and was held in great favor there-after; he played his own concerti and sonatas up to eleven times a season. Areview of 1762 lavishes praise upon him in terms that give a nice idea of whatthe Parisian public valued in an instrumental soloist: a speaking quality, ex-pressive immediacy, and ease: “M. Duport has performed new works uponthe violoncello every day, and has won new admiration. The instrument isno longer recognizable in his hands: it speaks, it expresses, it renders every-thing [at a level] beyond that charm one had believed reserved exclusivelyfor the violin.”54

In 1768 the younger Duport, Jean-Louis, made his debut at the Concerts


Spirituels at the age of eighteen: “A precise, brilliant, astonishing execution;a full, flexible, gratifying sound and a bold, sure style announce the great-est talent and a virtuoso who is of an age usually given over to study. He washeard with admiration by the connoisseurs.”55

Six weeks later Boccherini appeared before these same Parisian connois-seurs, playing one of his own sonatas, and was mentioned (with lamentablelack of descriptive detail) in the Mercure de France: “Boccherini, already knownthrough his trios and quartets, which are very effective, performed in a mas-terly fashion, upon the violoncello, a sonata of his own composition.”56

Although we have only this one published review, and Bachaumont’s un-helpful mention of the same occasion (see above), Luigi’s playing must havefound other Parisian audiences than those of the Concerts Spirituels. Thiscould have happened at one of the city’s redoubtable salons, many of whichhad long featured music on a regular basis; preeminent during this period,following the death of La Pouplinière in 1762 and the dissolution of his fa-mous orchestra, was the salon of the Prince de Conti, which flourished fromabout 1761 at the Hôtel du Temple. The prince maintained an excellent or-chestra, “one of the best and most complete that one could see.”57 It had alarge wind section, including such up-to-the-minute instruments as clarinets,and featured many current luminaries, both instrumental and vocal, as solo-ists (it was this salon that the ten-year-old Mozart visited in 1766). Conti’sroster of employees included Jansson, from 1764, and the elder Duport, from1766. The Duc d’Orléans also kept an orchestra on retainer. At the very least,Boccherini probably attended events at such establishments, where musicianswere often treated as guests rather than servants. We can only speculate asto whether he ever performed at them.

If the account of Boccherini’s biographer Picquot is correct, Boccheriniis especially likely to have appeared at the salon of the Baron de Bagge, follow-ing an introduction by the publisher La Chevardière.58 The baron did notmaintain an orchestra, but preferred to present musicians in a more inti-mate setting: “Every Friday during the winter Baage [sic] . . . holds at hishouse one of the finest private concerts in this capital. It gives him pleasureto admit all the foreign and amateur virtuosos who wish to debut in this cap-ital and to make themselves known by their talents.”59

François-Joseph Gossec, the violinists Gaviniés and Capron, both Duports,and the publishers Vénier and La Chevardière were regulars at Bagge’s sa-lon from about 1760. Boccherini may possibly have resided with him dur-ing his Parisian sojourn.60 The baron seems to have been something of a char-acter. He was evidently fond of taking part in his own concerts as a violinist,where his skills left something to be desired. He is also remembered, nonetoo kindly, by Fétis and others for his peccadillo of paying virtuosi to “takelessons” with him, and then claiming them as his students.61 Boccherini didnot dedicate any works to Bagge, but if he stayed there it seems fair to as-


sume that he would have performed for (and thus with) this eccentric butevidently generous amateur.

One cello concerto by Boccherini, G. 573, presents an interesting cir-cumstantial case for a meeting between Boccherini and the elder Duport atsome Parisian salon, perhaps that of Bagge. In this C-major concerto, theslow movement (Largo cantabile) is, very oddly indeed, in D major. The or-chestration of the movement is also odd: except for a short tutti introduc-tion and postlude, it is unaccompanied—or rather, the accompaniment tothe solo part is entirely self-provided: the cello double-stops its own bass (seeexample 4a). In his violoncello treatise of 1813 (published in 1820), Essai surle doigté du violoncelle, et sur la conduite de l’archet, Duport the younger includestwo études by his elder brother. One of these, the eighth in the book, is apiece in D major which dispenses with the other études’ second-cello ac-companiment in favor of a self-provided one (see example 4b).

While these two pieces are but vaguely similar to the ear, executionallythey are strikingly so: this is an unusual and difficult technique, in which thehorizontally executed cantilena of the melody must be maintained unruffleddespite the constant vertical dipping motions involved in executing the ac-companiment.62 It is tempting to suppose that this similarity represents a lit-tle compositional badinage between Boccherini and the elder Duport.

Similarly circumstantial evidence exists for Boccherini’s presence in 1768at the household of another saloniste, Madame Brillon de Jouy, who residedin Passy, then on the outskirts of Paris. According to his catalog, Boccheriniwrote six keyboard-and-violin sonatas for her, published the following yearby Vénier as Sei sonate di cembalo e violino, dedicate a Madama Brillon de Jouy, daLuigi Boccherini di Lucca.63 In June 1770, Charles Burney also visited MadameBrillon, and left us a report of her person and her musical tastes.

Madame Brillon . . . played a great deal and I found that she had not acquiredher reputation in music without meriting it. She plays with great ease, taste,and feeling—is an excellent sightswoman, of which I was convinced by her ex-ecuting some of my own music. She likewise composes and she was so oblig-ing as to play several of her own pieces on the harpsichord and piano forte ac-companied with the violin by M. Pagin.64

Parisian salon environments at this time overflowed with a cultural cur-rent which I believe Boccherini to have imbibed: sensibilité, or in AustenianEnglish, sensibility—the sentimental style, the deliberate cultivation of phys-ical and emotional hyper-receptivity to tender, intimate, tearful sensation.As epitomized in the novels of Samuel Richardson, sensibility had quiveredat the heart of the English middle classes for more than a generation; it foundwide Continental reception through translations of Richardson’s novels, andit vibrated in sympathy with many other areas of mid-century art andthought, including pantomime ballet and opéra-comique. In fact, Boccherini


could scarcely have avoided some troc with what was, by the 1760s, a perva-sive element in European culture; but in Parisian salons he would have en-countered its social manifestations at full strength. Parisian audiences reallydid weep at concerts and operas; we know this because they were proud ofthe fact, and wrote about it in their diaries and correspondence. These readytears were the badge of a sensitivity that was treasured as evidence of a finelytuned organism, a particularly excellent moral fiber. Such exquisite suscep-tibilities found their truest register in the intimate settings of salons, and inthe intimate nature of works written for only a few performers.

While Boccherini’s reception as a virtuoso performer in Paris seems, from


B ## 42solo

Largo cantabile

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Example 4b. Jean-Pierre Duport, Étude in D Major, opening bars.

the scanty available evidence, to have been rather mixed, his compositionsfor small ensemble were warmly received there from the very beginning. Aseven his sole published performance review testifies, he was “already knownthrough his trios and quartets, which are very effective.” It is telling that Boc-cherini had evidently taken careful steps to ensure his Parisian reception asa composer, sending his compositions to publishers well before making thejourney himself. In April 1767, some months before his arrival in Paris, theMercure de France had announced Vénier’s publication of an opus of six stringquartets by “Bouqueriny”;65 in the same year, a set of six string trios was pub-lished by Bailleux (in July)66 and Grangé brought out a Sinfonia in D.67 Thisastute entry into the publishing world resulted in Boccherini’s first really re-sounding, and certainly his most lasting, professional success. From 1768through the first third of the nineteenth century, a generation after his death,Boccherini was a steady presence in the Parisian publishing world, the pe-riod’s largest and most competitive music-publishing market. The table inthe appendix lists only first editions of his music, the great majority of whichwere brought out in Paris. If we add to this list, as Gérard has done, the mul-tiple reprintings of some works, works that were attributed to but probablynot written by him, and arrangements, both pirated and legitimate—all ofthese being testimonies, in their way, to his popularity—this authorial pres-ence on the Parisian scene becomes a substantial one.

spain

For all the productivity and popularity to which they attest, such successesin publishing did not constitute a secure livelihood. After six months in Paris,steady patronage was no more forthcoming for Boccherini than it was forMozart when on a similar quest ten years later. Boccherini and his travelingcompanion Manfredi evidently had plans to continue from Paris on to Lon-don, where Italian stringed-instrument virtuosi had enjoyed especial popu-larity for several generations.68 But other prospects seem to have intervened,and the young virtuosi parted company for a while. Boccherini traveled toMadrid, while Manfredi remained in Paris, joining Boccherini somewhatlater. In the end neither one of them went to London. Spain was a ratherless obvious destination than London careerwise, and we can only guess atthe specific enticements. Numerous biographers, beginning with Picquot,have suggested that the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Joaquín Pignatelli deAragón y Moncalvo, Conde de Fuentes, provided Boccherini and Manfrediwith letters of recommendation to the court at Madrid. Since these letterscannot be found, Tortella has presented an alternative theory.

In 1768 the expatriate Italian impresario and music publisher LuigiMarescalchi and a partner, Francisco Creus, had secured a contract with theSpanish royal house to present Italian opera at the Sitios Reales, the “royal


sites”—rural palaces situated within a day or two’s ride of Madrid, amongwhich the Spanish royal entourage circulated during much of the year.69 Thecompany so formed was christened the Compañía de Ópera Italiana de losSitios Reales, and it was responsible for two kinds of production: French spo-ken theater (both tragedies and comedies), and Italian “singing and dance.”We may suppose Boccherini was invited to participate in this company; in


Figure 4. Eighteenth-century map of Castilla y León. Private collection of the author. Photo copyright UCLA Photo Services.

any case, his name appears as composer of an insertion aria in the librettoprinted for their performances of Gian Francesco Majo’s L’Almería at Aran-juez in the spring of 1768.70 We may also suppose that he undertook thiswork in Spain in order to support himself while pursuing a more personalgoal. Among the singers for Marescalchi’s company was an Italian sopranonamed Clementina Pelliccia. Boccherini was to marry a Clementina Pelichain San Ildefonso, another of the Sitios Reales, in August 1769.71

In the spring of 1770, after about two years of membership in Mare-scalchi’s company (doubtless supplemented by free-lancing), Boccherini wasofficially hired by the king’s brother, the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, as “vir-tuoso da cámara y compositor de música.”72 Up to this point Boccherini hadnegotiated a career as international virtuoso/composer with reasonable suc-cess. After it he became, as the titles on his publications proudly attest, a mem-ber of the court of the Infante. This was no casual employment, but a prin-cipal object of eighteenth-century musicianly ambition. It made one aperson of substance and it cemented one’s prospects; one entered such ser-vice with the expectation of remaining there for life.73

While this exchange of freedom for security had been Boccherini’s objectthroughout, a less foreseeable part of the bargain was the degree of his sub-sequent isolation. Within a few years of his appointment there unfolded acomplex set of machinations on the part of the king to exclude his brother’schildren from succession to the throne. As a result Don Luis was essentiallybanished, his household forbidden to reside in or near Madrid. There fol-lowed more than a year of wandering in search of a suitable new home, and,as befitted royalty, Luis’s entire court wandered with him, Boccherini andhis family included; there were stays in Talavera, Torrijos, Velada, and Cadal-so de los Vidrios between 1776 and 1777, when Luis decided to settle in Are-nas de San Pedro on the Rio Tiétar, about eighty miles west of Toledo (seefigure 4).74 Luis’s new palace there was not habitable until 1783, and its con-struction was never completed.

Most of these towns were too small to figure on period maps, and remainfairly remote to this day. A measure of their cultural isolation in the eigh-teenth century can be found in the attempted exchange of letters betweenBoccherini and Joseph Haydn, which is reproduced at the beginning of chap-ter 7. Haydn laments, “No one here can tell me where this place Arenas is”—to him, as to the Austrian postal service, it was even further off the beatentrack of European musical culture than Eszterháza.

Perhaps to an even greater extent than most large countries, eighteenth-century “Spain” was a nominal assemblage of wildly diverse cultures andpeoples.75 Its music-making was characterized by a series of sharp dislocationsand parallelisms, along lines of social class, national identity, economic exi-gency, and religious custom.76 The Borbón royalty were French, and Frenchinfluence was to be felt in every activity of the Spanish upper classes: visual


art, architecture, dance, couture, manners, and morals. Yet, largely throughthe influence of the music-loving Queen Isabella Farnese (reigned alongsideFelipe V, 1714–46), the favored music of the royal house was Italian. It is char-acteristic of this period that the queens, rather more than their Borbón hus-bands, were the real music-lovers and to a great extent the arbiters of royalmusical taste; thus the queen of Fernando VI, María Bárbara de Braganza (r.1746–1758), is justly famous for her patronage of Domenico Scarlatti.

Spanish continuities with Boccherini’s prior musical experiences are many;the most obvious is in opera seria. Isabella Farnese had brought that most fa-mous of all Italian singers, Carlo Broschi, detto Farinelli, to Spain in 1737. Itwas her son Fernando (r. 1746–59) and even more significantly his musicalqueen María Bárbara who encouraged Farinelli to develop an opera com-pany. The creative and financial license given to Farinelli by Fernando wasalmost infinite, and Farinelli’s efforts on behalf of serious opera were so sub-stantial that by the end of his twenty-two-year residence in Spain he had suc-ceeded in making Madrid, from scratch, one of the most important of allvenues for this quintessentially Italian art.77

Through his participation in the Compañía de los Sitios Reales Bocche-rini had been, for the first time in his life, directly involved in playing andcomposing opera seria. His insertion aria for Majo’s L’Almería is unfortunatelylost. There exists a concert aria (aria accademica) in Bb Major, G. 557, to a textfrom Metastasio’s Artaserse, “Se d’un amor tiranno,” which I would proposeas an another likely composition from this period.78 Its delicious interactionof obbligato cello with soprano voice suggests a musical portrait of Bocche-rini’s affectionate yet professional relationship with Clementina Pelliccia.

During the period of Luigi’s association with the Compañía the grouppresented not only serious operas but also comic and larmoyant works byPiccinni, Galuppi, and others, while the unavoidable Serva padrona of Per-golesi had been in repertory since the days of Farinelli.79 Spanish royal andnoble audiences were thus quite well versed in Italian theatrical music of allkinds. That this eclecticism extended to the middle classes is suggested in aretrospective memoir of 1785.

With the taste to hear [from] such famous singers the best arias from Italy, therespread through Madrid the new taste for their music, and [this] decided en-thusiasm instantly ran through all the provincial capitals. There was scarcely ayouth, a young woman, an office boy who did not know and sing from mem-ory “Misero pargoletto,” “Padre perdona,” “Son Regina,” “Se tutti i mali miei,”etc. So this taste (by now the taste of fashion) ran through the drawing roomsat every private or domestic function.80

This musical currency with the rest of Europe was testimony to the speedwith which the Borbones, especially Carlos III (r. 1759–88) and his minis-ters, had brought Spain into the latest phases of Enlightenment. Yet one


does not have to look far to come up hard against evidence of attitudes thatwere quite distinct from the general European moment. For example, tothe very end of the century there were relatively few printing presses inMadrid, and the only ones that really thrived were those that operated withroyal support.81 (None of these printed music until the mid-1770s, and eventhen printing was fitful.)82 Print culture, lifeblood of Enlightenment andsubversion alike, was much inhibited under such conditions. Another strik-ing example of a deep conservatism in the midst of modernization can beseen in a decree issued by Carlos III shortly before his death, according towhich all the paintings in the royal collection which featured nudes were tobe summarily destroyed. (They included numerous canvasses by Titian andRubens. Carlos IV fortunately disobeyed the order.)83 The Catholic Churchhad retained a greater presence and authority in Spain than in other partsof Europe, largely through the Santo Oficio, the infamous Inquisition.Throughout the eighteenth century, the Inquisition continued to proscribemany central works of Enlightenment thought; indeed, with the advent ofthe French Revolution, Inquisitional censorship assumed a central respon-sibility in royal efforts to prevent the Spanish public from being “infected”by republican sentiment.84

Thus did Church and State support one another in maintaining an ex-tremely conservative intellectual climate. Diderot’s Encyclopédie was put onthe Index of prohibited books in 1759; all of Rousseau’s works were similarlycensored in 1764.85 Extremists like La Mettrie were “all but unknown southof the Pyrenees.”86 The ancient Spanish university system taught little naturalscience or medicine beyond the systems elaborated by Aristotle, and little the-ology beyond Thomas Aquinas. There were nevertheless individuals and afew cultural institutions that worked around this repressive climate toward areal “Ilustración,” a uniquely Spanish Enlightenment. Chief among them wasthe monk Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo y Montenegro (1676–1764), spokesmanpor excelencia of Spanish critical thinking. In his monumental Theatro críticouniversal and the later Cartas eruditas, as well as in a host of shorter works,Padre Feijóo treated of literature, medicine, natural philosophy, law, physics,and, not incidentally, music. He drew upon the latest work available from therest of Europe but maintained, as he himself attested, a habitual independent-mindedness and skepticism, an insistence on figuring out for himself howand why things worked: “I, citizen of the Republic of Letters, neither a slaveof Aristotle nor an ally of his enemies, will always listen to that which reasonand experience dictate to me, in preference to all private authority.”87

Feijóo was treasured by his own countrymen for these very qualities. Hisworks enjoyed multiple reprintings after his death, so that in the textual sensehe is very much a contemporary of Boccherini. It is typical of the complex-ities of Spanish culture at this time that the taking of religious orders wasone of the routes by which educated Spaniards could get information about


the Enlightenment. As a monk, Feijóo had legitimate access to Indexed worksand was thus able to provide a taste of their intellectual wares to his readers,though sometimes rather heavily salted with disapproval. In another remark-able example of the fallibility of repressive systems, the 1780s saw consider-able Spanish circulation and paraphrasing of the works of the Abbé ÉtienneBonnot de Condillac (1714–80), a philosophe who approached materialismin great detail through the sensations and actions of the human body, andwhose theories inform several sections of this book.88

As part of the Ilustración, Madrid was literally being remade before theeyes of Boccherini’s generation into a city on the model of Vienna and Paris,“a delightful place of amusement which could be frequented in all seasonswith safety and pleasure.”89 Yet the differences between Madrid and its mod-els remained profound. Baron Jean-François Bourgoing (1748–1811), “Min-ister Plenipotentiary from France to the court of Madrid,” remarked onMadrid’s grand central promenade, the Prado, as follows:

In [place of] that motley variety of apparel and head-dresses, which in otherpublic places of Europe, agreeably diversify the scene, you only behold on footat the Prado, women dressed in an uniform style, muffled up in long veils, blackor white, which conceal part of their faces; and men, for the most part, wrappedup in huge cloaks of a dark colour; insomuch that the Prado, however beauti-ful it may be, seems, in a peculiar sense, to be the parade of Castilian gravity.This is most especially conspicuous every evening; when the first solemn soundsof the angelus invade the ears of the pedestrians, they instantly uncover theirheads, make a sudden stop, as if arrested by some invisible hand, abruptly break-ing off the most tender discourse, and the most serious discussions, in orderto devote a few minutes to prayer.90

As Bourgoing’s account makes clear, even in the lives of those privilegedand Parisianized Spaniards for whom Boccherini worked, galanterie was pen-etrated with a solemn severity, a “gravity,” and Enlightenment proceeded inan uneasy dialogue with it. Yet, while the currents of Enlightenment thoughtflowed rather differently in Spain than elsewhere, this scarcely means thatthey did not flow at all; even outright denial is a powerful form of currency.In addition, these conditions make it the more interesting to speculate onthe function of instrumental music in Spanish culture, its representationalfluidity making it an effective carrier of certain Enlightenment ideas, flyinghandily beneath the Inquisitional radar.

Music was not subject to proscription as long as it avoided objectionabletexts or theatrical associations: the instrumental chamber music in which Boc-cherini specialized was never in any danger. But it was subject to very diver-gent estimations. The playwright Ramón de la Cruz (1731–94), whosesainetes (short vernacular comedies) offer a wonderfully penetrating glimpse


into Madrilenian customs in the last quarter of the century, makes it clearthat not everyone in Madrid shared the craze for imported music. “Thereare those who fall asleep when an Italian aria is sung, and are lifted fromtheir seats on hearing a seguidilla.”91 And in the Diario de Madrid for 5 Sep-tember 1795 there appeared an interesting discourse on musical style.

Pray, what effect can gabbling Italian music produce? Only the very fleetingpleasure of hearing a combination of infinite sounds which never reach theheart. . . . I cannot bear to think that this Italian music has perverted our sim-ple, graceful, expressive national melodies, which were true to our characterand touched us so deeply, amused us, caught at the ear and the heart, and,once heard, could never be forgotten. . . . Thanks are due to all who still pre-serve some of the charm of Spanish music in their boleros, tiranas, and otherdances. . . . If it were not for these, even our cooks would by now be singingItalian arias, and our olla podrida [a traditional stew with several different kindsof meat] would be seeking macaroni and spaghetti . . . instead of mutton, ham,and chicken.92

Spanish style is connected by Cruz to an irresistible desire to move; andby the anonymous author of the Diario article to the heart, to indelible mem-ory, to dance, and, finally, to the difference between processed foodstuffsand flesh. The apposition is of a disembodied artificiality (imported culture)with a physicalized genuineness (indigenous culture), and it ran throughmany levels of Spanish society at this time. This tension and intrication be-tween the imported and the indigenous is the most important characteris-tic of art and music, indeed of life in general, in this period in Spain.

Boccherini’s op. 9, his third group of six string quartets, was written in1770 and published in Paris in 1772 by Vénier. The opus bears the uniquededication “to the Gentlemen Music-lovers of Madrid” (“Alli Sig. Dilettantidi Madrid”).93 The number of noblemen in Madrid was considerable in1770;94 like their counterparts in the other big cities of Europe, they met inprivate gatherings and disported themselves with chamber music, with con-versation, and with food. These salons, or tertulias, as they were called inMadrid, housed yet further cultural cross-currents. The most aggressivelyFrancophile, or afrancesado, establishments had frequent personal connec-tions with Parisian, English, and Viennese circles, and, consequently, goodaccess to proscribed literature, officially discouraged ideas, and foreign artand music that were otherwise difficult to come by. A characteristic exam-ple of this is the contract with Joseph Haydn negotiated by María Josefa, theCondesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna, in 1783. Through her representa-tive in Vienna the Condesa-Duquesa attempted to get Haydn to send noth-ing less than “all his musical compositions,” at a rate of twelve per year. Thisrate proved impossible to maintain, and the contract eventually devolved into


a piecemeal arrangement; but the net effect was that by 1786, when Boc-cherini was hired as music director there, the Benavente-Osuna establish-ment owned a substantial number of chamber and orchestral works by Haydnthat were to be found nowhere else in Madrid.95

The poet, intellectual, statesman, and amateur musician Tomás de Iriartecomposed a verse description of a musical evening which gives some idea ofafrancesado musical taste and practices.

There are nights when one can find congregatedtwenty or maybe more aficionadoswho play their part all at once.My contribution is neither much nor very littleand thus among them I take a decent place,for when I don’t play the violin, I play viola. . . .We sample an abundant collectionof modern German music,which, as far as symphonies go, consistentlytakes the prize from the Italian.If someone dedicates himself to counterpointand brings in any of his work,the amateur orchestratries, examines, and assesses it.Thus with kindness the participantshear my own sinfonias concertantes.96

Iriarte was also a regular at the Benavente tertulias, which boasted a pro-fessional rather than amateur orchestra. To judge by Iriarte’s report, that or-chestra’s audience, the “signori dilettanti di Madrid” for whom Boccherinicomposed, were real connoisseurs with considerable, hands-on experienceof the music they heard.

At the same time, and not infrequently coming from the same circles, as-sertions of a self-consciously Spanish musical taste were to be found. As earlyas 1742 the influential Catalan composer and theorist Francisco Valls hadcomplained of foreign musical styles as “invaders,” the Italian solely con-cerned with flattering the senses, the French with the intellect; the Spanish,by uniting the two realms, proved itself “more scientific and more solid.”97

Within a generation this complaint had consolidated itself into an artisticposition. Self-conscious “Spanishness” appeared perhaps most characteris-tically in the tonadilla escénica, a short comic genre, generally sung through-out. The tonadilla had its heyday in Madrid during the second half of theeighteenth century. The use of local color and casts of characters recogniz-able from daily life, the satirical tone, and the free mixture of spoken dia-logue, simple recitative, and through-composition in tonadillas and in zar-zuelas suggest that Spanish composers had made a kind of stylistic end-run


around the conservatism of the imported opera seria, and by the 1760s wereproducing dramatic music that was fully up to the European moment: thatmoment being, above all, the comic and sentimental styles.

Afrancesismo had a counterpoint which took a singular form, one whichfurther distinguishes this period of Spanish cultural history. This is majismo,the deliberate assumption of Spanish working-class garb and manners. Ma-jismo was a deliberate response to the perceived artificiality of the upper-classafrancesados as epitomized in the petimetre (petit-maître), a bourgeois dandy,the opposite number of the majo and a frequent object of derision and dis-dain. Goya’s early cartoons for tapestries in the various Sitios Reales show usthe details of the majo costume while offering a subtle interpretation of itsgestural accompaniments (see figure 5). Goya’s majos and majas have shedtheir “huge cloaks of a dark colour” in order to play outdoor games, dance,


Figure 5. Francisco de Goya, Baile a orillas del rio Manzanares, 1777. Oil on canvas.Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo copyright Museo del Prado, Madrid.

or enjoy the sunshine. They share a “naturalness” which manifests as sub-stance, fleshliness. These people have weight, visibly distributed and con-trolled through their musculature, informing the trajectory and extent oftheir gestures, whether these be stilt-walking or the subtle adjustments of pos-ture involved in balancing a jug of water on the head. One sees none of thedrooping signifiers of melancholy in their poses; they bend only to accom-modate gravity. Although Goya’s models are nameless, they are often a bittoo real, their faces and gestures rather too vividly expressive, for their iconicfunction as pastoral decoration on the walls of palaces.

Any simplistic class-opposition of majismo and afrancesismo was much com-plicated during the later part of the century, when the costumes of majoand maja were taken up by the upper classes to signify repudiation of Frenchculture—in effect an early kind of sartorial nationalism. Such complex websof opposition and alliance played out not only in dress and gesture, but indance as well. Felipe V had introduced French courtly dance to Spain, grand-son of Louis XIV that he was. As in France, this art spread from theaters toprivate establishments, from staged representations to an embodied social cur-rency, from royalty to nobility and the merchant classes. On the French model,courtly dance became the pretext for formal gatherings, and the chief lan-guage of social hierarchy and gender within them. Yet all the while there wereother gatherings, majo gatherings, which featured the indigenous dances. In-creasingly as the century progressed, those gatherings were imitated by thewealthy, and even encouraged by official culture, so that one might find a fan-dango danced in the state-sponsored balls of the 1760s, or a seguidillas bolerasas the pièce de résistance at a nobleman’s party in the 1780s.

Composing successfully for this complex and ambivalent Spanish musi-cal landscape meant being fluent in a great range of styles: not only majismoand afrancesismo, but French (as opposed to Frenchified), Italian, and “mod-ern German music”; not only dance, but theatrical conventions serious,comic, and in between. By virtue of his training and his exposure throughtravel to different kinds of music, Boccherini was well set up to maintain suchcompetency, and he used it to good advantage throughout his career inSpain—which is to say, the rest of his life: for we do not know him to haveleft the Iberian peninsula again.98


Chapter 3

Gestures and Tableaux

If [dancers’] motions and features are in perfect consonance withtheir inward feelings, their expression will be so of course, and givelife to the representation. . . . To be successful in dramatic composi-tions, the soul must feel and be powerfully moved, imaginationsshould be enflamed, and genius be, as it were, the lightning that fore-tells the thunder of the passions!

jean-georges noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, 1760

Since a musician cannot move others if he be not himself moved, hemust necessarily cause in himself every affect which he would arousein his hearers; thus he gives them their own sentiments to understand,and persuades them best in this manner through sympathy.

carl philipp emanuel bach, “Vom Vortrage,” in Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen, 1753

Eighteenth-century treatises on performance contain frequent apostrophesto performers to lend their attention to the visible elements of their perfor-mances, by making their feeling selves available to sight, and instrumental-ists were not exempt from this expectation. Up to a point, we approximatethis in current concert practice. We like to see some evidence that the in-strumentalist is moved by what he is doing: the in-drawn breath, the furrowedbrow; perhaps, at the climax, a tasteful grimace, a sweeping follow-throughwith the hands. The performer who makes expressive sounds through his in-strument but does not supply us with these elements will likely seem cold orinhuman, no matter how impassioned the sounds he is making: one has onlyto think of Jascha Heifetz. But neither do we want very much in the way ofgestures and visible expressivity; or if we do, we may be perceived as ratherlowbrow. The latter-day terminus here would be Liberace, who, with all thepanache of an opera seria producer, used costume and set design to expandupon an already lavish gestural style at his instrument; it was largely the ex-tent to which his performances were spectacles that brought him into disre-pute with connoisseurs.

This degree of constraint upon the visual element represents a sea-change

65

in the reception of instrumental music, one which was already under wayduring the final decades of Boccherini’s life. The same change, or set of re-lated changes, was responsible for a precipitous decline in his posthumousreputation, which reached a nadir within only a generation or so of his death.In 1835 Fétis reported that

Boccherini is now known only in France. Germany disdains his naive simplic-ity, and the opinion of him held by the artists of that land may be summarizedin words pronounced by Spohr in Paris, during a musical gathering, where someof the Italian master’s quintets had just been played. The celebrated Germanviolinist and composer was asked what he thought: “I think,” he answered, “thatthis does not deserve to be called music!”1

What “music” was supposed to be changed a good deal between the endof the eighteenth century and 1835, and nowhere more radically than in theGerman-speaking lands from which Spohr hailed.2 We do not know whichof Boccherini’s works it was that Spohr so disdained; but we might imaginehis expostulation coming in response to a passage of the sort shown in ex-ample 5 (CD track 10). The third-inversion 1 chord (the piece having mod-ulated to E major by this point) and its resolution to a first-inversion toniccannot, it seems, be returned to often enough. The cellist moves again andagain, first for four bars in the tenor octave and then for four in the bass,from A, one of the most resonant pitches on the instrument, against whichis stacked an entire triad with which it forms multiple, rich dissonances, tothe much weaker, less resonant, and (in relation to the upper parts) moreconsonant G#. Scarcely an unusual harmonic gambit; but it is repeated to anunusual degree. The cellist’s tactile-acoustical experience of resistance andrelease in this situation is, like most pleasures, heightened by repetition. Abovethis, the upper parts create a complex texture of interlocking repetitions, bothsmall- and large-scale. The viola repeats a bar-long figure with several smallcontour variations; the violins begin at the half-bar, trading off syncopatedmelodic gestures and arpeggiated figures (which, on the micro-level, con-tain many repetitions of the note B); in the second half of the passage (halfwaythrough bar 14) they drop together into the alto register to play a melodicfigure in lockstep thirds that repeats every bar, while reiterating a short-long-short rhythm at every half-bar. For the violinists, then, in addition to the half-bar alternations of harmonic friction with release which underlie the passage,there are myriad small interactive melodic opportunities: in their tradings-off there is the subtle pleasure of trying to mimic one another exactly, whiletheir lockstep thirds raise the issues of balancing the sonority (the lower voiceslightly firmer and louder than the upper, the intonation pure enough to per-mit a timbral blend) and ensemble (the frisson of playing appoggiature to-gether). All these layered, interactive repetitions do not escalate; their smallfrictions and overlappings do not even suggest a direction. They invite the

66 gestures and tableaux

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Allegro brillante

67

Example 5. String Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, i (Allegro brillante), bars 11–17.

player’s ear and eye toward nothing beyond himself and his colleagues in theintimate act of playing. It is typical of Boccherini that such an inward focusoccurs in the middle of an apparently extraverted first movement, written inthe “bright” key of A major and marked “Allegro brillante.”

Thus Boccherini offers a plate of momentary delicacies to the players; butwhat are we, as listeners and observers, to make of such music? We can ra-tionalize it easily enough: it is simply and unambiguously periodic; it partic-ipates in the arsis-thesis phrase construction that late eighteenth-century the-orists regarded as governing both the localized structure of the bar and thedisposition of sizable chunks of music. A whole phrase (later, even a wholesection of a movement) could be characterized as weak and antecedent, orstrong and consequent. In a latter-day extension of this kind of understand-ing, Christian Speck uses a number of quasi-architectural terms—Schlußstein,Eckpfeiler, Stufe, Gerüstbau (keystone, corner-post, step, scaffolding)—in his de-tailed descriptions of how such blocks work together in Boccherini’s music,mortared by the near-infallible periodicity of the “italienische Zweitakter,”the two-bar unit basic to the Italian style (and to nearly all dance music). Butneither Speck nor any other writer on Boccherini has really addressed thetopic of his repetitiveness. It is flatly incredible that they would not have no-ticed it. If the players of the quartet quoted in example 5 take the notatedrepeats, the static seven-bar passage in question occurs four times at this pitchlevel and four times a fifth lower. Although this is not repetition in the strictestsense, containing as it does a host of small, subtle (albeit reiterated) varia-tions, Boccherini can most certainly do that too. In either case the effect issimilar: the music circles serenely in place. Movements such as the Larghettoof the Quartet in D Minor, op. 9, no. 2, G. 172, consist very largely of a chainof such circles (CD track 11). There is “motion,” insofar as a modulation tothe relative major will have been achieved by the end of the first half; melodicevents will consent to be parsed according to an extended binary form; butso conventional are these traits, and so pronounced the repetitiveness, thatit is surely the stasis itself that is most memorable—most thematic, in theeighteenth-century sense of the Main Idea. This music goes nowhere exceptwhere it already is.

Writing in 1845, when Boccherini’s reputation was already in decline,Henri Castil-Blaze related a story that suggests that even in the composer’slifetime such writing had, on occasion, been a problem. According to thisstory, Boccherini had been given the opportunity in Madrid to play cham-ber music with Carlos IV, king of Spain and an amateur violinist. The com-poser brought along an opus of quintets.

Carlos takes up his bow: he always played the first violin part; now there ap-pears in this part a figure of great repetitiveness and complete monotony. Dosi, do si: these two rapidly flowing notes are repeated to the point of covering


half a page. The king attacks them bravely, continues, pursues the discourse;but he is so absorbed by attention to his part that he does not hear the designs,the ingenious harmonies, introduced above and below this interior pedal. Hebecomes impatient, his bad humor crescendos, his voice joins his bow in articu-lating the monotonous figure in a ridiculous manner; finally, abandoning thelabor that has been tiring him, he rises and says in an angry tone,

“This is miserable, a student would write thus: Do si, do si!”“Sire, if it would please Your Majesty to lend your ear to the play of the sec-

ond violin and viola parts, or to the pizzicato presented by the violoncello whileI keep the first violin on this uniform figure. The figure loses its monotony asthe other instruments enter and mingle in the conversation.”

“Do si, do si, and that for almost half an hour! Do si, do si, delightful con-versation! Music of a student, and a bad student at that.”3

Now this story is problematic at best. It is not verified by any other source.While Castil-Blaze attributes it to the violinist Alexandre Boucher (1778–1861), Carlos is called prince of the Asturias, although he became king in1788, a full ten years before Boucher’s arrival in Spain. Boucher himself doesnot seem to have been regarded as a particularly sober or veracious charac-ter. Moreover, the quintet referred to here cannot be identified.4 Yet for allits questionableness Castil-Blaze’s story points very nicely at the nature ofthe interest generated by Boccherini’s repetitive music: an interest consti-tuted in performative interaction. The description of the way repetitionframes a textural and harmonic “conversation” rings true for any numberof such passages, and lends this story a kind of circumstantial authority.

Christian Speck has written on the logic and structure of Boccherini’s phras-ing. He does not offer examples of the more peculiar edifices that Bocche-rini was wont to produce by effectively eschewing any larger-scale relation-ships; but he acknowledges the way in which such passages assume an estheticidentity in their own right: “The listener has been offered an acoustical eye-glass, so to speak, with which the transition from one level to another can beexamined.”5 This eyeglass is lovingly trained on a small and extremely ordi-nary event: in example 5, for instance, 2–3, over and over again. Graduallya richness reveals itself. This is the unsuspected richness of the everyday, onewith which the listener in all his (presumed) ordinariness can identify.

boccherinian sensibilité

“The world in which we live is the setting of the scene; the source of his dramais true; his personages have all possible reality; his characters are taken fromthe middle of society; his incidents concern the customs of all civilized na-tions; the passions he paints are those I experience in myself.”6 Diderot writeshere of Richardson; he might equally have written this of Greuze, and it istempting to suppose that had he heard Boccherini’s music in its repetitive

gestures and tableaux 69

vein he would have included it in his estimation. The “world in which welive” that he evokes so casually is the world of the salon, the drawing room,the tertulia, the world of Boccherini’s biggest and most avid public; and thecentral culture of that world was that of sentimentality—or, to give it theFrench name by which Boccherini would have known it, sensibilité.

By the end of the eighteenth century a delicate tangle of topoi had grownup around the musical presentation of sensibilité. Boccherini would have hadany number of opportunities to become acquainted with its roots, especiallyin the realm of theatrical music; and we know that he took those opportuni-ties because his engagements with the sensible style contain some of his mostdistinctive traits as a composer. His sonatas and quartets are rich in these en-gagements at every level, from the conventional to the deeply idiosyncratic.To begin with the obvious: among his favored signifiers are melodic “sighs,”ports de voix or portamenti, the primary vocalistic signifiers of heightened feel-ing. As suggested in chapter 1, Boccherini tends toward larger melodic tra-jectories of descent and subsiding, which are easily read as representations ofinwardness; so too his marked penchant for the minor mode. He favors di-minished-seventh harmonies for their conventional associations with tenderanxiety. Texturally, he frequently employs throbbing accompaniments, string-playing enactments of the sensible protagonist’s palpitating heart. All of thesefeatures are sufficiently common in Boccherini’s early work that they can befound almost at random in the quartets opp. 8 and 9; they can be heard alltogether at the beginning of the slow movement of op. 8, no. 1 (CD track 12).

Another convention associated with the sensible in music is its tendency tomanifest in slow movements. Practically speaking, slow tempi simply allow moretime for sentimental reflection to be elicited. An argument could be madehere for the primacy of the Adagio, rather than the opening Allegro, withincompositions from the sensible tradition. Conceptually speaking, while a firstmovement sets forth a sonata’s Main Idea (as any number of late eighteenth-century theorists make sure to tell us), its slow movement—less immediate,arrived at after the ritual of theses and antitheses, and located at the tempo-ral “heart” of the sonata as a whole—sets forth its Main Sentiment. MaynardSolomon has pursued a similar idea in reference to Mozart; he suggests thatMozart developed an “adagio/andante archetype” in which a slow movementdelivered the main emotional impact of an entire sonata. The movementsSolomon cites, however, all contain a drastic contrast between an initial sweet-ness or repose and some darker state—anxiety, doubt, even torment—whichSolomon memorably dubs “trouble in Paradise.”7 By these lights, the mosthighly marked sensible passages in Boccherini’s slow movements serve arather different purpose: whether occurring as distinct episodes with inde-pendent thematic material, interrupting the narrative flow of an otherwiseconventional movement, or constituting an entire movement built in this man-ner from the beginning, they are yet sweeter than what surrounds them.


In the paintings of Luis Paret y Alcázar, who entered the employ of DonLuis de Borbón at about the same time as Boccherini, we can see what mightbest be called a French sensible style profoundly and subtly interpenetratedwith a certain Spanish fleshliness. Paret’s human figures are most distinctive.Willowy, delicate of wrist and ankle, suspended between points of repose,they move within a strange bluish twilight, enfolded in and sometimeseclipsed by exuberant swathes of satiny fabric, brilliantly rendered for itsreflection of light. These images can take on a magical aura: “Out of an ap-parently conventional practical structure arise, however, evanescences,flashes and raptures of great lyricism, of the most delicate tonalities, over-whelming the instantaneity of the model. We find an ambience of spectralevocations, like the palpitating residue of a dream-reality. And in all of thesethere is much refinement, a tension shot through with melancholy.”8

The parallels with Boccherini’s work are irresistible: a tender evocativeness,achieved around or in spite of the apparent subject of the work through non-representational means such as color; and achieved principally in referenceto the human body. Within their luminous cocoons, Paret’s bodies areminutely rendered as to character. In renditions of group scenes, even themost incidental person has his or her own particular expression, a selfhooddelicately written upon the stance and countenance (see figure 6).

Boccherini also exploits sensible conventions in ways distinctive to himselfwhich tend to foreground the physical experience of those involved in mak-ing the music. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the matter of dynam-ics. Boccherini is extremely partial to soft dynamics—a fairly predictable con-cern, perhaps, given the sweetness and softness characteristic of sensibilité;but he distinguishes himself from his contemporaries through the fre-quency with which he admonishes the instrumental performer to play qui-etly, and through his verbal and graphic inventiveness in doing so.9 Piano,pianissimo, dolce, dolcissimo, soave, con soavità, mezza voce, sotto voce, teneramente,diminuendo, smorzando, calando, morendo—even, at the very beginning of theQuartet op. 53, no. 1, che appena si senta (scarcely audible): an exquisite, in-deed an almost precious attention to the gestures involved in playingemerges through such particular distinctions. This affection for fine degreesof softness is further inflected by the marking rinforzando (or “Rf”), an am-biguous direction which can mean a momentary crescendo, a longer swell,or an accent, the manner of its execution contingent upon what the otherparts are doing. Such intimate contextualities, fluctuating from moment tomoment, are invitations to the performer to embody sensibilité, developing“that disposition linked to weak organs, the result of a mobile diaphragm, alively imagination, delicate nerves, that is inclined to feel pity, to tremble,to admire, to fear, to become agitated, to weep, to faint.”10

We find an interesting parallel to Boccherini’s hyper-precise dynamic in-structions in the dramatic works of his brother, Giovanni Gastone. Gabriella


Biagi-Ravenni has pointed out Giovanni’s “particularly attentive care” tominute details of stage direction in his libretti. Single, crucial gestures areprescribed (“lowers her eyebrows,” “avoids him without looking at him”) andqualities of motion and of speech are lovingly invested with specific feeling(“rises in wonder and scorn,” “in a transport of happiness,” “tenderly,” etc.).So numerous and detailed are these directions that the dramatic progressof a scene can be intuited from reading them alone, as Biagi-Ravenni notes;she adds, “Such precise attention to everything that can be communicatedin the theater by means of images, movements, and gestures is small won-der in a librettist who was also a dancer working in Vienna in the years inwhich the pantomime ballet saw its greatest triumphs.”11

Boccherini offers another musical representation of sensibilité in certainrepetitive passages in which a definable single melody, a singable line or pro-file to the whole, is only intermittently to be found (CD track 13).12 His highlydeveloped and personable sense of line is one of his most distinctive featuresas a composer; but in passages like these he forsakes or explodes it. He accom-plishes this through nearly constant registral displacement and free imitationof short fragments among the parts, keeping all involved within a harmonic


Figure 6. Luis Paret y Alcázar, Ensayo de una comedia, 1772. Oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo copyright Museo del Prado, Madrid.

field, within a group tessitura (with considerable exchange of individualtessiture), and within a rhythmic field “stamped,” as Speck puts it, by therhythmic profile of the fragments involved,13 and reliably contained withinperiodic phrase structure. The distinction of melodic foreground fromaccompanimental background has collapsed, and we are suspended in anamiable kind of Brownian motion-without-direction, a stretto without stress.14

This can involve just the lower voices, with the top voice sonically separatedinto a “holding pattern” of repetitive melody (see example 6), or all fourvoices may be equally involved (see example 7; CD track 14).

The abandonment of melodic narrative in these passages enacts a tendencyin all sensible art to leave lacunae. Not providing quite enough information isintegral to the style, as a way of inviting rather than directing attention. Inpainting, we have the evocative emptiness of landscape; we have also a mid-century cult for the non finito, a painting deliberately left unfinished, and therapidissimo or fa presto, a telegraphic painting done in a very short space of


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time (Fragonard was perhaps the greatest master of this style). Such worksleft open an esthetic space into which viewers inserted themselves, with all oftheir suppositions, assumptions, and putative completions, in order to actu-ally participate in the making of the painting. “The opportunity provided bylaconic imagery [made] every perceiver into an artist—a personne d’esprit.”15

Diderot’s considerations of sketches and rapidissimi read very much likeconsiderations of improvised music-making: “Sketches often have a fire thata painting does not. . . . The pen of the poet, the pencil of the expert drafts-man, has an air of running and playing. Rapid thought characterizes in onestroke; the vaguer the expression of the arts, the more the imagination is atease.”16 I would submit that the musical analogy here is to a particular modeof sensible performance in which the viewer/listener is every bit as active andsensitized as the painter/executant. A performance so constituted is verymuch a mutual undertaking by artist and recipient—a joint “speculation,”as it were. What is being improvised on the spot is not any particular configu-ration of tones but rather the relationship between the parties involved.“These lines do not so much chart the intended position of an edge as spec-ulate about what a lively form of edge thereabouts might be. They are notgenerated by immediate study of nature; they do not describe the accidentsof particular form.”17

Elsewhere, Diderot is perfectly clear about the likeness of this mutualizedsensible viewing to musical reception—and he locates it specifically in in-strumental music. The sonata or symphony whose wordlessness so taxed gen-erations of French rationalists is the perfect vessel for this kind of reception,by virtue of its semiotic lack.

In vocal music, one must hear what is being expressed. I can make a well-madesymphony express almost anything I want; and since I know better than any-one else how I can be moved, because of my experience of my own heart, it israre that the expression I assign to [instrumental] sounds, which according tomy current situation may be serious, tender, or gay, will fail to touch me moreprofoundly than one that is not so much of my choice. It is somewhat the samewith sketches and pictures. I see in the picture something pronounced: in thesketch, how many things may I suppose that are barely announced!18

Boccherini’s textural, lineless music offers many such passages that invitethe listener to suppose something “barely announced.” The most charac-teristic come in slow movements (CD track 15). With this disappearance ofline we lose all sense of piece-as-oration, the rhetorical metaphor that hadinformed composition, performance, and reception for almost two hundredyears. No one in particular is speaking to us here; the orator has apparentlystepped down from his podium to take a stroll beside us, exchanging dis-jointed sweet nothings in a twilit garden. The timbral ambiguity (it is virtu-ally impossible for a listener to distinguish which instrument in the ensem-


ble is responsible for which sound), the relaxed tempo, and the soft dynamiccreate topical resonances: such passages are evocations of the nocturnal, themixed and sourceless voices of summer nights.

The solo cello’s voice occasionally emerges from such a textural matrix,its upper-register uncanniness and pathos trumping the orator by evokinga specific nocturnal singer, the nightingale. This bird’s sweet but eerily dis-embodied song entails a complex and ancient set of associations: mourningfor the dead, or endless complaint over lost love, or the story of Philomel,tongueless and speechless, with an urgent story to tell and able only to sing,patroness of the wordless expressivity of instrumental music (example 22,bars 28–34; CD track 16). Such exquisite passages are not peculiar to Boc-cherini’s quartets, but can be found in the slow movements of his instru-mental ensemble music in all genres. Even in his cello concerti the soloistsometimes shows an abstracted tendency to wander away from his podium.19

While their metaphorical and imagistic origins are many and rich, suchpassages also have some genesis in a kinesthetic response to the real-worldrealm of acoustics. The acoustics of a room can affect virtually every aspectof the way a passage sounds and feels and what it evokes. The fresco painternegotiates this ambient element intimately and precisely in planning andexecuting his work.

A painter working on the walls and ceilings of large interior spaces naturallylit may respond to a lighting ambience rather as a musician responds to theacoustic of the space in which he performs. For a performer at Tiepolo’s levelthis is not simply a matter of “good light,” in the simple sense of sufficient illu-mination for the work to be seen. It is much more a matter of structure andliveliness, or bounce; of suggestion and the necessary stimulation of difficulty.The good lighting ambience is positive enough [i.e., as a presence or factor inthe creation of the artwork] to present a problem [in the sense of somethingto be extensively chewed on and digested into forms and decisions].20

Ideally, one would pursue this sight-to-sound analogy with an acousticalaccount of a room in which Boccherini worked, and do it with loving detail,as Alpers and Baxandall do in their considerations of the effects of light andshadow on Tiepolo’s painted surfaces in the Treppenhaus at Würzburg. Anappropriate space exists: there are rooms in the palace of El Pardo outsideMadrid which remain in their eighteenth-century condition, including (cru-cially in terms of resonance) wall tapestries and heavy drapes. Ideally, onewould play a quartet there many times. One would use the very instrumentsfor which Boccherini conceived the work. One would move about theroom(s) in search of their “sweet spots”; one would try the piece with an au-dience present, and without. One would eventually arrive at a thick de-scription, full of nuance, one that would give back to Boccherini’s texturalmusic some of its own irreducible substance—something like the following:


The picture, in a sense, is a number of different pictures and would be hardto exhaust, but it is noticeable that it looks better in the morning, when thelighting from both sides is at its more complex and paradoxical, not in the after-noon, when the simpler and fully licensed west light source gives its plain read-ing. There are also briefer and more accidental moments of fine complexity—such as an electrifying occasional five minutes in late afternoon when the sunis low enough in the west both to shine direct through the west windows andto reflect back strongly from the east wall on which it falls.21

But here, of course, is the definitive difference between painting andmusic-making: the degree of materiality, and thus the degree of material sur-vival, of the medium. We have scores and instruments (the latter often muchaltered) but the bodies and the sounds they made are long silenced. Whatis more, most of the rooms for which we may reasonably assume Boccherini’schamber music was initially conceived are simply gone, or altered beyondrecognition, or in ruins. El Pardo is now used by the Spanish royal familyand their illustrious guests, and is not readily available for impressionisticmusicological experiments. The current whereabouts of Boccherini’s Stainercello are unknown.22

tableaux

From the standpoint of the listener-observer, in soft and repetitive passagesthe player’s appearance, heavily constrained, is undemonstrative, apparentlyanti-theatrical. Yet in this near-motionlessness there is a subtle theatricalityat work, that of the tableau. During this period the troc between the visualand the performing arts was most characteristically expressed in a choreo-graphic and dramatic penchant for tableaux vivants, the most explicitlypainterly of theatrical devices; and concomitantly, by the development of atheatrical painting style in the peinture morale of Greuze, as well as by the fre-quent involvement of painters in set design. Such was the conflation of stagewith canvas that it is often impossible to determine which image came first,since “once the work was painted, and widely diffused by means of engrav-ings, it served as inspiration in its turn for the staging and designing of latercreations in the theater.”23 Examples are legion; the most famous is proba-bly outside of Boccherini’s sphere of experience, but serves to illustrate thecross-currents of influence during this period. In Act 2 of Beaumarchais’sMariage de Figaro, first performed in 1784, in the scene in which Chérubinserenades the countess, the actors are instructed to arrange themselves “asin the print after Vanloo called ‘Conversation espagnole.’” The engraving ofthis 1755 painting by Carle Van Loo (1705–65) is by Beauvarlet. Here wehave an image of music-making, transposed to a staged tableau with song,and finally given a continuous musical setting in 1786 by Da Ponte andMozart.


Boccherini probably missed Figaro, but he might have seen a revival of DonJuan in Angiolini’s Vienna staging. Here again, staged practice had been in-fluenced by engraved image, in this case Boucher’s engraving of the encounterbetween Don Juan and the statue, which had graced the 1749 edition of Mo-lière’s play. This practice of conflating representational media was by no meansconfined to professional circles. Tableaux historiques, which displayed famousevents, and pose plastiche, which displayed moods or states of mind, were pop-ular drawing-room entertainments throughout Europe.24 They remained sofor many decades: the reader may recall that such activities were a central fo-cus at Mr. Rochester’s house-party in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre.

Boccherini’s ability to provoke and satisfy the drawing-room taste for thetableau is frequently attested to in period criticism of his compositions. Heeven became, on occasion, an emblem for a visualistic listening. In the fol-lowing extract a Parisian pamphleteer writes from the midst of the maelstromof the 1770s “Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes”; Boccherini’s music isbeing pressed into service in an argument for the very concept of music’shaving “a fixed and true meaning”: “Play the fifth sonata of Boccherini’s op.5, and you will hear all the fluctuations of a demanding woman who employsby turns sweetness and reproach. One almost desires to put words to it; playeda hundred times, it still presents the same meaning and the same image.”25

Some of the ambivalence at work within the eighteenth-century fascina-tion with the tableau is evident here. The writer’s image is neither fixed norparticularly “true”: the woman he has imagined is above all changeable. Themore subtle-minded Diderot went so far as to personify an opposition to leg-ibility in women who behave in this manner: “We don’t want to know every-thing at once. Women are aware of this: they agree and then refuse, exposeand then cover themselves. We love it when pleasure lasts; it must thereforehave some progression.”26

Another association of Boccherini’s music with painting was made byPierre Baillot, who wrote circa 1804 that Boccherini’s quintets presented a“full, august harmony which invites recollection, which casts the imagina-tion into a sweet reverie, or which fixes it upon enchanting tableaux; it is thegrace of Albane, it is the naive sensibility of Gessner.”27 “Albane” is the Ital-ian painter Francesco Albani (1578–1660), whose work had enjoyed con-siderable popularity in eighteenth-century France on the basis of certain“small cabinet pictures with graceful figures in sunny landscapes.”28 Boucherand Fragonard both admired and copied Albani; nineteenth-century art crit-ics were to turn upon him, however, regarding his pastoral elegance and hisemphasis on pearly-skinned, sun-dappled naked bodies as “shallow, deco-rative, and even immoral,”29 and thus mirroring the critical turn of fortunethat their colleagues in music dealt to Boccherini.

Baillot also makes an association between Boccherini’s music and the Swisspoet, painter, and engraver Salomon Gessner (1730–88). Gessner covered


much the same pastoral ground in all the media of which he was master. Hisengravings of landscapes in particular convey a tranquil nostalgia. His métieras a writer was prose-poetry emulating works of antiquity, mainly the Old Tes-tament or the pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil. In imitation of the latter, hecalled a number of his longer pieces “songs,” and had the characters in them—Phillis, Chloe, Daphnis, Milon, and the like—“sing” instead of speak.

Silent Night! how deliciously you steal over me here! here on this mossy rock.I saw yet Phoebus, as he lost himself behind the crags of those mountains; hesmiled back for the last time through the light haze, which, like golden gauze,gathered glistening around distant vineyards, groves, and pastures; all of Na-ture saluted his departure in the soft purple after-light that glowed upon thestreaky clouds; the birds sang to him the last song, and in pairs sought theirsafe nests; the shepherd, accompanied by long shadows, played his eveningsong as he returned to his hut, as I peacefully fell asleep.

Have you, Philomel, through your tender song—has a lurking woodlandgod awakened me, or a nymph, that rustles shyly through the bushes?

Oh! how lovely everything is in its mild beauty! How still the country slum-bers around me! What rapture! What gentle ecstasy flows through my flutter-ing heart!30

In painting and engraving, Gessner and his contemporaries, painters likeVernet and Loutherbourg, tended to dwarf the people in their landscapesinto insignificance. One might well ask where the embodiment was in sucha genre, and how sensibilité could be supposed to operate without it.

More than in any other manifestation of sensibilité, embodiment in thepastoral landscape seems to have been the responsibility of the observer orreader: it was almost entirely introjected. One simply put oneself into thedeliberate emptiness of these scenes and imagined things. Diderot’s 1763account of an unidentifiable Loutherbourg paysage models this processthrough a Gessnerian ellipsis.

The eye is everywhere arrested, entertained, satisfied. . . . Ah! My friend, howbeautiful nature is in this little canton! Let’s stop here; the heat of the day isbeginning to make itself felt, let’s lie down alongside these animals. And whilewe’re admiring the work of the Creator, the conversation of this herdsman andthis peasant girl will amuse us; our ears will not disdain the rustic sounds ofthis cowherd, who charms the silence of this solitude and relieves the weari-ness of his condition by playing the flute. Let’s rest; you’ll be beside me, I’ll betranquil and safe at your feet like this dog, constant companion of his master’slife and faithful guardian of his herd; and when the weight of the day has fallenaway we’ll continue on our way, and in a more distant time we’ll still recall thisenchanted spot, and the delicious hour we’ve spent here.31

As we have seen, the simplistic, feckless innocence of such a response be-came a difficult business for critics within only a generation or two. It remains


rather easier for us to snicker at Albani’s, Gessner’s, and Diderot’s senti-mentality than to enter candidly into their scenarios. Being in a contem-plative style, Gessner’s work is not ideally represented through short extracts;similarly, the peacefulness of a Boccherini quintet movement best emergesthrough its full, exquisitely uneventful duration. Both require time, and awillingness to let one’s attention unmoor itself within time, a type of recep-tion that is in considerably shorter supply today than when Gessner and Boc-cherini were writing. All the same, it must be admitted that such time andthe untroubled, untrammeled leisure it bespeaks have always been more ofan ideal than a reality. Arcadia is by its very nature forever somewhere elseand long ago, the obverse of “the world in which we live.”

tableaux and sensible reception

It is just barely possible that Boccherini arrived in Paris in time to visit theSalon of 1767, which was open for public viewing up through early Octoberof that year.32 Of course we cannot know for a fact that he was there; but inany case the works exhibited there were a very active part of the troc withinwhich Boccherini moved in Paris. The paintings of the Salons were framed,hung, and framed again by the Parisian tradition of copious intertextual dis-course; they were further disseminated to the public by means of engravedreproductions (which Boccherini easily could have seen); and they are amongthe clearest emblems we have of period understandings of embodiment. Theypresent bodies seen, and so evoke the modes of seeing elicited by bodies.The clarity and suggestiveness of the criticism surrounding these imagesreaches a pinnacle in Diderot’s marvelous descriptive accounts, themselvesentitled “Salons,” which he produced from 1759 to 1781. Such clarity wouldseem naturally to result from the way painting presents bodies not in mo-tion, but frozen in time, mid-gesture, accessible to being rationalized in away that a living, moving body—or the sounds it makes—constantly eludes.I say “would seem” because there is a crucial and problematic assumptionhere: sensory experience is assumed to make its most powerful impact bymeans of the tableau.

The tableau posits a mysterious, ideal synoptic moment, where narrativeand indeed any temporality at all give way to an insuperably intense im-pression, a brand seared upon the mind of the observer. This moment is atthe heart of much mid-eighteenth-century discourse on the transmissionof meaning. Rousseau called it the “most vigorous” form of language, andwent so far as to use it to explain the very power of narrative, as if it were acumulation of internally constructed apparitions or tableaux, which “strikeredoubled blows” to the senses, producing a more emotionally and morallyintense effect than was possible through a single glance.33 Diderot took a dif-


ferent tack. In his thinking, the tableau freezes narrative action, but it alsosummarizes it. We not only read, but read into its figures those events thatsurround the represented moment; we imaginatively improvise their histo-ries, construct their futures: “In the first moments of vision, one is affectedby a multitude of confused sensations, which untangle themselves only withtime and through habitual reflection on what is taking place within us.”34

Reflection, the “descent into oneself,” serves the necessary function ofgrounding the received image in the viewer’s subjectivity. Thus internalized,tableaux become representations, not of things, but of our feeling reactionto things. Diderot called them “hieroglyphs.” Hieroglyphs in turn requirefurther reflective unpacking and analysis (amply demonstrated by his nar-rative ellipses in the “Salons”) in order to attain their fullest meaning in di-alogue with reason. Thus tableaux shift responsibility for meaning onto andinto the viewer, briefly but with great intensity. In all the arts, this absorp-tion of the receiver (audience member, Salon-goer, sonata player, novelreader) into the received (opéra-comique, Greuze canvas, Boccherini violinsonata, Clarissa) is the crucial maneuver of the sensible style. Greuze’s ren-ditions of scholars or maidens or patriarchs absorbed in various objects ofcontemplation are themselves fetishes of this receptive process, epitomizedfor Diderot, as for so many others, in the novels of Samuel Richardson: “OhRichardson! One takes, regardless of the role one has [in life], a role in yourworks; one joins in the conversation, one approves, one blames, one admires,one is irritated, one becomes indignant.”35

The sensible reader (or viewer or audience member or player) entered ac-tively into these stories, but also engaged to be entered into, influenced,changed by them. Accounts of Richardson’s readers run together, in styleand in tone, with the palpitating behavior of his characters: “There he is—he seizes the book, retires into a corner and reads. I watch him: first I seetears flow, he breaks off, he sobs; suddenly he gets up, he walks without know-ing where he is going, he utters cries like a desolate man, and he addressesthe bitterest reproaches to all the Harlowe family [of Richardson’s Clarissa].”36

Such erratic behavior was a badge of unselfconsciousness or “naturalness,”the reader’s or observer’s assurance that a highly stylized way of reacting tothe world was genuine, because it was helpless. Audience members arrivedat states of weepy dishabille; the reader of Clarissa knows not where he walks;Werther spends some last despairing hours unseen, even by the omniscientnarrator, on the peak of a rugged mountain. Yet the theatricality of thesesensible manifestations makes it clear that the competing and older require-ment of legibility had by no means been superseded. The whole situationwas more than a little paradoxical. In terms of the absorptive ideal, observerand observed will be most convincingly collapsed if any reminders of theirseparateness, such as performative self-consciousness or exaggeration, are


suppressed. Thus some accounts of sensibilité present it as an emphaticallynon-visual, in fact an anti-visual, experience: “It seems to me that those whowant to infer a knowledge of souls from a consideration of faces invert theorder of nature, because they give the eyes an office which pertains princi-pally to the ears. Nature made the eyes to register bodies, the ears to exam-ine souls. To those who would know the interior of another, what is most im-portant is not to see him, but to hear him.”37

Visual art of the 1750s and 1760s increasingly emphasizes images of peoplewho are intensely absorbed in their own actions and feelings, immune toany awareness of being seen that might manifest as distraction or self-con-sciousness. They gaze anywhere but at the viewer.38 Ideally, the living, breath-ing images of theatrical tableaux operated under the same restriction, theirrefusal to acknowledge any sight-based relationship “eliminat[ing] the be-holder from in front of the work, often with the side-effect of creating ahigher degree of illusion and a stronger emotional impact.”39 In viewingpainting, as in reading fiction, the issue of who was performing what (andupon whom) in this equation could be evaded easily enough; not so in the-atrical genres, which thoroughly and deliciously problematized the issue ofwhether one’s absorption was in the plight of the mythical Iphigenia, or inher poignant personification by Sophie Arnould, bosom heaving in a re-vealing white gown.40 And by this logic, it was the muted gestural palette ofthe saloniste at music, the mutually sustained fiction that he was not inter-esting to watch, or at least not there to be looked at, that made him capableof delivering the most powerful emotional impact of all.

Boccherini’s published chamber music was chiefly intended to be playedand enjoyed in salons.41 There the performer entered into sensibilité with afew very close associates, they too absorbed in the act of performance; butwith even a few non-playing listeners in the room, the equation was changed,theatricalized, and the amateur chamber music performer became availablefor sensible absorption by his listeners. Yet he was not costumed, nor veiledby a fictional narrative, nor separated from his listeners by a proscenium.The nature of his role was profoundly unclear; he appeared to be merelyhimself. He was engaged in an activity that displayed his body in its most ex-quisite capacity for interactive responsiveness, and without verbal mediation.There is potential here—one might suspect a deliberate invitation—for alistener’s absorption to become an erotic one.

This finds echoes in the expertly borderline salaciousness of some ofRichardson’s scenarios, where seduction is always, in the end, and despiteher own delicious vacillations, resisted by his heroine; the whole experiencethen with a confident ostensibility being assigned to the service of morality.In the following extract from Richardson’s Clarissa, the hero/villain Lovelacegives a male confidant an account of his rescue of Clarissa from a house fire,and of her subsequent near-rape at his hands:


Wicked wretch! Insolent villain!—Yes, she called me insolent villain, althoughso much in my power! And for what?—only for kissing (with passion indeed) herinimitable neck, her lips, her cheeks, her forehead, and her streaming eyes, asthis assemblage of beauties offered itself at once to my ravished sight; she con-tinuing kneeling at my feet, as I sat.

If I am a villain—And then my grasping, but trembling hand—I hope I didnot hurt the tenderest and loveliest of all her beauties—If I am a villain,madam—

Indeed you are! The worst of villains! Help! Dear blessed people! Andscreamed. No help for a poor creature!

Am I then a villain, madam? Am I then a villain, say you? And clasped bothmy arms about her, offering to raise her to my bounding heart.

Oh, no!—and yet you are!42

This vividly rendered speech is not set off by quotation marks, so that itis frequently unclear who is speaking, or indeed whether they speak or merelythink: boundaries of self are blurred, both on and off the page. Some ofDiderot’s accounts of Greuze walk this blurry line for pages at a stretch, fur-ther begging the question of where sensible absorption ends and pruriencebegins. Of the 1765 canvas La Mère bien-aimée (see figure 7), Diderot wrotewith fascinated censure, “That half-open mouth, those swimming eyes, thatreclining attitude, that swelling neck, that voluptuous mixture of pain andpleasure, will make all virtuous women lower their gaze and blush in thatplace [i.e., the Salon].”43

Women might blush; Diderot was honest enough to acknowledge thatmen, on the other hand, “would stop [before this painting] for a long time”;they would, he said, be drawn and confused by the sheer painterly virtuos-ity: “On her forehead, and from the forehead onto the cheeks, and fromthe cheeks toward the throat, there are passages in incredible tones; itteaches one to see nature, and reminds one of it. One must see the detailsof that swelling neck, and not speak of them. It is quite beautiful, true, andwise.”44

True and wise and deeply risqué. This inevitable receptive conflation ofthe sensual with the sensuous is the place where sensibilité and virtuosity collide.

One response to the uneasiness of this situation appears in changing pro-tocols for concert behavior. By the early nineteenth century, advice such asthe following was becoming increasingly common: “The listeners must sit atsome distance from the players, sunk, as it were, in the silence of the grave,so that they cause neither distraction nor disturbance; the players, however,once they have tuned their instruments, must refrain from those preludesso unpleasant to every sensitive ear, so as not to weaken the beautiful, grandeffect which such stillness and surprise call up so wonderfully.”45

This advice was offered by Johann Baptist Schaul in 1809 and directedspecifically to listeners to Boccherini’s string quartets. By 1809, nowhere more


than in Germany and nowhere more fetishistically than around string quar-tets, such audience behavior was becoming a ritual enactment of a Kantian“disinterested contemplation.” Schaul calls such listening “the capacity tovalue [music] according to its merits” (“um sie nach Verdienst zu schätzen”),among which merits its embodied visibility is emphatically not counted. Thiserasure has become something quite different from the original absorptivemaneuver, in which performing bodies were by no means erased, but ratherdeliberately conflated with the observer’s own.

Boccherini does seem at times to have walked that blurry erotic linepainted by Albani and Greuze, and inscribed by Diderot and Richardson;but he also partook very ingeniously of a fund of sensible topoi developed inthe theater, inviting the non-playing listener to create in his or her mind’seye that missing costume, proscenium, or narrative, and thus neatly chan-nel the uneasy intimacy of chamber-music performance into references totheatrical conventions.


Figure 7. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La Mère bien-aimée, 1765, engraved by Jean Massard(père), 1772. Copyright The British Museum.

tragedy

The most consistent theatrical reference in Boccherini’s music was to trag-edy, an association perceived by a number of contemporary connoisseurs.Thomas Twining, a musical enthusiast and correspondent of Charles Bur-ney, wrote in 1783, “Haydn, I think, is much oftener charming than Bocche-rini. Yet when Boccherini is at his best, there is a force of serious expression,a pathos, that is not so much Haydn’s fort, I think. I never see a smile uponBoccherini’s face; he is all earnestness, & Tragedy.”46

This is likely to surprise us now. We can readily identify the galant in Boc-cherini; we hear and respond to the charm, the sweetness, the perfect will-ingness to be decorative. While we might take exception to Felix Mendels-sohn’s dismissiveness in describing a quintet by Boccherini as “a peruke, butwith a very charming old man underneath it,” we nevertheless recognize hisestimation.47 With application, perhaps, we discover a more serious vein inBoccherini’s work. But tragedy?

The incomprehension is not our fault, nor Mendelssohn’s; the theatricalgenres that Twining refers to had all but disappeared by the time ofMendelssohn’s birth, and are deeply alien to us now. Twining meant the tra-dition of serious opera, above all opera seria, the expressive and formal con-ventions of which informed so much eighteenth-century musical reception.From the audience’s point of view, the affective impact of serious operaresided in a chain of discrete events, the arias, each one crafted to presenta single character’s particular emotional or psychological state as vividly aspossible. The sequence of these events and the material connecting themwere of secondary or even negligible importance in performance. Their im-pact chiefly came not through cumulation or the logic of narrative but, ina word, through the tableau.

In spoken theater and in pantomime dance, the tableau had a specific re-lation to tragedy. “Portrayal of the stronger, more violent passions often en-tailed a static staging of tableau-like images. Seized by hatred, terror, jeal-ousy, or vengefulness, the body became rooted, its limbs contorted, its focusdownward.”48 When Diderot wishes to convince us of the expressive powerof gesture in general, he does so with a series of snapshot-like images drawnexclusively from tragedy: highly charged confrontations from Corneille, andLady Macbeth’s somnambulistic hand-washing.49

That eighteenth-century audiences heard/saw serious opera in Bocche-rini’s music is made explicit by the following passage, in which a phrase fromthe Quintet in A Minor, op. 20, no. 6, G. 294 (1775), is taken up by a Frenchreviewer for its specifically tragic mode of expression. The way the reviewerconflates tragedy, sensibilité, and visuality is absolutely typical of the time, anda mirror to Boccherini’s “unsmiling face.” In order to feel the impact ofsomething, one must “see” it.


A young man had just played the following phrase for the first time, from oneof the less well known and less often quoted of [Boccherini’s] quintets.

The bow falls from his hands, and he cries out: Behold the first accent of Ari-adne’s grief, at the moment when she was abandoned upon the island of Naxos!Fontenelle would have said: Sonata, what do you want of me? Haydn and Boc-cherini reply: We want a soul, and you have only wit: go write your epigramsand your calculations.50

The line is elegantly mournful, its falling and retracing of a diminishedseventh across its first three bars accomplished with no fewer than three sigh-ing gestures: one rising in yearning, two falling in resignation. Somewhatunusually, it is played by the second cello; the young man of the account ispresumably a cellist, and not a violinist, as we might otherwise assume. Thusto its conventional melodic significations we can add timbral associations:the tune emerges from an unexpected quarter within the ensemble texture,in a voice made the more plangent and disturbing by being well out of itsusual range.51 The unexpectedness is a perfect touch. Ariadne, after all, doesnot expect to be abandoned; her grief is fresh with wounded astonishment.

In his violin method of circa 1803, Giuseppe Cambini invoked operatictableaux in his examples of how to play expressively. Using the opening first-violin line of Boccherini’s Quartet in C Minor, op. 2, no. 1, G. 159 (1761),Cambini takes the reader from the “meaningless and raucous noise” of un-inflected execution, through the basics of expressive playing—appropriatefingerings and articulations, dynamics, and finally imagery: “Above all, thinkthat you wish to move me . . . electrify your arm with the fire of thisthought . . . so that your bow becomes your tongue and your countenance,so that it tells me, ‘What! You know that I am innocent, you see me as un-happy! And you will not deign to console me!’”52

Cambini does not specify the source of his text; quite possibly he inventedit, with the assurance born of a lifetime’s familiarity with the expressive con-ventions of serious opera. The voice and the character implied could be that,for example, of Arbace in Metastasio’s Artaserse, Act 1, Scene 14. Unjustlyaccused of treason and murder, he pleads for consideration from his loverMandane; he has reason to believe she knows better than to condemn him;but she is not yet softened. They have the following exchange:

&c

Poco Adagio sostenuto˙ œ

œ œ#

œ ˙ œ œ œœ œ

œ œœ

œœ

&

5˙

œ

œ.œ

œ

˙œ

œ œ œ

tœ œ

œœ

œ ˙œ

œ

˙

˙


Arbace: You are deceived—

Mandane: Then,treacherous one, it is you who deceived me,for you seemed faithful, and I loved you.

A: And so now—

M: I abhor you!

A: And you are—

M: Your enemy!

A: And you want—

M: Your death!

A: That first affection—

M: Is all changed to disdain.

A: And you will not believe me?

M: And I will not believe you, worthless one!53

At this highly charged moment comes Arbace’s aria. We can imagine Cam-bini’s lines (suitably transposed to his native Italian) as its text, and Boc-cherini’s plangent phrase as the setting (see example 8).

Such an elaborate response to a single line of music may seem far-fetched.But Cambini’s example presents evidence that this is exactly the kind ofassociation that was made by Boccherini’s public. It is not free-association;its terms are quite clearly defined. In learning to exercise it, in allowing our-selves its license and its particular excess, we reclaim a central mode of re-ception for Boccherini’s music and for that of his contemporaries.

Other contemporary writers heard and saw the comédie-larmoyante in Boc-cherini’s music. Of all theatrical genres this was the most explicitly senti-mental; indeed, sentimentality found a kind of apotheosis there in the 1780s,in the character of Nina. Thinking her lover lost to her, Nina (or her actress)performs absorption to the limit, losing her reason on stage and to music.She did so first in 1786, to the music of Dalayrac and in the person of thedancer and romantic lead Louise-Rosalie Dugazon (1755–1821), and thenin 1789, to the music of Paisiello and in the person of the actress and singerCeleste Coltellini (1760–1829). Stefano Castelvecchi has explored Paisiello’sarsenal of compositional devices in this influential scene; chief among themare strategies of interruption and incompletion, “a fragmentary and in-complete quality,” “gaps even inside words.”54 Sensibilité is registered throughthe breath: something patently invisible, communicated aurally by means ofagitated reversals, repetition, disrupted rhythm, or tear-choked issuance inthe voice. For the reader of a text it is recreated by means of “interruptedphrases, broken syntax, repetition, typographical exuberance (ellipses,dashes, exclamation points, italics).”55 Nina demonstrates that when sensibilité


is taken to its limit, its terminus, it becomes actual derangement, with all co-herence drowned in reactivity. Yet she is not histrionic; her music essentiallyimplodes from its own heartfeltness, becoming the more disjointed, the lesssonically demonstrative, as her feelings grow the more insupportable. Interms of the absorptive ideal, observer and observed will be most convinc-ingly collapsed if any reminders of their separateness—such as performa-tive self-consciousness or symbolic exaggeration—are suppressed. In Nina’scase, even a coherent melody was too much of a fiction.

Some of Boccherini’s palpitating, fragmentary instrumental gestureswould readily have recalled such images to a period listener. Louis-Luc Per-suis (1769–1819), violinist, composer, and from 1817 briefly director of theParis Opéra, provides us with a late example of this response. He first stagedhis pasticcio ballet, Nina, ou La Folle pour amour, at the Opéra in 1813, andwent on to revive it in Vienna.

Persuis had staged his charming ballet Nina in Vienna. It is known that the au-thors of these sorts of works readily made use of the most celebrated composers,borrowing from their works those pieces which they judged most appropriateto the situation they sought to render. Here, the scene in which Nina, learn-ing of the death of her lover, abandons herself to somber despair, the precur-sor to her madness, was expressed by the orchestra with a pathos, an energy,and a disorder which painted admirably the state of the unfortunate Nina. Thisbeautiful conception was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm; and while themost distinguished connoisseurs were vying with each other in congratulatingthe author of the ballet, Persuis said to them, “The piece which so justly ex-cites your enthusiasm is, however, the work of a musician for whom you havebut little regard; it is taken in its entirety from a quintet by Boccherini.” Andin fact it was the finale of the Quintet in C Minor of op. 17 [sic: within Picquot’scataloging system] that had secured this triumph for the author of Nina.56

The piece Persuis used was the last movement of Boccherini’s Quintet inC Minor, op. 18, no. 1, G. 283, of 1774, and “pathos, energy, and disorder”describe it well. Furthermore, in the second section of this tempestuouspiece comes a passage that evokes the fragmentary, gasping, incomplete de-livery that had come to be the sonic icon of Nina’s disastrous sensibilité (seeexample 9).57


&b

b

bc

œœ

œn œ

Che! tu sai che

.œœ œ œ

œœÆ

œ œ

j

œœ œ œ

son in no cen te, tu mi

J

œÆ

œ

J

œ

J

œÆ

œ

J

œ

ve di mi se ro! E

J

œ

Æ

œ

J

œ

j

œ œœ

Œ

non mi con ------ -so li!-

Example 8. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 2, no. 1, G. 159, i (Allegro comodo), opening bars of first-violin part to words from Cambini’s NouvelleMéthode.

&

&

B

?

?

bbb

b b b

b b b

b b b

b b b

c

c

c

c

c

œpœ ‰ Jœ. œ œ ‰ Jœ.

œf

œp œ œ ‰ œ œ œ

œ

fœp

œ œ ‰ œ œ œ

Jœp ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰

Jœp ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰

œ œ ‰ Jœ. œ œ ‰ Jœ.

‰ œ œ œn ‰ œ œ œ#

‰ œ œ œ ‰ œn œ# œ

Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

œ œ ‰ Jœ. œ œ ‰ Jœ.

‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ

‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ

Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

&

&

B

?

?

bbb

b b b

b b b

b b b

b b b

œ œ ‰ Jœ. œ œ ‰ jœ#

‰ œ œ œn ‰ œ œ# œ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ# œ œnjœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

œn œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ#

‰ œ œ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœn

‰ œ œ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ



œn œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœ#

‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœn

‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ

Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰

vc. 1

vn. 1

vn. 2

vc. 2

vla.

67

70

Allegro assai

89

Example 9. String Quintet in C Minor, op. 18, no. 1, G. 283, iv (Allegro assai), bars 67–75.

(continued)

Boccherini’s quintet predated Dalayrac’s setting of Nina by twelve yearsand Paisiello’s by fifteen; about twenty-five years after them, Persuis used theforty-year-old quintet to set the dramatic moment they had made famous.The question here is not of direct influence (although the quintet had beenpublished in Paris in 1775, and could thus theoretically have been availableto Dalayrac and Paisello) but of a shared expressive terrain, a topos; and,most importantly, a topos shared freely between the domains of theatricaland chamber music.

the reform body

All of these modes of representation and reception hark back, with varyingdegrees of conflict, to that deeply ingrained insistence on legibility, the “de-sire to have the physical face of the world converted into signs,”58 which hadlong set the French (and so in large part the European) critical standard forany account of human nature in any medium. In the mid-century debatesabout the theater and the meanings of “naturalness,” in the attempts to fixmeaning—whether musical or verbal—that underlie the endless Querelles,we glimpse Enlightenment tensions between society and the individual be-ing worked out as tensions between legibility and passion. But nowhere ispassion epitomized more clearly than in “the dancing body in the relent-lessness of its motion and the inevitability of its evanescence.”59

Choreographers in Boccherini’s day struggled to find new methods for ar-ticulating human passion within the beautiful but formidable abstractions of


&

&

B

?

?

bbb

b b b

b b b

b b b

b b b

œn œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ#

‰ œ œ œ ‰ jœ ‰ jœn

‰ œ œ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ

jœ ‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰

jœ ‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰

œn œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœ#

‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ jœn

‰ jœ ‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ

Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰

Jœ ‰ jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰

œ Œ

œ Œ

œ Œ

œ Œ

œ Œ

73


the belle danse that they had inherited from the preceding century; this wasthe project of the reform ballet of Angiolini and his contemporary Jean-Georges Noverre. Both were articulate and eloquent writers, and in the con-text of our discussion of instrumental music their remarks are worth quotingat length, since, as Noverre put it, “A composer of music should understanddancing, or at least know the times (temps), and the possibility of introducingsuch motions as are suitable to the different styles, characters, and passions.”60

Boccherini is a very particular case of this. Although he wrote relatively littlefor the stage, and almost no dance music per se, his was a terpsichorean fam-ily, and his sister danced as a partner of none other than Angiolini himself.

The ideal body types and movement types described by Angiolini andNoverre speak not only for the theater, but for the everyday bodily experi-ence of a great many people—certainly every class of person involved in ei-ther the production or the reception of music such as Boccherini’s. The sightof dancing bodies trained toward articulating certain movements inscribedthose movements as ideals, made of them models for the watching individ-uals’ very experience of being embodied within the ambitus of the passions.As Diderot puts it, “The eye of the people conforms to the eye of the greatartist, and . . . for him, exaggeration makes the resemblance complete. . . .He enlarges, he exaggerates, he corrects forms. . . . It is the figure which hehas painted that will remain in the memory of people to come.”61

To a very great degree, Westerners experience self within the represen-tational frameworks of what is seen (though, post-Revolutionary republicansthat we have since become, we might suggest to Diderot that it is not onlythe “great artist” who communicates those frameworks). Kinesthetic expe-rience of selfhood is indelibly affected by sight. It is my further thesis herethat this visual-kinesthetic matrix of experience was borne out in the acts ofhearing and interpreting music.

An ideal early eighteenth-century body, as visibly expressed through thebelle danse, had been above all erect, encased in armatures to ensure and toemphasize this posture; motion had taken place around this core, adorn-ing it with carefully codified gestural traceries without ever altering its unityand dignity. Period writers on esthetics took it almost for granted that thisarchitecture of the visible structured the experience of the audible as well:in the persistent synesthetic semi-logic that informs Batteux, Hogarth, Sulzer,and their ilk, “line” meant ink on paper, as it meant hand and arm throughspace, as it meant melody through aural memory. As there were five stancesand seven movements, so there were a certain number of possible melodic,harmonic, and rhythmic events; and every effort was made to fix their sig-nifications in advance. That neither the proper number of musical eventsnor their proper affectual correspondences could ever be clearly stated, asthey could for ballet or painting, was of course the rock of difference fromother media on which Enlightenment music theory was eventually to wreck


itself. Yet whatever its theoretical contradictions, there can be no doubt asto the hegemony of this general style of reception, in which elaborateclassification and compartmentalization served an unquestioned core ofexperience.

Angiolini provides his own classification of contemporary theatricaldance, in which four basic styles are identified in order to praise a fifth, thepantomime style that he was instrumental in developing (and that was at itsheart a rejection of the classification of experience). Corsetry and tonneletswere being abandoned; the new flexibility signaled permeability, a suscep-tibility to emotions, which he exhorted dancers to cultivate and to rendervisible.

Angiolini’s discussion begins at the antipodes of expressivity, with whathe calls the grotesque style: “These buffoons proceed entirely by leaps andbounds, and usually out of time; they sacrifice it willingly to their perilousleaps. . . . It excites in the spectators only astonishment mixed with fear, asthey see their fellow creatures risk their lives at every instant.”62

Angiolini also likens this style of execution and choreography to the com-media dell’arte. He credits it for its virtuosity; but to this he firmly links a paucityof signification. These dances and their dancers present an athletic ratherthan a poetic embodiment.

Like the grotesque style, Angiolini’s comic treats of villagers, shepherds,and exotic national dances; but its execution is quite different: “As to[comic] dancers, they do not permit themselves the tours de force employedby the grotesques. . . . These comic dancers, if skillful, can make us admirestrength joined with precision and lightness, and can even make us laughsometimes, by artistically turning into grimaces the facial contractions madenecessary by their efforts.”63

Angiolini compares the creators and dancers of such ballets with the au-thors and actors of farces, and dutifully reminds us that Molière himself wrotein this style. The comic dancers’ agility makes it clear that the kind of dra-matic truth that could properly be located in stillness or in motion was a mat-ter of genre—that is, whether the medium involved was intended as tragic,comic, or pastoral. Thus when Diderot asserted that “an attitude is one thing,an action another; attitudes are false and small, actions quite beautiful andtrue,” he was not contradicting his own earlier emphasis on the expressivetruth of the tragic tableau so much as praising the liveliness of comic works.64

The third style Angiolini calls the demi-caractère; it presents pastoral, Ana-creontic, or Roman subjects, subjects such as (he tells us) the Opéra furnishesto choreographers. He also informs us that, properly and delicately pre-sented, this style can move hearts in the same manner as a happy dénoue-ment at the opera, or the reading of a novel: “It requires of those who exe-cute it precision, lightness, equilibrium, softness, and grace. It is here that thearms (if I may be permitted that expression) begin to enter into dance; and


they must be supple and graceful. In the first two genres [i.e., the grotesqueand the comic] they count for nothing.”65

This is the first style for which “softness,” “le moèleux” [sic], the key phys-ical condition of sensibilité, is mentioned. The emphasis on the arms is echoedby Noverre, who tells us that “Less attention should be given to the legs, andmore care bestowed on the arms; cabrioles should give way to expressive ges-tures.”66 This befits a style that is concerned with touching hearts; emotionalcommunication is something done with the upper half of the body.

The fourth category is the august danse noble or belle danse; Angiolini ac-knowledges this as “the most beautiful, the most elegant, and also the mostdifficult.” However, he also criticizes this style as having expressed little tospectators, save perhaps a certain generalized voluptuousness, on accountof the custom of masking the dancers.

With characteristic fair-mindedness, Angiolini delivers his culminatingpraises of pantomime style by reference to the works of his colleague andcompetitor Noverre.

But pantomime dance that dares to rise to the representation of the great tragicevents is without doubt the most sublime. Everything the belle danse asks of aDuprés and a Vestris, [pantomime dance] demands of its dancers, and that isnot all: the art of gesture brought to a supreme degree must accompany themajesty, elegance, and delicacy of the belle danse—and even that does notsuffice: the pantomime dancer must, as we have said, be able to express all thepassions, and all the movements of the soul. He must be strongly affected byeverything he would represent, must indeed experience it, and must make thespectators feel those internal tremblings that are the language with which hor-ror, pity, and terror speak within us, and that bring us to the point of growingpale, sighing, shuddering, and bursting into tears.67

Thus these dancers were responsible not only for mastery of positions andsteps and styles, but for communicating passions to the observer. Dancersmust also act, and act effectively: the spectators’ “pity and terror” is a clearreference to classical tragedy, for which this highest and most difficult kindof dance was reserved. This entire discourse on movement styles appears inAngiolini’s preface to his and Gluck’s pantomime treatment of Voltaire’s Sémi-ramis, a tragedy of the most grimly unremitting kind.

And yet this tragedy had not the stern stiffness of execution of its Frenchclassical model. It had to be heartfelt; its dancers had to be “strongly affected.”Le moelleux had become the key. The chief sense in which writers of this pe-riod use the word is “softness”; moelle is also marrow, the heart of the bone,and moelleux also means pithy, substantive, lingering, whether of discourseor of wine. Diderot’s favorite exemplar of le moelleux is usually Greuze; inseeking to convey the affective impact of his paintings he repeats and dwellslovingly on the very term.


a light, soft [full, fleshly] inflection in all her figure and in all her members,which fills her with grace and truth . . .

truth of flesh, and an infinite softness . . .it is flesh; it is the blood beneath that skin; it is the finest half-tints, the truest

transparencies68

This is moelleux of a velvety, meaty sort—the delicate drag of napped fab-ric against the skin of the caressing finger, the resistant yielding of the breastto the palm of a pressing hand; but it is also, and explicitly, the susceptibil-ity of that flesh to emotion, up to and including the intense emotion oftragedy. A mid-century reform body was ideal to the very extent that it feltand instantly conveyed transparency—or, to use another word favored by writ-ers of this period, penetrability. Such “true” flesh in its ideal presentationwas often female, but a remarkable feature of this period in the history ofembodiment is the degree to which men sought to conform themselves tothis ideal, making themselves penetrable, and taking pride and pleasure inso doing.69 In Angiolini’s text, the degree of physical hardness—the mus-cular strength required to leap in the grotesque style or perform quick, me-chanically repeated intricate movements in the comic, and the facial con-tortions resulting from such efforts—is the precise degree of removal fromexpressivity.

Another feature of the reform body was its integrality. Movements werenot visibly articulated nor isolated from one another, so that the whole ofthe organism appeared affected, penetrated by its own slightest tendency.Diderot called this ideal “conspiration”: “It is not in school that one learnsthe general conspiration of movements; conspiration felt, seen, extendingand coiling from the head to the feet. If a woman lets her head fall forward,all her limbs respond to that weight; if she lifts it and holds it upright, thesame response from the rest of the machine.”70 As classification of experi-ence was rejected, so was classification of movement, the “actions, positions,and false, stiff, ridiculous, cold figures” of the belle danse.71

Angiolini’s genius found its match in that of Gluck, who developed vividsonic analogies to this new, penetrable, conspirational ideal, radically rede-fining the “actions and positions” of musical motion in the process, and thusof the listening ear. We have seen that Boccherini went so far as to borrowfrom Gluck on one occasion, using the latter’s Don Juan of 1761 (see chap-ter 2). Boccherini’s ability to call up tragedy for his listeners without benefitof staged action suggests that he well understood Gluck’s musical-dramatictechniques; and we might point to several particular traits in this regard. Oneis chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of light and shade, comic and tragic, recom-mended by Angiolini as a “pass[ing] instantaneously from white to black.”72

This is at times rendered instrumentally by Boccherini as drastic contrastsof tender and violent. Boccherini also shared Gluck’s genius for refining the


nuances of gravitas through tone color; his skill demonstrates the truth ofAngiolini’s perceptive remarks on instrumentation: “In order to awaken ter-ror, or courage, it is in vain that one uses flutes, violins, cellos. It is the in-strument, and not the note, that produces the effect: the melody, the mod-ulation, and the various motives must contribute to it, but without the correctand varied application of the instruments one cannot hope to attain a par-ticular effect.”73

Boccherini had an unerring instinct for the expressive qualities of in-strumental tessitura in assigning a melody. The “Ariadne” opening to theA-minor quintet cited above, where the second cello sings in an alien andtroubled alto register, is a striking example. He also had a matchless skill inmatters of sonority, the crucial art of doubling and voicing; some passageshave such evocative power on this basis alone that one can imagine “grow-ing pale, sighing, shuddering, and bursting into tears” merely at their tim-bre (CD track 17).

Angiolini stresses that the characters in a pantomime should be, above all,human: “We and the painters must make [our characters] recognizable; every-one knows the indifference of spectators to unknown personages.”74 Onlywhen a performer demonstrates human commonality with the viewer is theabsorptive maneuver possible, and humanity was increasingly understood toreside in the irreducible peculiarity of the individual. As pantomime dancebecame more popular and sensible reception took firmer hold of public re-sponse, movement styles became more and more personalized. By the 1770sand 1780s, “dancers’ performances were no longer compared to a single, idealform. Instead, dancers were perceived as initiating their own styles.”75

This increasing individuality was also reflected in changes in the processby which professional dancers learned a ballet. Rehearsals were reconceivedto foster dramatic engagement: Noverre went so far as to advocate thatdancers should not have their actions taught to them mechanically by theballet master. Rather,

A skilful Ballet-master must act in this case as some poets do . . . and implicitlyrely on the actors[’] discernment. . . . They assist at those rehearsals it is true,but more to give advice than to lay down precepts. Such a scene, they will observe,is weakly expressed: in this other you are perfectly at home; but in this third you do notact with sufficient spirit, so that its object is not fully answered. [Here is the languageof the poet.]—Just so the Ballet-master must rehearse over again a scene, tillthe performers have reached that degree of natural expression common to allmen, and which displays itself with equal truth and energy, when it is the re-sult of feeling.76

One can only imagine the chaotic, exciting, erratically fruitful workingenvironment that must have resulted from this extraordinary eighteenth-century adumbration of method acting. We are reduced to guessing how such


an approach might have translated into professional music-making; weglimpse here the possibility that the whole concept of “rehearsal” as we nowunderstand it has changed beyond all recognition. But it is important to rec-ognize that such radical practices took place in a context where the storiesbeing staged were taken from the familiar pastures of mythology or classicaldrama. This, together with the practice of publishing written accounts of theaction to be staged, reduced the choreographers’ and dancers’ burden oflegibility. It simultaneously encouraged spectators to practice their own,highly controlled versions of penetrability by identifying with the archetypalcharacters, seeking their own human commonalities with even the dreadfulDon Juan or Sémiramis.

For all the eloquence expended by Angiolini and Noverre in the serviceof dramatic progress and bodily reconfiguration, in actual practice thesechoreographers and their contemporaries never rejected the older gesturalvalues outright. Then as now, a ballet that did not engage in some symmetry,skill for its own sake, and decorative display would scarcely retain an audience.As Noverre puts it, “I will have . . . regularity even in irregularity.”77 One caninfer along these lines how the same audiences might have shaped their wayof listening to a sonata, a genre fully as regular as a classical ballet, and asstereotypical as any myth, even as it offered increasingly refined opportuni-ties for absorptive identification with the performer. As Noverre tells us, reg-ularity and stereotype may very well be essential; but to a “reform listener,”they are essential chiefly as vessel, frame, parergon to the vital business of giv-ing an account of the sentiments and the character of the person perform-ing it.

Indeed that character, that person, is a character or person only insofaras he performs himself physically, according to Feijóo, who adumbrates post-modernism by two centuries and makes the radical argument that identitydoes not reside in physiognomy: “The lineaments of the body or of the facedo not naturally signify the dispositions of the soul. . . . This natural repre-sentation cannot consist in anything but various, subtle, and delicate move-ments which the different dispositions of the soul cause in the body, espe-cially the face, and above all the eyes. . . . We call these subtle movementsgesture.”78

spanish dance and gesture

Feijóo wrote against the background of Spanish preoccupations with per-formance and human nature. These were substantially the same as the Frenchpreoccupations, but the stakes were quite different. Early in the century theBorbón dynasty had introduced the belle danse to Spain, where it developedinto a repertory of courtly dances known as danzas; by mid-century, as inFrance, the artifice of this gestural repertory was beginning to suggest a fa-


tal inauthenticity. But it also inevitably represented foreignness. The in-digenous or “low” dances, bailes, were practiced in increasingly self-conscioustension with the danzas over the course of the eighteenth century, givingSpanish contributions to later-century theories about the performing arts apeculiarly nationalistic flavor. Heartfeltness, human commonality, absorp-tive strategies, softness, penetrability—all had their place in Spanish society;but if you knew them as sensibilité, you were an afrancesado and by definitiondivided against your own people. To know them as inherently Spanish qual-ities was to participate in an active construction of embodied “tradition” thatmarks this period. The second half of the century was witness to an extra-ordinary process whereby features both gestural and musical of many ear-lier bailes were combined, by performers and theorists alike, into a scant hand-ful of signature dances: the fandango, the seguidillas (with its descendant thebolero), the jota, and the tirana.79 These few bailes, together with the highlyprofessionalized flamenco practices consolidated around the same time, be-came extraordinarily successful in representing (and inevitably reducing) theSpanish national character in the ensuing centuries.

Majismo, the focal point of late eighteenth-century “Spanishness” and theopposite number of afrancesismo, is palpable—in fact by some accounts it isdefined—in the evolution of the seguidillas into the bolero.80 Seguidillas wereoriginally in a rather fast triple meter, but increasingly complex, showy chore-ography worked against musical momentum, slowing the beat down as thedecorative gestures multiplied. In late-stage, “bolerified” seguidillas, of whichBoccherini’s may serve as a good example, a stately triple meter is so subdi-vided that it poises tensely on the edge of disintegration into a series ofsmaller gestures (see example 10). It is not difficult to read into this delib-erately maintained tension a picture of the majo’s proud refusal to attain orsubmit—whether to the next strong beat, or to authority in general.

Emblematic of this resistiveness was the practice of the bien-parado, or “well-stopped.” At the end of a dance—in some accounts, even at the end of sec-tions or phrases—the dancers froze, holding elegant and artful poses, com-peting for cries of “Bien parado!” from the onlookers.

In the bien-parado is combined almost all the science of the bolerological art.Yes, sir: the best dancer who doesn’t know how to stop himself at his moment(a su tiempo), with grace, clarity, and to the beat, though he execute wonders,doesn’t merit the least applause.81

Not everyone can do those diverting bien-parados in which, holding itself im-mobile, the body reveals even the smallest movements of the face with tran-quility and restfulness. Serenity in difficult steps and moods is the first thingwhich must be observed in this dance.82

This was a virtuoso tradition. Angiolini would have appreciated thesedancers’ physical control, which gave them not only the aerial dexterity of


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his comic dancers, but the physical aplomb to suspend motion abruptly andyet expressively. He would also have recognized the dramatic effectivenessof the bien-parado, which served the same basic purpose as the tableau vivant:however briefly, these “freezes” made bodies legible. As for what was readinto that legibility, Spanish tendencies were much the same as French; bien-parados seem to have served quite unambiguously to mark and heighten thedance’s erotic progress. Frenchmen in Spain tended to find this even moreovert than in France. Bourgoing provides eroticized accounts of several Span-ish dances, at a level of detail that makes his fascination clear.

The fandango is danced by only two people, who never touch one another, noteven with their hands; but to see them provoke one another, by turns retreat-ing to a distance, and advancing closely again; to see how the woman, at themoment when her languor indicates a near defeat, revives all at once to escapeher pursuer; how she is pursued, and in her turn pursues him; how the dif-ferent emotions which they feel are expressed by their looks, their gestures,and their attitudes—you cannot help observing, with a blush, that thesescenes are to the engagements of Cytherea, what our military engagementsare in time of peace to the true display of the art of war.83

Again, the reluctance to attain or submit. The fandango resembled theseguidillas in tempo (quick to moderate) and meter (triple). Dancerly virtu-osity was less important than in the bolero; majismo tension played out ratherthrough a dramatic fiction of infinite deferral and restraint. The character-istic harmonic profile of the fandango reenacted this deferral. Traditionally,sections of the dance alternated between major-mode tonality and themodal cadencia andaluza, based on the descending tetrachord la–sol–fa–mi.The final of the cadencia is on mi. A tonal ear will hear this as a dominant,and helplessly seek resolution on la. It will even be encouraged to do so bythe tonal sections of the dance; but such resolution is not to be. Consider-able psychological tension builds up over this subversion of the most basicrelationship of tonality, repeated over and over and over again.84

For all that his essays in these dance types are wonderfully characteristic,Boccherini composed very few works in specifically Spanish styles. His sin-gle zarzuela, La Clementina, G. 540, was written in 1786 at the request of theCondesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna. A set of villancicos (short unstageddramas for performance during the Christmas season), G. 539, has been ten-tatively dated to 1783 by Gérard. In the arena of instrumental music, he madeone excursion into a mimetic representation of Spanishness, the Quintet inC Major, op. 30, no. 6, G. 324, of 1780, which is entitled La musica notturnadelle strade di Madrid and which contains depictions of Madrid street life:church bells, religious processions, blind beggars, manolos (another kind ofmajo), and a military regiment’s advance and retreat. As far as bailes go, Boc-cherini wrote but the one fandango, and the one seguidillas I have presented


here. (And as in the case of the Musica notturna, the title of the seguidillas isincorrigibly Italian: Minuetto a modo di sighidiglia spagnola.) Each is exemplaryof a style, but it cannot be argued that these pieces represent the composerin any central way. Indeed, he does not seem to have had much confidencein explicitly Spanish music on an international market. In a letter of 10 July1797, Boccherini expressed reservations to Pleyel about publishing La mu-sica notturna: “Among the quintettini of op. 30 you will find one that bearsthe title Night music of the streets of Madrid. This piece is totally useless, andeven ridiculous outside Spain. Listeners will never be able to understand itsmeaning, any more than the executants will be capable of playing it as itshould be played.”85

One might assume from this that, for all that he could write a rousing fan-dango, Boccherini was somewhat alienated from the musical culture of thecountry in which he lived for over half his life. Yet I doubt that Boccheriniwas alienated. It is simplistic to assume that he remained an outsider to Span-ish music all his life; to do so is to locate that musical culture exclusively inits more highly marked indigenous practices, to fall into the trap of equat-ing authenticity with folk music: the very trap which the advocates of ma-jismo and flamenco were energetically digging for themselves. At their mosttruly enlightened, the thinkers and the artists of the Ilustración—amongwhom I would count Boccherini—avoided this trap by freely importing anddeveloping influences from outside the Iberian peninsula that seemedbeneficial, profitable, or beautiful, confident that their adoption into Span-ish culture was in itself enough to eventually ensure Spanishness even as itredefined it. We in turn may focus on the divisions so created; or we may fo-cus on the connections that arose. The latter tend to the interstitial, the tran-sitory, the un-institutionalized: they resemble the development of a pidgin,where imported and indigenous linguistic cultures begin to develop a com-mon new vocabulary. Such a focus is perhaps more difficult, but certainlymore interesting.

For over half of his life, Boccherini was, to all intents and purposes, aSpaniard. I doubt very much that he was resistant to the Spanishness thatmanifested in the small and telling matters of daily embodiment: gesture,stance, matters of display and restraint, frivolity and gravity, “spaghetti” and“mutton.” Rather, he incorporated these matters into his music on many lev-els beside that of the mimetic or self-conscious, just as he had done with thesignal features of Viennese or Parisian style. At a subtle level—a level, I wishto reiterate, that has little to do with the posturings of a nationalistic musi-cal jargon—“Spanish” traits can be found in most features of Boccherini’scompositional style. His “pidgin” might include his affection for seeminglyendless “vamping” on dominant harmonies, which might plausibly be heardas an extension of the basic idea of the cadencia andaluza —or, equally plau-sibly, as an extension of the yearning implicit in sensibilité. By means of or-


namentation, harmonic rhythm, and periodicity, he interprets and reinter-prets the play with restraint and momentum that characterizes the bailes. Hisskill with the tableau could as well be called a skill with the bien-parado; hispersistent executional preoccupation with the particularities of fleshly ex-perience would have been understood by any Spaniard of the day as a Span-ish preoccupation; and as I will suggest in coming chapters, certain of hiscomplications of the ideals of legibility and transparency, as well as his cul-tivation of a particular vein of satiric melancholy, have a peculiarly Spanishcast to them. Ultimately, the nationality we assign to such traits becomes amatter of preference, or of vested interest.

instrumentalist, what do you want of me?

Throughout this chapter I have been at pains to suggest that as listeners wejoin our eighteenth-century counterparts in “reading” apparently sonicevents for imagistic or tactile associations. Dance types are the most obviousexample of this, but there is also the tragic aria, the nightingale from an or-namental cello solo, the memory of velvety skin called up by a diminished-seventh sonority. As performers in search of richer understandings of thisrepertory, we might further experiment with configuring and understand-ing our own performing bodies in a range of new ways. Depending on thetradition of appearance being referenced in the piece of music at hand, wemight assume our own continual legibility; or the intermittent legibility offreeze-frames; or an elusive Protean changeability. Depending on the kinetictradition we wish to invoke, we might comport ourselves as expressive ges-tures around a stable core; or as operating on a continuum from regal/statelyto athletic/grotesque; or as newly, radically, frighteningly flexible and per-meable, soft above all, and expressive in direct proportion to our softness.Perhaps most globally, we do well to assume our nearly constant role as por-tals into visualistic fantasies on the part of our audience; and, in this guise,be prepared to offer ourselves as (always carefully unacknowledged) eroticobjects.

Yet whether we are performers or listener-observers, we will inevitably en-counter problems in this venture. We know we will encounter them becausethis is what happened to our eighteenth-century predecessors, who wrotevolubly and brilliantly about the experience. In his 1767 “Salon” Diderot givesextended consideration to a portrait of himself by Louis-Michel Van Loo.Diderot is unhappy with the likeness for several reasons. He says his own chil-dren would not recognize the “old coquette” it portrays; and he blames itsinappropriate charm on the fact that the painter’s wife, Madame Van Loo,engaged Diderot in raillery while he sat for it.86 He avers that the portraitwould have had an entirely different tone, one more characteristic of “le


philosophe sensible,” had she gone to her clavecin and preluded for him; or,better yet, sung

Non ha ragione, ingrato,Un core abbandonato

“or some other piece of the same genre”—that genre being Metastasianopera seria.87 This would seem to be an invocation of the tragic, its starktableaux eliciting a truer image of selfhood. But for Diderot, the particu-lar affect of Van Loo’s portrait is not only wrong, it is too fixed, too tableau-like: “I had in one day a hundred diverse physiognomies, according to whatwas affecting me. I was serene, sad, dreamy, tender, violent, impassioned,enthusiastic. . . . The impressions of my soul succeeding one another veryrapidly and all painting themselves on my face, the eye of the painter willnot find me the same from one moment to the next, his task becomes muchmore difficult than he thinks.”88

“Much more difficult” scarcely describes the impossible charge Diderothas assigned to the painter here. He has taken the absorptive maneuver sofar, so thoroughly conflating how he looks with the ever-changing flow of howhe feels himself to be, that his own body has receded into unpaintability.

This tension has a particular application to instrumental music, for itmust be admitted that, for all the visual imagination that the performer orhis audience brings to the performance, not every movement an instru-mentalist makes is legible. In many cases—most cases, truth be told—whatthe string player does makes no sense as pantomime, and signals nothingat all except what it actually is: the physical movements necessary for mak-ing certain sounds on the apparatus at hand. Consequently, one of the mosturgent matters represented on stages public and private by Boccherini andhis colleagues was their challenge to the very idea of being legible. Icons ofunreadability, they gestured tantalizingly on the edge of the abyss of the un-fathomably subjective.

The challenge had been implicit from the beginning in the cultivation ofsentiment in the arts: if the truest and most interesting meanings are thoseof individual human passions, and if these arise from the recesses of the in-dividual soul, then in some measure their truth will be in their invisibility.Individual selfhood, that crown jewel of sensible Enlightenment, is inter-pretable only through a tension between appearances and an interiority notultimately accessible to display. Feijóo and many others acknowledged this,but its implications are most poignantly demonstrated by the course ofDiderot’s career as a critic of the visual arts. Norman Bryson has chronicledDiderot’s progress from the overflowing descriptive enthusiasm of the early“Salons”—surely some of the greatest flights of visualistic language ever pro-duced—to a profound disillusionment later in life, arising from the ultimateindistinguishability of such descriptions from fiction. In the consummately


brilliant and earnest pursuit of transparency, opacity had been produced.89

As early as 1751, Diderot had adumbrated this crisis in a famous and ele-gant lament.

The state of our soul is one thing; another, our explanation of it, whether toourselves or to others; another, the total and instantaneous sensation of thatstate; another, the successive and detailed attention we are forced to give it inorder to analyze it, to explicate it, to come to understand it. Our soul is a mov-ing picture, after which we paint ceaselessly; we spend a good deal of time inrendering it faithfully; but it exists whole, and all at once; the spirit does notgo by measured steps, as does its expression. The paintbrush takes time to ex-ecute that which the eye of the painter embraces all at once.90

We recognize this as the problem of performance as it relates to text.Where does textual authority end? Where does performance become ex-cessive, irresponsible, “libertine”? Even Diderot’s voluble genius ultimatelyfoundered on the problem of the nature and extent permissible to perfor-mance, as he encountered it in the realm of the descriptive; and yet musi-cology’s modest pretensions to science involve an unavoidable obligation tothis very thing. As it was for Diderot, as it was for Noverre, accurate de-scription is mandatory for anyone who is serious about making sense of theexperience of art.

In instrumental music, whose visible realization is forever half-formed, thetangles redouble themselves. Yet an actual instrumentalist has never had theluxury to be immobilized by insoluble dilemmas; he chooses a course ofaction and follows it. Boccherini’s career is particularly interesting for thecourse he took, and for the philosophical issues that swirl in his wake. Issuesof text and performance, authority and permeability, and the limits of thelegible are most interestingly demonstrated in his relation to his own virtu-oso status as a performer.


Chapter 4

Virtuosity, Virtuality, Virtue

Would you not state categorically that true sensitivity and performedsensitivity are two very different things?

denis diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” circa 1770

The first movement of the Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, has long been afavorite of mine on account of its opening phrase (see example 11; CD track18). Two descending sextuplet groups outline an elegant, tender gestureof descent. The graceful decorativeness marks it immediately as galant; itemerges as sensible too, by the fact of its retiringness (downward reading asinward). It can be conveniently executed with the left thumb set across thefifth C–G; from there, the whole melody through bar 4 lies nicely underthe hand. This fingering makes most of it sound on the lower strings of theinstrument, and incorporates sensibilité all over again by making the resting-places on every first and third beat increasingly throaty and soft, intimaterather than demonstrative in timbre, as the overall trajectory of the phrasedescends over two bars. As noted in chapter 1, Boccherini is fond of pas-sagework that organizes itself in this way around a single positioning of theleft thumb to encompass a phrase, several periods, or even an entire sec-tion of a piece. One soon learns to look for such fingerings, because theyare so often to be found; if they are not always the only possible solution toa passage, they are almost always the most mechanically logical, and fre-quently the most interesting as well. In this example, physical convenienceand sensibilité entangle themselves, each arguing for and supporting theother.

Boccherini himself seems to have been exceptionally fond of his open-ing idea, for it recurs much more often within this movement than is usualin such pieces. He uses it in bar 5 to affirm the modulation to the dominant(CD track 19), and again in bar 16 to initiate the closing gestures of the firsthalf of the movement. It reappears in the tonic in bar 27, early in the second

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œ œ œ œœ

œ

j

œ

œ

œœ

œ

J

œ

œ

œ

œ

Œ

B

?

7

œ

œœ .œ œ œ

œ œœ œ

j

œ.œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ

J

œ

˙

‰ œœ#

œ

j

œ œ

œ

.œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ

œ

B

‰

œœ œ# œ

œ

œœ#

œ

rf

œ œœ

p

œ œ œ

œ# œœ

œœ œ

‰j

œ

œ ‰ œœ#

œ

B

?

10

œ

rf

œ œ œ

p

œ œ œ

œ#œ

œœ

œ œ

‰j

œ

œ ‰ œ

œœ

œ œ œ#œœœ œ

œ œœ œ œ œ

œ# œœ

œœ œ

‰j

œ

1

Presumably the lowest pitch here should be an open C — that is, an octave lower than written.

œ ‰

J

œœ#

œ

B

?

12

œœœ# œœ œ œœœ œ

œœ

œ œœ œ œ œ

œ œœ

œœ œ œn

?

‰j

œ

œ ‰ j

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œœ œ œ œ

œ# œœ

œ œœ œ œ œ# œn

œœ

œB

?

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

Œ

vc.

basso

106

Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G.17, i (Moderato).

ÌÌ

?

?

14

œ

œ

f

œ œ

p

œ œœ œ œ

œ# œœ

œ œ œœ œ œ# œn œ œ

œB

?

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

Œ

œ

œ

œœ œ œ

p

œ œœ œœ

œ

2

œ.œ

J

œ≈B

&

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ .œœ œ

œ

&

?

16

.œ œ

6œ œ œ œ

œ œ.œ œ œ œ

œ œ

˙ œ#œ œ œa

tœ

œœ

œœ

œ œ œ

œ

œ

œœ#

œ œ œ œ;œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

sotto voce

œ œœ œ#

œœ œ

&

?

18

œœ

œ

œœ#

œœ œ; œœ

œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ œ œ œ;œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œœ œ#

œœ œ œ

œ œœ œ

œœ œ

œœœ œœ

œœ œ# œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œœœ

œ œ œœ

œœ œ œ

œœ œ œ

œœœ


&

?

U

U

Legate

20˙

Œ ‰

œ#.œ

B

˙Œ Œ

œ#.œ

œ.œ

œ#.œ œ

.œœ œ œ

œ#œ

Ó ‰œ

.œœ

œ

o.

j

œ œ

p

œœ

j

œ œ

œ#œ œ ‰

œ#.œ

œ œœ

œ œ

Œ

B

?

.

.

.

.

23œ#

2 Probable correct rhythm:

Probably a C.

.œ

œ.œ

œ#.œ

œ.œ

œ œ œœ#

œ

Ó ‰œ

Ì :

œ

œ œ

J

œ

j

œ œ

œœ

j

œ œ

œ#œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

‰? B

j

œ

3

3

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

‰

œ œ

107


(continued)

B

?

.

.

.

.

25j

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ#

œœ

œœ œ œ œ

œ# .œ

˙ œ .œ œ œœ

œœ

œn œœœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ .œ œ

œ œ œ .œ

B

œ œ

œ œ œ

œ

œ

œœ

B

?

27œ œ

œ œ œœ œ œ œ .œ

œ .œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ

˙

˙

˙

œœœ

œœœœœœ œ

œ œ œ œ .œ œœ

?

œ œœ

œj

œ

.œ

œœ

œ

?

?

29

œ

œœb

œ œœb

œ

?

œ œ

œœ

œnœ

B

œœb

œ

?B

˙b ˙

˙˙

œb

œbœ

œœ

B

œ

œ œ œn œb œ œ

.

.

œ

œ

A

J

œ œœ œ œ

B

?

31 œ œœ œ œ

œ

?

œœb

œ œBœb

œ

œ

?

œN œb œ

œ˙b˙

œ

œœ

œnœ

B

œœb

œ

?

œ

œbœ

œœb

B

œ

œ

˙.

.

œ

œ

b

j

œ˙

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

33 œœn œb œ œ œ œ

œ œ

œœ œn œ œ œb œ

œ( )

˙

’

œ

Œ

B

œ .œœ œb œ# œ œ œn œ œ

œ

œœœœ

6

œœ

.œ œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œ

~ ~~

108


B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

36

œœœ

œœœœœœ œ

œ œ

6œ œ .œ

œ œ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œœ

œ œ œ

6œ

œœ

œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œœ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

38

œœ œ

œ œ œ œœ œ œ

œ œ

6

œ œ

.œœ

œ

œ

œ

‰

J

œ

œ

œ

œ

œb œœ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ œ œ

œ

œ œ œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ œœ œ; œ;œn œ œb œ

œ œ œ. œ

.

œ

.

œ.

œ

.

œ

.œ. œ

.

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

40

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ œ œ

œ

œ œ œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ œ œ œ; œ; œn œ œb œ

œ œ œ. œ

.

œ

.

œ.

œ

.

œ

.œ. œ

.

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

41

œœ

œ

œœ

œ œ œ œ; œ œ;œn œ œb œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ œ œ œ; œ;œn œ œb œ

œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

Presumably:

42

œœ œ

œ œ œ œœ œ

œ œœ œ

œ œœ œ

œ œœ œ

œ œœ œ œ œ œ

œ

4 Q Q Q

œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

4

œb œ œœ

œœ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ œn œ œœ œb

≈ ≈

109


(continued)

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

n

n

n

n

n

n

44œ œ œ œ œ œ

œœn œœ œ#

œ œ œ œ#

œœ œn œ

œœ œ

œ œ œnœ

œb œœj

œœn œ œ œ#

œn œœ œ# œ

œ œ œœ

œ œ

U

U

œ œ œnœ

œ œ œ .œn œ œB

œn œœ œ# œ

B

?

47

œ

œ œœ œ œ œ

œ# œœ

œœ œ

‰j

œ

œ

‰

œœ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ

œœ

œœ

œ œ

‰j

œ

œ

‰

œ

œœ

B

?

49

œ œœœœœœ

œ œœ œ œ œ

œ# œœ

œœ œ

‰j

œ

œ

‰

œœ

œ

œ œœœ

œœ œœœœ œ

œœ œœ œ œ

œœ .œ

œb

‰j

œ

œ

œ

œœ

‰

B

?

51

œ

œ œ œ œœ œ

6œ

œœ

œœ

œ œ œ œœ œb œ œ

œ

?

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

Œ

œ œ


œœ

œœ œ œ œ

œ œb œ œœ

B ?

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

Œ

?

?

53

œ

œ

œB


œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ

œœ œ

B

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

‰

j

œ

.œœ œ œ

œ œ œ œ.œ

œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ# œ

œ œ

≈

110


half (CD track 20), where it functions as a kind of portal to a set of ferventexpostulations and lamenting replies in C minor. When these have subsided,sobbing, into a half-cadence on G in bar 34 (CD track 21), we are well primedto hear a reprise: the histrionics require resolution into the steady tender-ness of the opening idea, the harmony invites resolution into the home key.Sure enough, the idea appears in bar 35, as sweetly decorative as before, its

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue 111

B

?

55œ

œœ

œœ

œ œ œœ

œ

œœ

œ œœ

rK

œ œ œ œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ

œ

œœ œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ œ œ

rK

œ œ œ œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ œ œ

rK

œ œ œ œœ

œ

œ

œ

œœ œ œ œ


œ œ œ

B

?

57

œœ œ œ

œ œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

.œ.

œ

.œ.

œœ

œœ

œ

.œ.

œ

.œ.

U

U

˙

Œ ‰

œ .œ

˙ Ó

B

?

59œ# .œ

œ .œ

œ# .œ œ .œœ œ œ

œœ

Ó ‰œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ œ

œœ

j

œ œ ‰

œ

œ?

œœ œ

œ œ

‰ j

œ

œ

œ œ

œ œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

B

œ œ œœ œ œ œ

œ

B

?

Segue

62œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

‰

œ

œ œ

œ

œ œ ?

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

‰

≈ ≈


technical presentation identical to that of its first appearance: one plays itwith the left thumb set in a bar-fifth, and the whole period lies elegantly un-der the hand (CD track 22).

But that hand and all its elegance are apparently misplaced: the bar-fifthis a minor third too high, and the whole passage lies in E b major. The keyis scarcely prepared and most certainly unexpected. Its character is whollydifferent from the traditional candor and forthrightness of C major—qual-ities particularly pronounced on the cello, which resonates at its fullest inthis key. And, as Boccherini carefully signals with his use of clefs, this minor-third displacement marks the difference between an alto and a soprano tes-situra; in any opera one might care to name, this alone would signal pro-found differences in character. Apparently an entirely different person, asoprano with a softer, reedier, more covered voice, has suddenly steppedinto the lead role.

She holds the stage (and the Eb–Bb bar-fifth position) for ten or so bars,long enough to really establish herself in a piece sixty-two bars in length; sherelinquishes her position only through some rather reluctant modulationsand changes of thumb-position, which end in bar 46 with another half-ca-dence on G (CD track 23). Its resolution is the right and proper one, intothe home key. From there to the end of the movement there are no furtheruntoward events; the interloper has disappeared; the opening idea even ap-pears one more time, in bar 54, in its original location and tessitura, as aclosing idea. Yet a memory of the irruption lingers; however delicately, it hascast a shadow of question over the whole idea of reprise.

The second movement embraces that shadowiness by beginning in C mi-nor (see example 12; CD track 24), in the eighteenth century one of themost emotionally charged of all tonalities, associated with pain, pathos, grief(and of course, in functional-harmonic terms, with the interloper Eb major).The countenance of this particular C minor immediately takes us far pastany ordinary pain and deep into tragedy: it is an anguished lament, almostdemanding that we assign it a persona from among the classic heroines inorder to contain its most un-salon-like passion. The tessitura of this voice isa low mezzo (Boccherini has assigned it the tenor clef), which gives it a cer-tain gravity: let us call her Dido, queen of Carthage, regal even in her ex-tremity. Her second utterance, in bar 5, is a heartbreakingly long messa divoce, six and a half beats in an Adagio tempo, very nearly impossible to exe-cute without acute discomfort and constraint upon the right arm. From it sheascends in bar 7 into her uppermost register in an agonized direct address(CD track 25).

The cellist cannot execute this gesture with any secure strategy like thumb-position, but must use an unsupported portamento up the neck of theinstrument, its technical riskiness a perfect gestural enactment of Dido’s

112 virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

C

C

Adagio˙ œ

j

œœ œ œ œ

œ .œ œœ œ

.œnœ ˙ .œ œ

œ .œ œ œœ

.œœ œ

j

œ œ œ œœ

œœn œ œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

4 j

œ œ œ œ .˙

œ .œ

œ

.œ

œ

.œ

œ

.œnœ

.œ

œ

.œ

œ

w

œœ

œ

œ œœn

œ

œ œœ

œ

œ œœn

œ

œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

6˙ œ œ œ œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œœ œ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œ œb

U U

U.œ

J

œ œ

‰

J

œ

˙

˙b

˙

˙

#

.œn

J

œ œ Œ

B

˙

˙

Ó

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

dol:

9

œ

6

œ œ œ œœ

5

œœ

.œ œ œ

œ

5

œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

.œœ œ

6œ

œ œ œ œœ œ œ

œœœœœœœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œ œœ

œ

bThis seems more likely to be a B than a C.

vc.

basso

113

Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G.17, ii (Adagio).

(continued)

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

( )

11.œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œb œnœ œn .œ œb

œ œœœœœ

œœœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œœ

œ

.œ œ œ œ

œ œœ œ œnœ œn .œ œb

œ œœ

œ œb

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

13œb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

w

œ

œ œœ œb œ

œ

œ œ œ œn œ œ œ

j

œ

œœ

œJ

œœ

œ

œœ œ

J

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

15

J

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ J

œ

œœ

œJ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ œ

J

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ œœœœœ

œœ œ œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

B

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ ≈œ œ œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

U

U

17.œ

J

œœ

œ

Mm

œ

œœ

œn ˙

œ

Œ ‰

œ œ

œ

œ .œ œ œb œ

œ œn œb

j

œb œœ

j

œœ œ

œ œ

œn œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

20 j

œœ ˙n œb

œ

œ

œ œb

J

œA

œ

J

œ œœ œb

œ

œ œ œ œ

œA œ œ œ

J

œœN

œœ

œ œ œ

œb œœ# œ

( )

114


vulnerability. Beneath it, an augmented-sixth intensification of the standardPhrygian question-cadence communicates her urgency. There is, of course,no answer (see example 13).

Ah, di chi mi fideròSe tu m’ingann’?

Ah, in whom shall I trustIf you deceive me?

What follows must, by logic both formal and emotional, supply some re-lief from this extreme pitch of feeling. Dido will lapse into sad reflection.


B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

23

J

œn

œ

J

œ œb œœn œ œ

B

Œ

˙ œn

w

.œ

œ

œ œ

œn œ œ œ œœb œ œ

œ ˙œ

w

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

25 œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

œœ

œ

œ œœ

œ œ

j

œœ

œ

œœ

œ œ

B

?

b

b

b

b

b

b

27

œœœ

œœœœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ#

œ¯

œœ œ

œœ

œ œ œb

œ

œœ œ œ œ

œœ œ œ

≈

œœ œn

J

œ

≈

œœ œ

œœn œ

œœ

œb œœn œ

œœ

œ

U

U

˙

U

œ#œ

Ó

˙

U

Ó


B b

b

b

w

Ah

œ œ œ œ œ

di chi mi

.œ

J

œ œ

‰

J

œ

U

fi - - -de rò, Se

.œn

J

œ œ Œ

tu m’in gann’?

Example 13. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 5–8 to words from Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata.

In bidding you goodbyeI would lose my life;I could not liveAmong such sorrows.1

And what better material to accomplish such reflection than something wehave heard before (CD track 26)?

The resemblance is unmistakable: bar 9 gives us the key, the tessitura, andthe melodic contour of the anti-reprise at bar 35 of the first movement (com-pare CD track 22). It is even subject to the same placement of the left hand.Inter-movement returns like this are not the usual stuff of eighteenth-centurysonatas, but this one has a para-dramatic aptness. The first movement’s puz-zling anti-reprise now takes its place as a foreshadowing of Dido’s wretchedfate. In a tonality borrowed from an unthinkable future, it expresses artlesstenderness and candor: are these qualities not the heart of love as it is lived,the very stuff of human connection? And are they not just the sort of mem-ories to which an abandoned lover would helplessly, hopelessly return? In-deed, Dido continues to dwell within their gestural and harmonic orbit, firstwith exquisite delicacy (bars 11–12), then with increasing obsession (bars13–16; CD track 27). She subsides in apparent resignation in bar 17, only tobreak out again in lamentations so extravagant that she seems to have losther reason: sob throngs upon sob, chromaticism upon chromaticism; sheinterrupts herself with a near-shriek, modulations abort themselves (bars18–23; CD track 28).

I go . . . but where? Oh God!I stay . . . but then . . . what will I do?Must I then dieWithout finding pity?And is there such cowardice in my breast?2

In bar 23 the harmony rights itself back toward C minor, but with a suddenchill: by placing the clef change on the pivotal G, Boccherini signals a newthumb-position, and the cool hardness of thumb tone here takes on a fright-ening connotation. Dido has made up her mind (CD track 29).

No, no, may I die . . .

—and thus her last, passing quotation of the galant melody in the secondhalf of bar 24 has become an imprecation—

. . . and may the faithless AeneasTake with him on his journeyThe deathly omen of my fate.3

The movement closes with a half-cadence on G. It would be a strangesonata indeed, as it would be a strange opera, that did not resolve the ten-sions of its early events in its late ones; even Metastasio’s terrifying rendition


of Didone’s suicide is followed by a serenely distanced licenza. Thus this half-cadence poises us to hear something extravert, preferably something un-complicated—and Boccherini delivers it (see example 14; CD track 30).

Not just uncomplicated, but rather fixed; the rondo theme of the thirdmovement is registrally limited and very repetitive, substituting a flurry ofminimally directional motion for any memorable shape. It is completely un-singable: the ghost of Dido’s uncomfortable vocality has been exorcized en-tirely. But so has any connection to sensibilité. It is not only her agony thathas been obliterated, but any memory of her tenderness as well.

The exorcism is both sonic and visual. The passage must be executed withthe left thumb once again set on the original bar-fifth C–G (and here therereally is no choice; any other fingering would be perverse). Hammer-like,the fingers of that hand strike and release the string rapidly in order to enun-ciate the tune around the fixed thumb pitches. The left hand position man-dates rapid, repeated string-crossings, for which the cellist’s right arm mustbe articulated at the elbow, so that its upper and lower halves operate in op-posite directions in relation to that central fulcrum. Every cellist will workthis out slightly differently (some might prefer the chief articulation to oc-cur at the right wrist), but it is certain to produce a visible effect of constraintas well as a segmented, akimbo angularity, anathema to the sensible ideal ofphysical softness, and to the pantomime ideal of a unified, reactive, expres-sive body. The rondo theme mechanizes the player’s body in an explicitlytheatrical way, forcing it to visibly mimic hammers, levers, fulcrums. The op-erative image is not even human, but rather the escapement in a clock, orperhaps the rapid shuttle of an automatic brocade-loom, its fixed set of mo-tions producing a handsome if formulaic texture.

Rondos by their very structure further analogize the theater, but they doso in a way that is nearly the inverse of how a first movement behaves. There,the opening idea is readily, traditionally, and fruitfully identified with theprotagonist. But in a rondo it recurs an indeterminate number of times—something no protagonist would ever do; in music no less than in drama,there is above all a specific significance to his or her every appearance. (Onehas only to look at the first movement of this very sonata to see this princi-ple at work.) In rondos the opening idea functions mainly to contain theepisodes, becoming in the process a kind of frame or proscenium. By thisanalogy, it is the episodes that emerge as the real matter in question, thecharacters or events of the drama.

In the second episode of Boccherini’s rondo, at bar 108, some brusque C-minor gestures introduce a very peculiar character. It may take a few secondsto recognize her (CD track 31).4 Although her melodic and harmonic lin-eaments and her tessitura are identical, we had every reason to believe thatwe would never see or hear from her again. Is this an invitation to nostalgia?An impossible reunion? We hardly know, for she is clothed in consummatestrangeness. The passage is marked a punta d’arco al ponte e piano (strisc.):


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this last word, indistinct in the manuscript, could mean either strisciato, slid-ing, or, if strasc., strascinato, dragged: thus, “at the point of the bow, at thebridge, and softly (sliding)/(dragged).”5 Follow this extraordinary concate-nation of directions, and you get a glassy, choked, and distant tone, and anotably stilted execution on account of the restriction on the amount of bow.This character has acquired an actively unpleasant edge through the brittleglassiness of the ponticello tone, as well as a precisely scripted gestural con-straint or awkwardness. If this is nostalgia, it plays as somehow contaminated,distanced from itself, possibly (and most unsentimentally) ironic.

Now the episode is striking enough by itself. That it is ostensibly containedby the blithely mechanical rondo theme amounts to a twist of the knife. Therondo has framed the executant to the listener-observer as a quasi-automa-ton. When she comes to execute reminiscence in this episode, the questionmust arise as to how such a creature can feel anything resembling nostalgia.This question is then positively begged by the overdetermined grotesquerieof the ponticello and the sliding or dragging. Which is this cellist’s true na-ture, then, man-machine or sensible kindred spirit? Which state is her gen-uine one, which one an actorly assumption? Recourse to the player’s ownexperience will not be of much help in answering these questions: she is dis-tanced from her own body in the rondo by the necessity of segmenting it inorder to execute the theme, and from her capacity to feel by the constraintsof the elaborate and uncomfortable performance directions. Even as we puz-zle over her nature, in bar 152 she exits as abruptly as she had entered. Thereare a few more brusque gestures in C minor—as if a curtain had closed uponher somewhat unceremoniously—and from there all is well to the end ofthe sonata: it is cheerful in affect, entirely unsurprising in form, appealinglybrilliant in execution, the final, flashy gestures erasing any lingering ques-tions with sheer panache.

Except, except, except. There has simply been too much strangeness in thispiece, and that strangeness too clearly intentional, for our questions to van-ish smiling into a tonic cadence. To mention only two, and on very differ-ent planes: Was the cyclic use of themes between movements, by no means


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common practice during this period, an isolated experiment? And what wasBoccherini doing, arch-sensible composer and sublimated tragedian that Ihave averred him to be, by so courting irony and alienation?

The cyclicity was no isolated experiment. Several Boccherini scholars haveaddressed his experiments with it in every genre of instrumental music; heuses it more, and more consistently and inventively, than any other composerof his generation. Stanley Sadie offers a typology of Boccherini’s many cyclicusages: “The linking of two movements with a common slow introduction;elsewhere entire movements or sections of movements are repeated, mostusually so that a fast movement already heard reappears as a finale, or sothat a central movement is presented with the same music following as pre-ceding it. Sometimes even more complex schemes appear.”6

Such devices are uncommon in the sonatas, however. I know of only oneother example of full-fledged cyclicity in these works, the Sonata G. 569, alsoin C major. In this piece a peculiar plan unfolds around a stately slow intro-duction and a gaily tripping rondo theme. Each of these two ideas reappearscyclically—the slow one several times—during the course of the sonata; butthe “unity” so produced ends up sabotaging the sonata’s very viability withinits genre, because of a problem nested in the allegro tune. By virtue of be-ing a rondo theme, it is already thoroughly dedicated to multiple reap-pearances. Its further, cyclic reappearance after two intervening movementsinitiates a second complete rondo movement built upon the same idea. Thusthe whole concept of rondo has proliferated, overrun its boundaries, andtaken over the piece; there is no conventional first-movement form at all.On this basis—ironically, the basis of excessive unification—some period lis-teners would have denied G. 569 any proper identity as a sonata and calledit a capriccio instead, acknowledging its uniqueness. I know of no other eigh-teenth-century instrumental piece with this feature.7

Such a witty plan differs in purpose, if not in subtlety, from the cyclic reap-pearances in G. 17. Both are essays in the complex effects of memory andexpectation upon the listener’s perceptions, and as such are obviously quitedeliberate; their multivalent complexity suggests that Boccherini could, whenhe wanted to, engage in a particular species of “cleverness” usually assignedto Haydn. But by and large he did not want to. In general, and notwith-standing these exercises, it does not appear that wit in itself—pinnacle ofself-consciousness, crown jewel of Enlightenment—interested Boccherinivery much. He may have written an unusual number of cyclic works, but theyform a relatively small part of his oeuvre. Much more typical of him is a cer-tain type of reappearance that is ill served by the term “cyclic”; rather, I wouldcall it an art of recycling. Very often, Boccherini shares themes and passagesbetween entirely different works; genre is no obstacle, nor the extent of therecycling, which can vary a good deal. The one factor that he usually retainsas a constant is key. The first theme of the Sonata in A Major, G. 13, for ex-


ample, appears as the first theme of the Concerto in A Major, G. 475, while,as noted by Christian Speck, there is a similarity between the beginning ofthe C-minor second movement of the Sonata in C Major, G. 17 (discussedabove), and that of the C-minor second movement of the String Trio in FMajor, G. 95.

Another, more extended and more complex example of this sort of in-ter-generic recycling, noted by Gérard, can be found in the correspondencebetween the jaunty opening theme of the second movement of the Sonatain A Major, G. 4, the first movement of the Sextet in C Major, G. 466, andthe concert aria (aria accademica) in BbMajor, “Se d’un amor tiranno,” G. 557.Here even the usual commonality of key has been abandoned. Boccherinidates the sextet 1773 in his catalog; Gérard, reading thematic association astemporal, dates the sonata and the aria to around the same time. This asso-ciation is reinforced, and a further chronology for it suggested, by FriedrichLippmann’s theories of the influence of metric verse upon melodic con-struction in instrumental music. The strong but fluid pulse of the settenari(seven-syllable lines) of G. 557 was by far the most popular metric choiceamong authors of Metastasian-style libretti. Its typical association with cer-tain rhythmic configurations in melodies, exhaustively documented by Lipp-mann, would have been kinesthetically ingrained for Boccherini, as for allcomposers of his generation, through years of exposure to opera seria. It islogical and elegant to infer from this that the aria came first.8

In other cases, a theme or passage introduced in one movement of a workreappears in a subsequent movement; but a main idea may reappear as asubsidiary one, or vice versa. In the Sonata in G Major, G. 5, for instance,the material in question is neither the main nor the secondary idea, but anentirely new tune, differing in affect from everything else in the movement,which appears briefly in the second half shortly after the reprise (see example15a). Something quite like it opens the ensuing Largo; but the resemblanceis never reiterated nor confirmed, so that its affectual residue is at best fleet-ing (see example 15b).9

Striking examples of both inter-generic and inter-movement recycling maybe found in the Sonata in EbMajor, fuori catalogo, the first movement of whichI discussed in detail in chapter 1. Rich and interesting as that first movementmay be, the emotional and technical showpiece of the sonata as a whole is itsprofoundly dramatic C-minor slow movement (CD track 32). Boccherini usedthe opening theme of this movement more or less verbatim in the slow move-ment of the Sinfonia in C Major for large orchestra, G. 491, of 1770. There,however, it does not constitute the main theme of the movement, but is thebasis for an extended excursion upon an unprecedented theme by the solocello. The player who is fortunate enough to be acquainted with both worksmay well find that there is interpretational “bleed-through”: the immenseearnestness of the sonata will turn the rather conventional pompousness of


the sinfonia movement toward deeply serious reflection, while the memoryof the symphonic setting will inflect subsequent renditions of the sonata withan element of grandeur. In cases like this, any firmly established chronologywould be a hindrance upon the play of interpretational association.

After the hair-tearing intensity of the sonata’s slow movement, the inno-cence of the opening idea of the third movement might at first seem feck-less (CD track 33). But reflection proves it otherwise. This theme is itself areminiscence of that memorable “celestial” event at bar 45 of the first move-ment, where the tonic harmony returned, clothed in an unprecedentedtheme (see example 2; CD track 34). Through this delicate piece of recy-cling, Boccherini inflects expectation with memory, very much as he doesthroughout the Sonata G. 17. A formal incongruity—an inexplicable mo-ment, however lovely—reappears, clothed conventionally as a principaltheme. Galatea has been dressed and taught manners. She legitimates her-self through “hindsight”; but her very nature is infected by the prodigy ofher birth. She has the haunting quality of a déjà vu: we might call this Boc-cherini’s art of the déjà entendu.

I would propose yet a third category of recycling in Boccherini’s music,one which is even more fleeting, and yet more endemic. This involves thereiteration of material that, while striking, is not properly speaking thematicat all, but transitional. A modulating passage, a reiterative chunk tossed into fill out periodicity, the offhand figuration that closes a phrase—passagesof this sort, sometimes amounting to no more than half a bar, reappear inmany different works. Lacking the logic of a derivation from poetic meter,


B?##cc

.œpiano

œ .œ œ œ œ#.œ œ .œ ‰ Jœ ‰!̇ !̇

.œ œ .œ œ œ œ.œ œ .œ!̇ Jœ œ Jœ

vc.

basso

50

Allegro militare

Example 15a. Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, i (Allegro militare), bars 50–51.

B?##œ œ œ œ œ# œ 6œ œ œ œ œ œ œnœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

vc.

basso

Largo

Example 15b. Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, ii (Largo), opening.

lacking even the definition of being a complete idea, no one such passagecan reasonably claim primogeniture over another. The recurrences seem al-most accidental. And yet one notices them, playing the sonatas. They are aconstant and appealing feature of learning this body of work.

I think it is the fact that one notices these shared traits while playing thatis, in the end, the key to their meaning. They are not accidental at all, butneither are they conscious or self-conscious in the same way that a cyclic re-appearance is. They represent not Boccherini’s dispositio—the deliberate ar-rangement of consciously invented material for an oration or a composition—but his actio, his delivery of it. They represent the contribution of his hand,of the gestures that produce characteristic patterns of melodic and rhyth-mic figuration, the bodily means by which Boccherini approached his in-strument. These moments within the sonatas, like Tiepolo’s ink drawings,“exhibit the process of their making.”10 And in the sonatas above all, thatmaking was grounded in and referred to Boccherini’s own virtuosity.

A hand, even a virtuosic hand, makes music rather differently than a con-scious intellect, and always somewhat independently from the ear. The stakesare different; ease, familiarity, pleasure are paramount. Left to their own de-vices, hands will tend to reiterate certain familiar patterns many, many times.(To offer one small example of this: in my orchestra days, I used to identifydifferent oboists by the melodic patterns they played when testing out reeds.Each had his own, and never varied it.) Released from the exigencies of aparticular inventio, negotiating the transitional space before the next one,Boccherini resorted to his hands’ memory of what had worked well in a sim-ilar place before—and then, remarkably, he wrote it down.

We cannot use such a mode of creation for the dating or periodization ofworks; hands remember too readily, and too capriciously, across five or fiftyyears. But we can use it to suggest an alternative to teleological models ofartistic development. In certain cases, with certain artists, it seems that idiomis the shaping force in creation, as much as or more than any putative progresstoward innovation, or greater complexity, or transcendence.

This word idiom and the delicate tangle of concepts and questions it en-trains are deserving of a little scrutiny. The Greek combining form idio- de-notes any native property: “own, personal, private, peculiar, separate, dis-tinct.”11 In European languages, nouns deriving from the Greek noun formidioma generally refer directly to language itself (e.g., the Spanish idioma,“the common tongue, proper and particular to any nation”).12 But someclosely related forms may also take on different nuances emphasizing thequality of distinctness, whether of a whole language (e.g., the French idio-tisme, “a manner of speaking adapted to the proper genius of a particularlanguage”),13 as manifested in dialect (e.g., the Spanish idiotismo, “the in-flection of any verb, particular construction of some phrase or particle,which has some irregularity, and does not follow the general rule of the na-


tion; rather, it is used only in some province or part thereof”),14 or as man-ifested in general comportment (e.g., the Spanish idioteo/a, “proper, private,singular. From the Greek idiotetos, which means property, or the natureproper to every thing”).15 We cannot help but see the loaded word idiot peer-ing out from these forms, which have no current equivalent in English. Theassociation of peculiarity with stupidity or social incompetence is not new—nor is it unique to English: the primary definition of idiotismo given in the1726 Diccionario de la lengua castellana is “the universality of the ignorant,or idiots.”16

As a creative principle, the word imposes certain restraints. In musicalworks driven by idiotism, the composer’s process would involve the presen-tation of his own, personal, private, peculiar, separate, distinct mode of ut-terance, its distinctness not necessarily deriving from any generally consti-tuted standard of originality or novelty, but from a particularly constitutedone made up of the utterer’s own irreducible habits. Within the world atlarge, this might be received as proof either of his idiocy, or of his genius—genius being, by some lights, the most advanced state of virtue.17

Idiotism is by its nature untranslatable: “distanced from ordinary usages,or from the general laws of language . . . incommunicable to any other id-iom.”18 If models of progress or development can even be applied to this asa compositional process, I propose that they would tend toward precisely thesort of economizing and self-confirming practices that we see in Boccherini’svirtuoso music: a lifelong finding, testing, and proving of those ideas andgestures that sum up the thinker, the gesturer, to himself.19 If historical in-quiry can be applied to idiomatic process, it will just as surely tend towardan elucidation of how selfhood was constituted during the period and theplaces involved, as even my brief etymological excursion suggests.

Yet idiomatic creation need not devolve to the idiocy of solipsism. As aform of self-portraiture, it can be moving indeed: a faithful rendering ofquirks and asymmetries, of the marks of life’s passage upon a single coun-tenance, ultimately representing to us that tender and awful moment of theself ’s self-recognition in the face of its own evanescence.

the sonatas within boccherini’s oeuvre

Boccherini had composed energetically in the years prior to being hired byDon Luis de Borbón in 1770, and since he was primarily an itinerant virtu-oso during this period, his early output is rich in music for solo cello. Gérardestimates that Boccherini had written a hundred works by 1770, includingtwenty-four sonatas for solo cello and basso, and eight or nine concerti forcello and orchestra.20 Christian Speck is of the opinion that more sonatas,dating from the composer’s very early years in Vienna, are to be found inmonastery archives at Seitensetten in Austria.21 These numbers are neces-


sarily conjectural, because although Boccherini kept a catalog of his ownworks from 1760, he omitted from it his concerti, cello sonatas, and vocalmusic.22

Why such a substantial omission from what was otherwise a meticulouscatalog? Gérard explains it by saying that Boccherini “reserved [theseworks] for his own use”;23 this is reinforced by a perusal of the offerings ofany major concert series of the day—the Viennese Academien, the Con-certs Spirituels, the Hanover Square concerts in London—from which it isclear that an instrumental virtuoso by definition performed his or her owncompositions. It is useful to assume, then, that Boccherini did not considerthese omitted pieces as “works” in the sense we understand today, but ratheras accessories to performance, essentially personal and circumstantial: ve-hicles. This would not have been a peculiar attitude. In the first half of theeighteenth century, virtuoso concerti and sonatas “circulated, if they cir-culated at all, in manuscript parts,”24 with publication gradually becominga norm for such music only in the second half of the century. This latterperiod, the period of Boccherini’s working life, saw a profound metamor-phosis in the concept of a composition from an irreproducible, character-istic event—“sonata” in the exact sense of “played,” “concerto” in the senseof “given in concert”—to the reproducible, reinterpretable “thing” we calla work.25

In the case of virtuoso music this metamorphosis was at best incomplete;given the very nature of such music, it is not really completable. Nowhere isthe liminal status of virtuoso music better demonstrated than in opera, whichwas emblematic of the inextricable relation of composed work to performedversion.

In a traditional eighteenth-century view—and not just an Italian one—the veryidentity of an opera rested on performers and performative occasions. WhenBurney wrote his General History of Music in the 1780s, he identified airs fromoperas composed sixty and seventy years earlier by their singers. Of Handeland Rolli’s Ricardo primo, Ré d’Inghilterra from 1727 he wrote, “The first air forCuzzoni . . . is plaintive, pleasing, and original. And the second . . . for Faustina,is the most agreeable song of execution of the times.”26

This attitude persisted through and beyond the period of the genesis ofthe “work-concept.” Indeed, it still thrives: concertgoers and consumersof recordings speak, with an affectionate fetishism very similar to Burney’s,of “Callas’s Iphigénie,” “Schnabel’s Pathétique,” “Bylsma’s Boccherini.” Such apersistence reflects a common understanding of musical events that has con-tinued to exist apart from and simultaneously with the painfully patricianKantian separation of the work-ideal from its specific instantiation; it sug-gests that, to the great majority of people who engage with music in any way,the idea of separating it from its performance is absurd.


virtuosi

For all that a performer-centered understanding of music may have beenand may still be the commonest (not to say most commonsensical) view, thenature of those performers was a fiercely contested topic in the eighteenthcentury. The contests took place at every imaginable level, from the mostquotidian to the airiest regions of philosophy; it would not be off the markto say that performance, and especially performance as personified in thevirtuoso, was one of the most intense cultural preoccupations of Boccherini’sday. It is in this fraught context that his exquisite play with form and idiomassumes its full importance.

Some typical quotidian contests are implied in the differences betweenBoccherini’s two oil portraits, reproduced in chapter 2. In the first, he isplaying his cello. This identifies him as an instrumentalist version of whatin the Middle Ages would have been called a cantor, a singer or choral di-rector, but more fundamentally, a musician physically engaged in the pro-duction of music. From the Middle Ages also came the routine presump-tion that cantores have little perspective on what it is they are doing. Theylack theoretical knowledge, and this makes them unfit to engage in poiesis,creation. They are a kind of para-artist. In the second portrait, Boccheriniappears before us cello-less with inscribed sheets of music paper, therebyidentified as the opposite number of the cantor, the musicus, the expert, con-cerned with the textual aspects of music, aware of its theory and its effects,and thus licensed to create.

This ancient distinction still operated pervasively and powerfully in thelives of eighteenth-century musicians. We can see it in the payroll recordsfor Boccherini’s first post in Spain. In 1770 Boccherini was hired by the In-fante Don Luis as “violón y compositor”—that is, for his skills as both cantorand musicus—at the rate of 14,000 reales de vellón a year, with a raise to 18,000in 1772. This combination of skills placed his pay well above that of the other,non-composing musicians in the establishment, the most senior of whom,the violist Francisco Font, earned 9,000 reales de vellón a year. Furthermore,in 1784, when Boccherini was finally appointed Don Luis’s “Compositor deMúsica,” a title that denotes a full-fledged musicus, his contract stipulated thathe receive an additional 12,000 a year just for compositions. Font and histhree sons, cantores lifelong, received cautious raises, but were obliged to sup-plement their earnings in the Infante’s household with such theatrical andorchestral work as they could scare up in Madrid.27

By making efforts to advance to the status of musicus—that is, a composerwith a handsome permanent appointment—Boccherini was doing no morethan any other ambitious young cantor of his time would have done. To noteonly the most obvious parallel, his career concerns resemble those of Mozart’searly manhood. But as with Mozart, the evidence of those efforts provided


by the compositions is both ambiguous and complex. In particular, the ex-tremely personal and idiomatic ways in which Boccherini kept execution andperformance central to his composerly thinking, and the degree of his crit-ical and financial success as a composer on these terms, confound the oldcantor-musicus divide. It is the virtuoso more than any other kind of musicianwho can confuse the separation, making clear that within that separationthere coils a paradox. For when an art is constituted in such a manner thatits performance is its chief glory and reason for being—its end—poiesis, mak-ing, collapses into phronesis, doing. The creation, the “thing made,” is the ac-tion itself.

Why should this matter? The stakes in the cantor-musicus distinction turnout to be high indeed, nothing less than the differentiation of life and art,ethics and esthetics. Poiesis is forever privileged, both materially (through thepayroll) and ethically: it is exempt from the restrictions and obligations ofthe moral life; it alone among human activities may freely subsume meansinto end. We know these stakes as vividly today as ever before. Treat life as ifit were art, take end as means, and you get not vivid expression but atrocity.Subject art to ethical rules and you get not the grandeur of human harmonybut censorship, shackles upon the spirit. A rubric for their distinction is noth-ing less than vital.

It may also be unattainable. This uncomfortable possibility emerges moreor less immediately, even if we take the whole discussion back quite a bit fur-ther than the Middle Ages. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes thedistinction when he speaks about art, poiesis: it is always other than phronesis,practical wisdom, knowing how to do, because we engage in it toward theend of making something. “Neither is acting making nor is making acting.”28

“While making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good actionitself is its end.”29 But in talking about life and how it is to be ethically lived,he muddies the distinction by characterizing human virtue specifically interms of artistic practice. He tells us that the two kinds of virtue, moral andintellectual, are acquired through habitual exercise, ethike; they exist in seedform in our natures, but we acquire them, activate them, become them, “byfirst exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts. . . . For the thingswe have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. menbecome builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too webecome just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave bydoing brave acts.”30 The curiously tautological, “bootstrap” quality of this con-struction of virtue comes close to self-contradiction, and yet it demonstratesAristotle’s keen attunement to the profound intrication of human nature,be it virtuous or lyre-playing, with performance.

Virtue is found in, and only in, its continued performance. It needs to keepbeing enacted; thus the virtuoso is obviously one in whom virtue is being en-acted with particular perfection. But is this right? Was Boccherini a more vir-


tuous man than Francisco Font, because he played with more facility and choseto compose? Aristotle would presumably have said, Yes; and the difference intheir pay inscribed just such an answer in the registers of social status. But ofcourse it is a central characteristic of the eighteenth century that thinkingpeople were increasingly constrained from drawing such conclusions.

virtuosity contra sensibilité

The culprit, in a sense, was the discrete, individual, feeling self, the newlyconceived common man, central player of both democracy and sensibilité.Both of these sciences are in the end anti-virtuosic; both locate human virtuein capacity rather than in performance of that capacity. The contradictionsthus generated are apparent in Rousseau’s 1754–63 Essai sur l’origine deslangues.31 Rousseau proposed a set of bodily markers of human virtue; butthey are painstakingly configured as capacities rather than performances.According to him (and pace Noverre and Angiolini!), gesture, although themost immediate form of communication, has at best a sporadic connectionto the heart and the imagination. Only expression through the voice (andits reception through sentire) can make available the full richness, the fullotherness, the virtue of another being. But this voice has certain stronglymarked peculiarities. Its utterances are “genuine” to the exact extent thatthey rely on those sounds which “emerge naturally from the throat”—thatis, they are minimally produced or performed. Complex vowels, diphthongs,and consonants “require attention and practice” and as such represent theinterventions and distancings of artifice.32 Rousseau’s idealized throat is openand uncomplicated, as transparent to passion as (he says) perfect languageis to its object. This candid melismatic language is characterized by its ef-fortlessness, and effortlessness is ever the marker of the “natural.” Anythingthat interferes with this throatliness—even the tongue, lips, or teeth—is “en-ervating,” distanced from original passion, or representing a lesser type ofpassion, where the highest and most “natural” passions are those of tender-ness, pleasure, and self-sufficiency. Thus, for instance, Rousseau character-izes anger as palate- and tongue-formed, while tenderness is glottal; and hecharacterizes the voice of deficient passion with words like rude, coarse, harsh,noisy, croaking, nasal, and muffled.

This whole idea of the relation between speaking and singing is, to put itmildly, physiologically idiosyncratic.33 In Western vocal technique, the actualdifference has less to do with any “openness” of the throat than with a degreeof sustained support or tension in diaphragm, larynx, and oral cavities; thepositions of these areas are held and maintained more or less consciously—and if anything, much less effortlessly, if we take muscle tone as a form of ef-fort, than in speaking, which can issue adequately from a much more vari-able range of tensions and bodily positions.34 What matters here, of course,


is not accurate physiology so much as the eighteenth-century conventionsof bodily imaging that were focused in Rousseau’s influential account. Hisidea of vocal openness and indolence concentrates the sensible values of bod-ily flexibility, softness, and penetrability into a single act—arguably the cen-tral act of the performing arts, that of voicing the passions—and it does soby making an elaborate end-run around the very possibility of virtuosity,indeed of performance in any conceivable sense.

For Rousseau, writing in Paris but forever and congenitally at odds withhis surroundings, everything genuine and passionate resided in the physi-ologies and languages of “southern lands”—his code for Italians—while coldartifice and harsh croaking characterized “northerners”—that is, French-men, and most particularly his anathema Rameau. His national polarizationof genuineness and artifice was exactly the reverse of that of Noverre, whopresented these polarities in a manner more typical for a Frenchman, andfoundational to reform choreography: Italian = virtuosic, display-oriented,visual, and therefore superficial; French (by implication) = feeling-oriented,audible, and intrinsic.35 Noverre offers the following anecdote.

Taste is seldom compatible with difficult exertions. . . . I consider these curi-ous and difficult passages, both in music and dancing, as a mere jargon, ab-solutely foreign and superfluous in these arts; whose voice should be pathetic,as always addressed to the heart: their proper language is the language of sen-timent; it is universally expressive and seducing, as it is universally understood.

Such a performer on the violin, you tell me is an admirable one; but I haveno satisfaction in his performance; he affords me no pleasure, nor creates inme the least sensation. . . .

An Italian performer, such as I have described comes to Paris; all the worldruns after him, though nobody understands him, and he becomes celebratedfor a prodigy. Their ears have enjoyed no satisfaction in his performance; norhas his music given them the least pleasure; but their eyes have been amused;he handles the bow with much address, and his fingers run with amazing celer-ity from the neck to the bridge of his instrument: he accompanies all thesedexterities with a thousand aukward [sic] distortions of his body, and seems tosay to the audience, “Gentlemen, look at me, but do not listen to me;—thispassage is extremely difficult; it will not flatter your ear, but it will make a verygreat noise: and I have been studying it these twenty years!” Plaudits arise from allparts of the theatre, and though he doubtless exercises his fingers very dex-trously, yet this automaton, this piece of machinery, receives all that approba-tion which is constantly refused to a French Performer.36

Whatever their conflicting nationalistic biases, Noverre’s and Rousseau’saccounts are fundamentally linked by their emphasis on pathos, the “addressto the heart” via the ears and the understanding, which is not optional. Inits absence, not only the merit of the performance but the very humanity ofthe performer is called in question: he croaks, he contorts, he is an “homme


machine et sans tête,” an automaton.37 We have already seen that Angiolini,to whom pathos was equally central, went so far as to refer to an athletic andextraverted physical virtuosity as the grotesque style.

In interpreting virtuosity as grotesquerie, automatism, or foreignness, oneaccomplishes a certain distancing from it, a location of its seductive wondersinto categories where human feeling is presumed to be distorted or void. BothNoverre’s violinist and Angiolini’s “buffoons” destroy sentiment throughamazement, amazement specifically provoked by the visibility of their vir-tuosic bodies: “Gentlemen, look at me, but do not listen to me.” Rousseau’slocation of expressive authenticity in a vocal process that is fundamentallyinvisible is no accident. In the Dictionnaire de musique of 1768, he makes re-peated identifications of visuality with superficiality or expressive inadequacy.It is only in moving past the seen, Rousseau asserts, that poiesis, true creation,can take place.

Execution . . . depends particularly on two things: first, [on] a perfect knowl-edge of the touch, and fingering of his instrument; and, secondly, [on] a longcustom in reading music, and phrasing it at sight; for while we see separatenotes, we always hesitate in the pronunciation; we acquire a great facility inexecution only by uniting them in the common sense which they ought to form,and in placing the thing itself in place of the sign.38

Famously, it is the written, “the sign,” that epitomizes Rousseau’s anti-visuality. If for Rousseau the pronunciation of consonants represented a de-volution from the pure melisma of passion, the codification of sound intowritten symbols was a final, fatal loss of artistic vitality. This is a perfect in-version of the ancient system of values inscribed by Boccherini’s portraitsand career, according to which the musicus was explicitly privileged throughhis production of written and, ultimately, published works.

In characterizing virtuosity as Other, these high-minded French-speakingwriters pointed directly at the sources of its power over late eighteenth-centuryminds. To audiences of this period, virtuosity was indeed the perfect anti-thesis of sensibilité, for by its nature it makes the absorptive maneuver impos-sible. However spiced by wonder and pleasure, virtuosity inevitably confrontsthe watcher with the gulf of their difference from the watched; as such it isnot far from alienation, and it is to the operations and typology of alienation,and its threat to Enlightenment visions of human commonality, that all thesecharacterizations of virtuosity speak. The huge popularity of virtuosic per-formances of all types during the eighteenth century—indeed it was a pe-riod in which many new kinds of virtuosity were invented or perfected—suggests that alienation exercised a seductive force every bit as powerful assensible commonality. Creature of his age, Boccherini of course knew this;his sonatas show just how ingenious he was in using his own virtuosity as ameans to explore it.


the grotesque

There was, of course, a precedent for such virtuosity in pantomime dance,where as we have seen, it had specific connotations. The grotesque danceris obviously an impressive athlete in Angiolini’s account; we are moved toastonishment at his daring leaps. Sensible attempts to identify with him re-sult in our fearing for his safety. That he does not fall, does not break his an-kle, is perhaps a source of relief, but beyond this rudimentary exercise inabsorption we cannot go with him. He is too strange to us; and his strange-ness lies in what he does with his body—things we cannot do, would not wantto do, did not know were possible, find positively distorted or disturbing—and by the very same token, thrilling. The thrill is that of being confrontedby difference. What sort of body can this be? Can it possibly be natural? Thuscarefully administered and tightly controlled, our fear of difference is ofcourse also a delicious attraction.

At the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna where Luigi and Leopoldo Bocche-rini worked, little else was presented in the way of dance but this style. Themost comprehensive exhibition of grotesque virtuosity available duringBoccherini’s lifetime, however, was undoubtedly provided by the boulevardtheaters of Paris, in which the gamut of human physical possibility was welland truly run—tightrope dancers, fire-swallowers, contortionists, androgy-nes. On another level, when little Wolfgang Mozart appeared in Paris for thePrince de Conti in 1764, his hosts delighted in administering tests to theboy. They placed a kerchief over the keys, contrived a variety of dictation ormemory exercises for him, and made him play extremely difficult music atsight. This gave Mozart’s childhood performances what Maynard Solomonhas called a “vaudeville character,”39 led to regular speculation as to whetherthe boy was a species of automaton, and further attests to the period’s ap-petite for prodigies, for feats that exceeded what had previously beenthought possible.40 The corrales (public theaters) of Madrid catered to a sim-ilar taste in Spanish audiences. A well-developed appetite for illusion hadlong been cultivated in an entire genre of magic plays, while acrobats per-formed stunts between theatrical works or the acts thereof. But it was on thestreets of Madrid that some the most vivid grotesquerie of the entire eigh-teenth century could be found (see figure 8).

On Ash Wednesday . . . a burlesque procession takes place in Madrid. . . . Fromthe morning onward, bands of grotesquely masked boys and alluring girls in-vade the streets, leaping and frolicking about. All day long the city is overrunby these boisterous and insolent hordes. In the evening, a procession forms.At its head, three traditional characters: Uncle Chispas, rolling his raging eyesbeneath his mask; the girl Chusca, wild and provocative; Juanillo, hunched inhis cloak and with the air of the court executioner. Behind them, a giganticmannequin made of straw, dressed from head to foot—the pelele, on which is


Figure 8. Francisco de Goya, El entierro de la sardina, 1812–19. Oil on canvas.Museo de la Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid.

hung a small sardine. After him, jumping, shouting, and overflowing withpranks (lazzi), come all the apprentices, shopkeepers’ dwarves, porters, watercarriers, unemployed valets, fruit and vegetable merchants, fishwives, shopgirls,and loose women of the capital. They are all dressed up, some in grimacingmasks, others in penitents’ hoods, others still in pointed san benitos [the longpeaked caps worn by those accused by the Inquisition]. In the glimmer of thetorches, amid the noise of firecrackers, to the dull beating of zambombas [earth-enware drums] . . . all these disarticulated puppets, paper kites floating abovethem, tumble noisily down to the Puerto de Toledo [one of Madrid’s city gates],pass through it, and once outside solemnly bury the sardine in the earth, whileabove them the pelele burns on a stake.41

The grotesque was linked to the Spanish aristocracy’s fascination with ma-jismo. María Josefa Pimentel, Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna andBoccherini’s employer for a few years in the later 1780s, seems to have hada particular taste for it. It was she who commissioned what is one of the mostfamous repositories of grotesque imagery in Western culture, Goya’s 1799Caprichos. Goya, for his part, used the grotesque in an ironic manner, as ameans of social criticism. This is something Boccherini cannot be said to do—unless we expand the ambitus of such criticism to include any art in whichthe stability of Enlightenment selfhood is called, however circumspectly, intoquestion. Goya’s “Incómoda elegancia,” a study for an unengraved Capricho,is one of a series of drawings in which various members of Spanish societyface mirrors that contain distorted images (see figure 9). The gentleman’selegant, conventional dress, just like the conventions of sensibilité, or the for-mal impeccability of the rondo in Boccherini’s Sonata G. 17, is revealedthrough reflection as a site of extreme constraint and discomfort.42

Boccherini’s cello sonatas and a few of his quintets contain moments ofregistral prodigiousness that qualify as grotesque, simply by virtue of the factthat no one had written such high pitches for the cello before. For example,in the last movement of the Sonata in Bb Major, G. 565, the soloist arpeg-giates a G-minor harmony upward, and then upward again, seemingly un-able to stop himself; he ends on a g999 above the staff in treble clef, well offthe end of an eighteenth-century fingerboard. (There is an irresistible like-ness between the left hand at this moment and an acrobat walking a tight-rope.) This moment exceeds the tessitura of the rest of the piece by an oc-tave or more, and the tessitura “natural” to the instrument (which is to say,normal by mid-eighteenth-century standards) by at least two octaves. Whileit is not all that difficult to play, it is most certainly arresting to hear. At thesame time, Boccherini’s commitment to “serious” styles was strong enoughthat he never conflated such showmanship with his compositional mainidea. Thus passages of this type all share a similar positioning in the sonatas,quartets, and quintets that contain them, as climaxes within secondarythemes, followed by sizable silences (he sometimes marks the subsequent


Figure 9. Francisco de Goya, “Incómoda elegancia,” sketch for anunengraved Capricho, c. 1790. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo copyrightMuseo del Prado, Madrid.

rests aspettar molto, “wait a long time”). They mark an ongoing discourse,but never set its tone. The silences that follow these alarming excursions areopportunities for purest gestural dramatization: a slow retrieval of the lefthand (perhaps the right with it, for effect?) through the air at the end of thepassage, and the bringing of it back toward a normal playing position. Thusmight the cellist mime that gesture of astonishment made famous by DavidGarrick in his portrayal of Hamlet, while the cesura sonically mimes the si-lencing effect of such untoward statements upon discursive “business asusual.”

Moments like this are not common in Boccherini’s work, but they arememorable: they exceed any reasonable expectation. They also exceed thecapacity of the instrument to sound beautiful, and in this respect they par-ticipate in another feature of the grotesque, in which beauty is explicitly per-verted as an esthetic standard. So too is another esthetic ideal, that of natu-ralness: and certainly, even when played masterfully, such passages exceedthe capacity of the instrument to sound “like itself.” Here one might betempted to invoke that eighteenth-century paradigm of altered vocality andsublimated grotesquerie, the castrato; but these passages go well beyond eventhat vocal range. This is an Ovidian transformation, not into an altered hu-man but into some other sort of creature altogether: a most unlikely bird.(In this vein, Voltaire is said to have remarked to Boccherini’s contempo-rary Jean-Louis Duport, also a virtuoso in the instrument’s upper registers,“Sir, you make me believe in miracles: you know how to turn an ox into anightingale.”)43

Other examples of this sort of cellistic metamorphosis occur in passageswritten entirely in natural harmonics. In the passage shown in example 16,which is embedded in a movement entitled “I pastori e li cacciatori,” the firstcello and viola are, presumably, the hunters. They are oddly hoarse and sub-stanceless hunters, however, on account of the passage being situated amongrather high harmonics on the cello’s bottom strings. (The viola is playingnormally, but will presumably seek to blend with the cello timbre.) We arestruck by how unlike itself the instrument sounds, as much as by any horn-like qualities.44

This sort of passage is fairly easy to play; the striking effect is not stronglytied to any athletic level of executional prowess. Its grotesquerie, then, issomewhat independent of virtuosity, at least in the traditional musical senseof that word. But virtuosity it is nevertheless: this is the virtuosity of the ac-tor, whose prowess and whose unnaturalness constitute themselves throughhis doubleness, the assumption of personae not his own, and around whosefigure the problem of alienation crystallized most urgently in the eighteenthcentury.

Doubleness is but a hair’s breadth away from duplicity; the moral implica-tions of this state are not difficult to follow. One might go so far as to suggest


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Example 16. String Quintet in D Major, op. 11, no. 6, “L’uccelliera,” G. 276, ii (Allegro [I pastori e li cacciatori]), bars 37–49, viola, cello 1, cello 2.

that its apotheosis in the alienated nature of the great player constitutes agrotesque on the level of morality; and one would find this very suggestionbodied forth in the unforgettable protagonist of Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau,circa 1761. The Neveu is a virtuoso player, beyond a doubt. His single-handedmimicry of actors, prostitutes, singers, instrumentalists, entire opera com-panies, is wildly grotesque and uncannily vivid, all informed by an apparentabsorptive furor. But the tacit restriction of sensible absorption to “the mid-dle of society” is not for him. He throws himself with equal relish into high-flown tragedy and into the most contemptible qualities of human nature,making it ultimately impossible to determine his moral locus, and hence hissincerity. Thus this may not be absorption at all—or it is absorption in thewrong thing: his interlocutor finally bursts out in desperation, “Is this ironyor truthfulness?”—exactly the question we might pose to Boccherini in thesecond episode of the rondo of G. 17, when the first movement’s main ideamakes its stilted, distorted, shocking reappearance.

The trouble with admitting characters like Boccherini’s Dido-gargoyle orthe Neveu de Rameau to one’s music-critical banquet is that in with themblows the wind of doubt. In spite of ourselves we begin to wonder, even inthe heart of the most lucid sweetness: is this all it appears to be? Does theperformer mean it? (Will she mean it five minutes from now?) And if weask this about one of Boccherini’s most patently sensible practices, his ex-tremely delicate shadings of soft dynamics, we get a distinctly unsettling an-swer. In my discussion of this feature of Boccherini’s music in chapter 3, Isuggested that such intimate contextualities, fluctuating from moment to mo-ment, are invitations to the performer to embody sensibilité, developing “thatdisposition linked to weak organs, the result of a mobile diaphragm, a livelyimagination, delicate nerves, that is inclined to feel pity, to tremble, to ad-mire, to fear, to become agitated, to weep, to faint.”

To undo this assertion, full-fledged doubt is not even necessary, only care-ful scrutiny. Merely looked at a little more kinesthetically and a little lessRousseauistically, dolcissimo writing proves to embody a nearly complete dis-juncture between executional and receptive experience. On stringed in-struments, soft dynamics may give the velvety sound of sensible indolence,but producing them for extended stretches takes quite a bit of effort. Everygesture must be restrained at the source; momentum must be constantly in-hibited. The player’s general muscle tone will be much more tense than itis when playing full-out—just as the singer’s production of the Rousseau-vian melisma turns out to require careful placement and focus. There is noindolence here, no transparency, no naturalness. In fact, in contradistinc-tion to the comfortable state of a “natural” style of playing (such as one wouldexperience, say, in playing mezzo-forte, legato, in the alto range of the instru-ment), the experience of the physical production of soft dynamics closely


resembles that of certain unusual playing techniques—armonici, ponticello,col legno —of which Boccherini is likewise very fond, all of them involving adelicate backing-off, a distancing, a making-strange of the player’s habitualphysical contact with his instrument. In the case of dolcissimo, the discom-fort is not immediately audible to the listener. In the case of ponticello andits kin, it is. Executionally speaking, the heart of Boccherini’s sweetness turnsout to be an alienated state.

Thus does doubt blow in through the open door and chill our favoritedelicacies. In the minuet and trio pair of the Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no.3, G. 173, the minuet gives us Boccherini at his most genteel and ingratiat-ing (this is the Boccherini, we imagine, of Mendelssohn’s “peruke”). He hasmarked it piano and con grazia (CD track 35). The piece is gratefully written,each part nicely placed upon its individual instrument and the voicing amongthe four ensuring an easy clarity and resonance. In short, a pleasure to play,and also to hear; it seems to summon precisely that elusive aplomb after whichcountless dancing masters and earnest pupils had been striving throughoutthe century. It is followed, however, by a trio marked ponticello (CD track 36).Sul ponticello, “on the bridge,” is a special effect caused by bowing so close tothe bridge that the fundamental tone is eclipsed by its upper partials. It isdifficult to maintain, if only because of all the countless hours spent, earlyon in the process of framing one’s body to playing the instrument, in learn-ing not to do it. Boccherini seemingly dramatizes the physical rigidity re-quired in executing ponticello by awkward, rapid scurrying gestures. We exitthis after only a few bars, to begin a quintessential Boccherinian trajectoryof descent, marked dolce—but it descends and pulls into itself too gladly andtoo far, the first violin line becoming increasingly infested by flats, and thesupporting harmonies, as if wincing in protest, moving through three dif-ferent diminished-seventh chords in as many bars (CD track 37). The wholephrase crosses the line from le moelleux into a musical enactment of decay.Its juxtaposition with ponticello recurs several times in the course of the trio,until a cruel message is physically inscribed on both players and listeners:do not trust what feels soft and grateful.

Boccherini has carefully confined all of this bizzarria to a trio, a conven-tional site of alterity; but it is so very strange, it separates the players fromtheir accustomed ways with such subtle violence, that neither they nor wecan recover in time; alienation manages to infect the sweet little minuetupon its return (CD track 38). We cannot help it: this second time, the mark-ing con grazia now seems a bit much (is grace not sufficiently implied by theminuet type?), the repetitive gestures precious, the reiterated accents (fuss-ily marked poco FP in the parts) annoying. We notice a self-consciousnesswe missed the first time around: why, for instance, does Boccherini give usa thirteen-bar period in the first half of the minuet (and end the secondhalf with it as well), when he could very easily have kept it to a normative


twelve? Profound as it is, this alienation is not notated in any way; this is a“straight” reprise, indicated only by the abbreviation “D.C.” at the end ofthe trio.

the automatic and mechanical

At the Burgtheater during the period of the Boccherini family’s visits to Vi-enna even those events that were most tragic (in Angiolini’s definition, asantipodal to grotesque), which is to say the opere serie staged in observationof Imperial ceremonies, were rife with showy special effects created by stagemachines, whose dramatic function was to inspire a rather un-tragic amaze-ment. Nor was the work of Angiolini, Gluck, and other reformers themselvesever as distinct from matters of spectacle as their theoretical writings, andtheir posthumous reputations, might lead us to believe. Witness Karl Ditters’sdescription of the bewitching stage sets for Metastasio and Gluck’s 1754 com-edy Le cinesi:

Quaglio’s decorations were quite in the Chinese taste, and transparent. Work-ers in lacquer, carpenters and gilders had lavished all their resources uponthem, but their chief brilliancy depended on prismatic poles of glass, whichhad been polished by Bohemian craftsmen, and were carefully fitted into oneanother in empty places, previously soaked in coloured oils. No pen can de-scribe the surpassing and astounding brilliancy of these prisms when lit up byinnumerable lamps. The reader must imagine the reflected brilliancy of theazure-coloured meadows of lacquer, the glitter of the gilded foliage, and lastlythe rainbow-like colours repeated by hundreds of prisms, and flashing like dia-monds of the finest water. The most vivid fancy will fall short of the real magic.—And then Gluck’s god-like music!45

Here artisanship achieves the magical. But is it art? Were we to confrontDitters with this question, we would likely be greeted by bafflement; suchquestions, and the gulf between art and craft that they presuppose, acquireda gravitas during the nineteenth century that was alien to the eighteenth.For the most part, the marvels made possible through mechanical execution—in this case, the precision and expertise of those Bohemian craftsmen—wereenthusiastically welcomed into eighteenth-century esthetics for their capacityto promote the sense of wonder, and for the confirmation they gave to theEnlightenment’s swelling sense of confidence in human knowledge and hu-man attainment.

Incredibly elaborate stage machines were nothing new; they had been afeature of theatrical entertainments since ancient Greek times. Automata,too, had been designed and built for centuries.46 These fusions of technol-ogy with artistic purpose were continually refined, and achieved a certainpinnacle during the eighteenth century in the work of Jacques Vaucanson


(1709–82), a Parisian builder of automata, who created real wonders—mostfamously, a flute player that played tunes with the correct embouchure andfingerings.47 The same fascination was evident in Spain. In 1755 FernandoVI undertook to have several automata built for him—a “gabinete armónico”containing musical statues, and an “árbol de Diana,” a mechanical tree com-plete with singing birds.48

These enchanting creations were an efflorescence into art of Newtonianmechanics, that newly minted view of the universe and human nature withinit as one gigantic and splendidly regulated machine. Along with the grotesque,mechanism can be counted among anti-sensible currents of thought in theeighteenth century; but of the two it is mechanism that is likely to be themore difficult for us to comprehend. Some of us may be disturbed (as werea great many people in the eighteenth century) by its frank substitution ofmechanical laws for an animating divine principle. More of us, perhaps, willencounter ahistorical difficulties, finding oppressive rather than liberatorythe materialist presumption that all human actions and reactions can be re-duced to logical and mechanical explanations. Our view is shaped both byRomantic (that is, post-sensible) notions of ineffable selfhood, and by our post-industrial mistrust of machines. While we may not go so far as to regard themas “the poisonous engines that have blighted the modern landscape and de-humanized modern relations,”49 neither are we entirely comfortable with thedegree to which machines have intricated themselves into, and consequentlyshaped, the most intimate reaches of personhood and of art.

Newtonianism informed not only the remarkable creations of Quaglio andVaucanson, but, increasingly, many eighteenth-century understandings ofthe human body. On the level of medicine, it was a revolution, a decisive re-framing of nearly every basic principle in the ancient humoric model. Onthe level of music-making, Newtonian understandings of embodiment man-ifested themselves in the development of newly methodical, efficient ap-proaches to pedagogy; and metaphorically, as a new set of topoi concernedwith images and experiences of this efficiency. In England and France, par-ticularly, the late eighteenth century saw a huge increase in the productionand publication of instructional treatises for every instrument. Here me-chanical processes, not just of instruments but of the bodies operating them,were conceptualized and systematized; and here we find also a rebirth ofideals of individual bodily efficiency first explored in ancient Greece. Aris-totle and his contemporaries make use of the linked concepts of enkrateia,or self-mastery, an explicitly master-servant relation of conscious self to bod-ily sensation; and askesis, the systematic self-training of sensation and reac-tion into virtue (whence the English word ascetic). As all these ancient Greekwriters make clear by frequently employing horses or dogs as metaphors (or,in the case of Xenophon, by writing actual treatises on training these crea-tures), the conscious or master self employs askesis along exactly the same


lines as would the animal trainer, inculcating good habits through strategi-cally administered punishments and rewards.50

In the belle danse of the first half of the eighteenth century, dancers hadconfigured themselves toward carefully constructed generic ideals of beautyand “naturalness,” through which great effort was meticulously concealed.Newtonianism increasingly encouraged them to configure themselves to-ward an awareness of individual comfort, and a quite different naturalness,one based in the individual experience of ease and in the mechanical effi-ciency of movement. The London dancing master Giovanni Andrea Galliniarticulated this shift toward an increasing personalization of movement style:“Who does not know that almost every individual learner requires differ-ent instructions? The laying of a stress on some particular motion or airwhich may be proper to be recommended to one must be strictly forbiddento another.”51

The individual body, its unique conformation, its strengths and weak-nesses, was the point of departure for this new pedagogy. Its radical indi-vidualism modified and to some extent broke down the old classificationsof movement type and character; but it is important to remember that theruling concept—that of there being bodily ideals at all—was by no meansdestroyed. In many ways mechanism served to reinforce it the more subtlyand efficiently. Thus the dancing master, after studying his pupils’ anatom-ical peculiarities—their physical idiom, in a sense—was the better equippedto amend them toward the “perfections” they lacked, correcting their de-fects and reinforcing their advantages.

The master should observe whether some are weak in the knees and the in-steps or in one of these two said parts. For this he should use a remedy andmake them do a long daily exercise practicing walking around the room onlyon the balls of their feet, keeping the knee and instep stretched without anybend whatsoever and, thus exercising for a few hours daily, the weak parts willbe fortified.52

The sensations produced by walking around for “a few hours daily” at theextreme of tiptoe cannot be very far off those produced by some of the cor-rective measures of the old style of pedagogy, such as wearing a tight whale-bone corset. The difference is one of the degree of active participation ofthe body involved. The mechanistic dancer takes it upon herself to recon-figure her body through strategic exercise; there is an implication that be-cause such exercise is mechanically “correct” it will sooner or later come tofeel “fortified”: comfortable, right. The dancer will not need to don it as shewould a corset: she will feel unease at not doing it, for she has become it.Thus pedagogical mechanism was a means both of physical individuation,and of an unprecedentedly thorough assimilation of that individuality to pre-existing ideals. Nowhere was this ambivalence of purpose more thoroughly


demonstrated than in the training of soldiers’ bodies, as shown in this ex-tract from a military treatise of 1772:

If we studied the intention of nature and the construction of the human body,we would find the position and the bearing that nature clearly prescribes forthe soldier. The head must be erect, standing out from the shoulders, sittingperpendicularly between them. It must be turned neither to the left nor theright, because, in view of the correspondence between the vertebrae of the neckand the shoulder-blade to which they are attached, none of them may movein a circular manner without slightly bringing with it from the same side thatit moves one of the shoulders and because, the body no longer being placedsquarely, the soldier can no longer walk straight in front of him or serve as apoint of alignment.53

There is an inescapable logic to such accounts: ease is hard to argue with.But it is harder still, indeed perhaps impossible, for the postmodern readerto accept this model of embodied acculturation without deep moral queasi-ness. Michel Foucault uses the above example as part of his mountainouslythorough exegesis of Enlightenment physical disciplines as systems for astrategically internalized coercion of the individual: the efficiently movingsoldier, multiplied by thousands, far better serves the purposes of the State.54

Similarly, the mechanistically trained dancer represented the delights of so-cial docility and obedience upon the stage with an ease that erased the de-gree of self-restraint and pain with which they had been achieved from theexperience of the dancer herself.

We cannot readily (or advisably!) forget Foucault’s characterization of thisattentiveness as a new, unprecedentedly complete, implicitly malevolent levelof surveillance. Yet I wish to bear in mind some of its other layers of mean-ing. The operative layer here is almost inaccessible to us now, yet we knowit existed: the fundamental hopefulness of the Enlightenment. In this spirit,mechanistic embodiment was an expression of a belief that bodies—thosemost opaque, most universal manifestations of humanness—could finally beexplained in all their marvelousness. Thus illness would be conquered; thusdancers and instrumentalists would be able to achieve perfect expressivity,merely by recourse to movements that felt right; thus the most cherished hu-man communications would at long last become infallible. We may not beable to regain such hopefulness now but, at least for present purposes of un-derstanding, neither do I wish to relinquish it.

Instrumentalists’ regimes for the strengthening of weak body parts canbe traced in the method books and collections of études that begin to ap-pear in France, followed by England and other countries, around the mid-dle of the eighteenth century. In the case of stringed-instrument methods,the degree of mechanical explicitness varies pretty widely. In the treatises ofthe 1740s and 1750s, little more is conveyed than the conventional num-


bering of the fingers and their correspondence to notated pitches; gradu-ated exercises follow a basic principle of askesis: the development of physi-cal learning through the adding-on of complexities. But as the century pro-gressed musicians began to show a more refined consciousness of kineticefficiency that recalls that of the dancing masters.

I use as my exemplar here a manuscript cello method by FranciscoBrunetti, produced in Madrid around 1800, in part because its author al-most certainly knew Boccherini himself.55 Brunetti begins with scales, mov-ing away from C major by gradually adding sharps and flats; each scale is ac-companied by a short “warm-up,” a sort of proto-étude which focuses on areasof that key that may pose problems as to intonation or left-hand position-ing. The warm-up for Eb major, for instance, concentrates on the first-posi-tion backward extension of the first finger (necessary in this key on three ofthe cello’s four strings) and its positional relationship with a normal, “closed”left-hand position. This is done through alternation of the two positions,teaching the hand to find the more unfamiliar extension through associa-tion with the familiar.

Brunetti’s method resembles others of this period, Duport’s in particu-lar, in being rich in double- and triple-stopped chords. By repeatedly fram-ing the left hand over certain groups of simultaneously sounding pitches,chordal technique uses reiteration to shape it to a system—most fundamen-tally, to tonality. Although stringed instruments are built and tuned to maketonal formations accessible to the hand, they do not make them inevitable;the very simplest chord-framings, kinetically speaking, bear little direct re-lationship to tonality. For instance, an index finger across three strings willproduce a non-tonal chord; to make something tonal of it, the adjacent fingermust be added, while to make the most basic tonal formation, a major triad,the next finger over (the ring finger) must be used instead, which extendsand braces the hand ever so slightly (see example 17). One system’s “basic”is another’s “moderately artificial.” Beginning cellists spend some time learn-ing first to articulate, then to associate the index and ring fingers, in orderto produce this formation “automatically.”56

Similarly, while the five positions of classical ballet have some basis in“natural” human movement, they are not an inevitable result of it. Repetitionis the main avenue for the askesis that will eventually make the hand a tonal,the foot a classically elegant one; but desire for a particular result must informevery repetition. This is the minutest, most incremental level of the Aristo-


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Example 17. Chord formations from Brunetti.

telian, “bootstrap” terms for the acquisition of virtue, terms by which “habit-uation is not a mindless drill, but a cognitive shaping of desires through per-ception, belief, and intention. These capacities are involved in acting fromcharacter, and, to a different extent and degree, in acquiring character.”57

In a treatise of 1797, the Parisian cellist Jean-Marie Raoul (1766–1837)promotes askesis through mechanical metaphor.58 He describes the correctpositioning of the left hand in terms of balance: “The thumb is a fulcrumand point of reference for the whole length of the fingerboard”;59 and likeseveral other writers, he likens the action of the left-hand fingers to little ham-mers. Raoul’s graduated exercises for the bow are beyond exhaustive; he sys-tematizes skills that would rarely, if ever, be used in playing the repertory ofhis day. To such an overtrained body, more ordinary difficulties will seemeasy; and ease, or the appearance of it, is essential to art: “Taste is seldomcompatible with difficult exertions.”

Late in his long life, Jean-Louis Duport produced a magisterial treatisefor advanced players, in which his explicit concern is to correct commonbad habits; he does this by reference to a “unity of principles” in matters oftechnique, and especially in relation to the left hand. Here, mechanism iselevated to a status intrinsic to art. What is properly efficient will work foreveryone.

If one were to say that there are as many kinds of expression as there are play-ers, I would reply that that is natural, each having to have his own, but for finger-ing, which is entirely mechanical, it seems to me that there must be only one,that is to say, the same for all.60

When the bow is kept at the same point on the string as much as possible,it will, nevertheless, and even in spite of the player, move a little closer to thebridge when the sound increases, and a little further away when it diminishes.61

Duport refers to “l’aplomb des doigts” or “l’aplomb des mains,” in muchthe same fashion as Angiolini and Noverre use the term “aplomb,” to meanthat natural state of balanced ease from which proper, expressive movement—or in Duport’s case, true intonation—can ensue.

Although they make copious use of it, Duport and his Parisian contem-poraries do not discuss the mechanics of that quintessential Boccheriniantechnique, thumb-position. Brunetti’s treatise sketchily demonstrates one wayto approach and establish this position: the hand moves up the neck (whichis to say, “up” pitchwise although downward in space) and then the thumbdrops silently onto the C–G bar-fifth behind the rest of the hand, where itremains for the rest of the exercise. For the scale’s descent, Brunetti dictatesthat the thumb should be kept in place while the fingers move across to thelower strings, rather than back down the neck. (This transverse “descent” is,incidentally, precisely the maneuver implied in the opening bars of Boc-cherini’s Sonata G. 17).


In 1804 a cello method was jointly produced by a team of stringinstructors—prominent among them Pierre Baillot, who has already ap-peared in these pages as a champion of Boccherini—at the newly establishedConservatoire Impérial de Musique, one of several post-Revolutionary phasesin the development of what finally became the Paris Conservatoire. In thistreatise mechanical exigency comes full circle onto a dancer-like, visualizedself-awareness.

Once care has been taken to place the violoncello, the left hand and arm, thebow, the right hand and arm, in the manner prescribed in the preceding sec-tions, one must hold the head and the body upright, avoiding anything in one’sattitude that could have the air of negligence or affectation. It cannot be recom-mended too strongly to students that they seek to take up a noble, easy atti-tude; there is a secret relationship between the sense of hearing and that ofsight, [so that] if the latter is offended, if someone perceives something con-strained or careless in the posture of the performer, that seems to contradicteverything he might do with expression and grace, it makes those listening tohim suffer, by rendering the more shocking the contrast he presents all at oncebetween his playing and his attitude.

Indeed, we would say that it is extremely rare and almost impossible to seea virtuoso who charms the ears and offends the eyes at the same time.62

Programs for the training of the body to a universalized set of mechani-cal principles are one thing; setting that trained, efficient body to work inorder to produce a theatricalization of mechanism is quite another, althoughof course the two realms can intersect. Some really peerless examples of suchintersection can be found in the solo keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scar-latti, works dedicated to his patroness Queen María Bárbara de Braganza,and conceivably encountered by Boccherini during his early years in the or-bit of the Spanish royal court. Sara Gross has interpreted Scarlatti’s penchantfor a certain class of showy techniques—rapid, repeated hand-crossings, andvery wide leaps across space in each hand—as instrumental-gestural drama-tizations of the particular physicality of Spanish dance. She suggests that thesewere read by observers (or by their royal executant) as an invocation of thateighteenth-century idea of “Spanishness” that was more or less equated, bySpaniards and foreigners alike, with bodilyness: the proverbial “mutton” asopposed to “spaghetti.”63 Almost as striking to the observer as these aerialgestures, however, is the way the keyboardist’s eyes and attention must be sofiercely focused upon the keyboard. This focus, vital to pitch accuracy, makesit plain how tightly harnessed and controlled that bodilyness must be. Thusthese sonatas make the body flamboyant and constrain it at the same time,pressing gesture into the service of a rapidity, profusion, energetic repetitive-ness, and redundant precision so marked and exuberant as to constitute akind of topos of mechanism—including, in its range of cheerfully freneticaffects, its prevailing hopefulness as a view of the world.64


Scarlattian mechanism, and the frequency with which he resorts to it, isan extreme. Such topoi are much more of a special effect in Boccherini’schamber music, sunk as it so often is in the anti-mechanics of sentimentalabsorption, and played as it is upon stringed instruments, whose visible pre-sentation of mechanism is quite a bit less obvious than the keys, levers, andplectra or hammers of a keyboard instrument. But as we have seen in therondo theme of the Sonata G. 17, Boccherinian mechanism, when it occurs,“mechanizes” the player’s body, forcing it to visibly mimic those hammers,levers, fulcrums, further forcing upon it the necessity of strengthening cer-tain organic weaknesses—notably, that of the left thumb under sidewayspressure—in order to achieve this mimicry; and it does all of this in orderto perform a view of the world that differs crucially from Scarlatti’s uncom-plicated good cheer. Boccherini’s automaton has suffered a fatal alienation.

the paradox of the actor

“One is oneself by nature; one is another through imitation; the heart oneimagines for oneself is not the heart one has.”65 In his “Paradoxe sur le comé-dien,” Diderot treated performative alienation with a fullness and provoca-tiveness that has never been matched; his animadversions on the relationsbetween inspiration and technique, sensibilité and virtuosity, and (by exten-sion) self and performance continue to inspire discussion and debate to thepresent day. The “Paradoxe,” which had its genesis during the 1760s and wascirculated through Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire in the 1770s,66 representsa turning-away from the thinking of the arch-sensible Diderot of the early “Sa-lons.” Its thesis is that a great actor—or, to use the more evocative eighteenth-century term, a great player—must be the very opposite of sensible: “I insist,then, and I say: It is extreme sensitivity that creates mediocre actors; it ismediocre sensitivity that creates a multitude of bad actors; and it is an ab-solute lack of sensitivity that forms sublime actors.”67

These are very different terms than those in which he praised Greuze!Diderot’s reasons for this reversal are simple: he had observed the virtuos-ity demonstrated by professional players like Henri-Louis Lekain (1729–78),Claire-Joseph Léris (1723–1803), known as “La Clairon,” and above all theEnglishman David Garrick (1717–79), who had visited Paris in 1764. Theseplayers were able to present passions vividly and believably; being profes-sionals, they also did so dependably, night after night, and on command.Declaiming en haut voix for hours and for nights upon end presumed a sheerphysical toughness which militated against the softness, indolence, and fee-ble organs of sensibilité.68

Such a physically situated susceptibility was clearly incompatible with thestringent physical requirements of professional playing. Diderot went on toassert that it is in fact incompatible with greatness in any walk of life: “The


sensitive man is too much at the mercy of his diaphragm to be a great king,a great politician, a great judge, a just man, a perceptive observer, and con-sequently a sublime imitator of nature.”69

If players’ bodies were not particularly transparent or penetrable, theirsouls were entirely opaque. On one famous occasion Garrick performed asequence of violently characterized emotions for a salon audience merelyby removing his face behind a doorway for a few seconds between expres-sions, reappearing each time entirely and unnervingly transformed. A morequintessential presentation of the notion of the dramatic tableau would behard to imagine. Diderot, ever the thinker-through to causes, could notsquare the facility of this demonstration with any notion of sensible trans-parency in the performer: “Has his soul been able to experience all thesefeelings and perform, together with his face, this kind of gamut? I don’t be-lieve it at all, and neither do you.”70

Garrick’s was an extreme example of the representational versatility re-quired of professional players, which troubled Diderot even in its more or-dinary manifestations. “It would,” he tells us, “be a singular abuse of wordsto call this ability to render all natures, even ferocious ones, sensitivity.”71 Hewent on to develop the idea that this very ability meant that players have, inessence, no intrinsic identity: “They are suited to play them all [i.e., differ-ent personalities] because they have none.”72 This is not the blank slate ofinnocence, but a deliberately achieved state of abdication from identity, aremoval or separation of self from action, a state of being in which the ac-tors are “suspended between nature and their rough draft”73 in order to makethe executional choices that will best delineate the character of the moment.This watchful, deliberative, alienated state at its most effective is character-ized, Diderot tells us, by “sang-froid,” cold-bloodedness: the very inverse ofsensibilité.

A fine example of actorly sang-froid is to be found in the person of La Ca-ramba, the tonadillera María Antonia Vallejo Fernández (1750–87). Althoughshe was highly esteemed for her passionate, impulsive stage persona, she be-came quite another creature during the 1779 scandal involving Pablo Esteve,the librettist and composer with whom she worked most closely. Esteve hadbeen insufficiently circumspect in some sarcastic dramatic references to hispatronesses, the Duquesa de Alba and the Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna. La Caramba, however, was very much implicated: she was, after all,the one who performed the sarcasm, and in whose body the overly personalreferences became readable. During the ensuing legal proceedings againstEsteve,

La Caramba was called before the authorities, but defended herself wisely bysaying that she—poor little thing—did no more than sing the words they putbefore her, together with the music they also gave her, and that she had too


much to do learning the one and the other, what with the continual changesof repertory, to make herself a follower of what she said; when she said some-thing, she did not enter into it, that her business was to sing.74

La Caramba escaped punishment. Esteve could (or would) invoke no suchseparation from his craft, and spent time in jail.75

In the late eighteenth century actors were what they had been forcenturies—a class of people much mistrusted and maligned, and quite sep-arate in status from the societies for which they performed; moral brinkman-ship such as La Caramba’s would understandably reinforce their ostracism.(No less a figure than Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos [1744–1811], one of theliterary and social architects of the Spanish Ilustración, nevertheless feltcalled upon to point out that it was precisely because they were held in socialand economic contempt that actors tended to be the lowest sort of people,with very little education and no means of self-improvement.)76 And Diderotmade it clear with painful honesty that the paradox is not only the actor’sburden, but that of any performer, and indeed of any person in society. Every-one, he reminds us, acts and manufactures feeling at least some of the time:“The sensitive man obeys the impulses of nature, and renders truthfully onlythe cry of his heart; the moment he moderates or forces that cry, he is nothimself, but an actor playing a part.”77 And as with the player or man of so-ciety, so with the poet: “One says that one weeps, but one does not weep whenone is pursuing an effective adjective that eludes one; one says that one weeps,but one does not weep while occupied in making one’s verse harmonious:or if tears flow, the quill falls from the hand, one gives in to feeling and oneceases to compose.”78

Thus the great player or poet—or, for that matter, the great courtesan—maintains a perpetual doubleness. Nor would the instrumentalist have beenexempt from this condition. I have been at pains to show that some eigh-teenth-century instrumental music-making referred much more constantlyand explicitly to theatrical practice than subsequent criticism has been inthe habit of acknowledging; and the parallel is sustained in reverse by Diderot,in whose model the actor’s relationship to his own body and the feelings ex-pressible through it is very like the relationship of an instrumentalist to hisinstrument. Diderot makes use of the metaphor on multiple levels. His useof musical terminology (gamme, gamut or scale) to describe Garrick’s salonperformance is telling: the Englishman played himself, his own body, likean instrument. When later on in the “Paradoxe” Diderot asserts that “a greatactor is neither a pianoforte, nor a harp, nor a harpsichord, nor a violin, nora cello,”79 he does so in order to make the point that the player is notidentified with any one timbre, or role, or set of possibilities, but throughhis alienated competency is capable of them all: “He has no harmony which


is his own, but he takes on the harmony and the tone that are appropriateto his part, and he knows how to adapt himself to all of them.”80

Diderot “accords [a] dignity of corporeal memory to the actor playing arole on the instrument of his body.”81 Yet he is not fully identified with thatbody. In the “Rêve de d’Alembert” of 1769, Diderot develops the idea of thenervous system as a “sensitive instrument,” a network of fibres which he alsolikens to a spider web, the player-spider a detached consciousness utteringitself through those fibres—and yet always already separate from them. Thisambivalent state finds its perfect representation in the figure of the virtuosoinstrumentalist, who conveys such astonishingly vivid emotions and images,which may or may not be his own; we cannot be sure; his gestures seem some-times to signal him, yet in the next instant they are plainly without expres-sive significance; the physical presence of the instrument would seem to in-terfere with our capacity to identify with him, and yet it is the very instrumentof his expression. His relation to it is separate yet not separate; to us, read-able yet not readable.

For all that Boccherini tells us that he was “as my music shows me to be,”and for all that his music was appreciated by his contemporaries for preciselythis quality of transparency, he too was an alienated and self-conscious crea-ture. In Diderotic terms, he was inevitably so, simply by virtue of being ac-culturated. Inevitably also, his virtuosity made him emblematic of this dividedstate; but he is remarkable in the way he occasionally resists and ironizes sen-sible transparency through that same virtuosity. Another particularly evoca-tive example of this resistance hides in plain sight, as it were, within the sin-gle most famous piece of music by Boccherini, the “Celebrated Minuet,” thethird movement of the Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5, G. 275, written in1771. Over a serenade-like plucked accompaniment, the personable charmof the tune is registrally embedded in and expressively veiled by the secondviolin part, which appears to be enacting a private little purgatory of mecha-nistic fixity and inexpressivity (see example 18). The second violinist simplyhas no time for galanterie; he must concentrate on keeping the constant string-crossings reasonably even through the length of the bow. The balance betweenhand and arm muscles is slightly different for every inch of the bow from frogto tip and back again; but the notated figure changes not in the least to ac-commodate or acknowledge this. Thus a heard effect of understated, undif-ferentiated rigidity—a mechanical topos—is produced through an equallyunderstated virtuosity of muscular subtlety and flexibility—a state of appar-ent physical “sensitivity,” itself achieved, as the composer knew very well,through years of rigorous, quasi-mechanical discipline. There is irony all overagain (though this time it could not have been intended by Boccherini) inthe fact that he presents this distancing maneuver to us in the very piece thatwas to become such a latter-day icon of ancien régime preciousness.


It is utterly characteristic of this composer that cultural tensions wereplayed out, quite literally, in exquisitely calibrated physical tensions in theperforming individual. Characteristic, but not unique to his work, nor even,in the end, all that peculiar to it; I believe Boccherini’s physicalistic bentmakes a particularly attractive gateway to considerations of how his contem-poraries handled the same kinds of issues. In music-making it is the natureof embodiment to demonstrate itself somewhat episodically—a passagehere, a tendency there. The relations of like passages, like tendencies, be-


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tween composers, audiences, styles, nationalities, are only beginning to bemapped.

And yet, for all the Enlightenment’s faith in knowability, this will neverbe a finished map. Boccherini’s Celebrated Minuet is iconic of this fact.Around the famous, elegant tune, familiar to us twice over by virtue of itsclassically simple structure and its countless appearances in film and adver-tising, grows a dense, delicate thicket of contradiction and ambivalence, en-acted by the second violinist (whose “inessential” part is almost always omit-ted in transcriptions and adaptations). There, on stage, just to the left of theobvious, is the problem. The more attention we players pay to what or whomwe perform, and the closer we listener-observers listen and look, the moreentangled we become.


Chapter 5

A Melancholy Anatomy

In 1993, doctors at the University of Pisa honored the 250th anniversary ofBoccherini’s birth in a rather unusual way. They exhumed his “quasi-mummified” corpse from the Chiesa di San Francesco in Lucca, where it hadbeen since 1927, took it to Pisa, and there performed “a complete paleo-pathological examination” of it.1 Among the observations contained in thedoctors’ official report is the following: “The soft tissue examination revealedsevere aortic arteriosclerosis and pleural and nodal calcifications, confirm-ing the biographical data of Boccherini’s death from tuberculosis.” A 1996report on this event, from the local newspaper Il Tirreno, adds that Bocche-rini was

about 1.65 meters tall, and of a rather delicate appearance. [The scientists]consider the more serious pathologies, besides cervical arthritis, to have beencalcifications at the thoracic and pulmonary level, which confirm the diagno-sis of tubercular pleurisy. “The condition of the teeth, nearly all fallen out, wasextremely bad,” explained Professor Fornaciari, “a sign that the master ne-glected oral hygiene. In addition, the musician suffered from arteriosclerosis,and from particular pathologies linked to his activities as a violoncellist.”

The “more serious pathologies” signaled consumption, the White Death,what we now call pulmonary tuberculosis: a dependable killer at the time,and even into living memory. While tuberculosis had been around for mil-lennia, it took the growth of the modern city and the unprecedentedly closepress of the people within it to give the bacillus its full infective scope. DavidBarnes has estimated that in the early nineteenth century as much as 80 per-cent of the population in large urban centers like Paris was infected.2 Thebacterial basis for this infection, and thus the basis for its effective preven-tion, was not discovered until 1882; a cure did not become available until

160

the discovery of penicillin in 1928, and even then antibiotics did not comeinto general use until the time of the Second World War.

Explanatory structures were urgently needed for a disease so endemic andso deadly. In the late eighteenth century these structures bifurcated alongthe lines of social class. On the one hand, the high incidence of consump-tion in the poorest, most densely populated sectors of cities inspired an end-less series of quarantines; these often strenuous official interventions in themovements and assemblies of common people inevitably took on a tone ofpolitical suppression. The masses had the potential to infect all of societywith the dangerous fruits of their association; containment was imperative.3

On the other hand, consumption among the upper classes could be read asevidence (or cause) of a sensitive, artistic, refined nature, and as such im-plicitly desirable. This conflation was to continue into the nineteenth cen-tury and to find its apotheosis there, becoming a veritable cult of the tuber-cular, a cult which was “not simply an invention of Romantic poets and operalibrettists but a wide-spread attitude.”4

In her essay on the metaphors bound up in illnesses, Susan Sontag pos-itions tuberculosis (by which she means the upper-class version of the dis-ease) as the disease of visibility: “TB makes the body transparent. . . . TB isunderstood to be, from early on, rich in visible symptoms (progressive ema-ciation, coughing, languidness, fever), and can be suddenly and dramaticallyrevealed (the blood on the handkerchief).”5 Like sensibilité, this diseaseseemed to unite inside and outside. Like sensibilité, it could be linked equallyto weak, shrinking delicacy or insupportable excitement, pale invalidism orthe hectic bloom on the cheeks. And like sensibilité, in the labile variabilityof its symptoms it made an excellent theater for the endlessly compellingidea that a person had a public outside and a private inside, which might ormight not coincide.6 But consumption lent Diderot’s paradox an urgency thatultimately exceeded anything to do with sensibilité, for the condition was or-ganic, not behavioral. It killed the very people it seemed to explain, and itdid so with perfect opacity: nobody really knew why. As such this disease marksthe boundary—porous, negotiable, arguable, but boundary nonetheless—between the bodily realms of visible and invisible, culturally malleable andbiologically mandated.

This consumptive man, the Boccherini of the body, regularly presentedand irregularly resisted sensibilité through the body of his works. What I wishto pursue here are the ways in which Boccherini encouraged his audienceto read his (or their own) consumption through this sensible window, thusinvoking a very particularly inflected and infected embodiment. If we regardconsumption, eighteenth-century style, as a deranged terminus of sensibi-lité, then we will find it summoned above all in musical representations ofmelancholy, which is something Boccherini’s peers frequently heard and de-scribed in his music. This maze of metaphorical associations is itself a kind

a melancholy anatomy 161

of metaphor for the period’s labyrinthine understandings of mind, body, andtheir proper relationships.

musical melancholies

In ancient and early modern medical writings, music is most generally con-sidered apposite to melancholy, a cure for it rather than a participant in it.Music’s cheering, rousing qualities are routinely praised, and all the familiarold anecdotes—Orpheus, Amphion, Timotheus—trotted out in support. Afamous example of this use of music took place in Spain in 1737. Melancholywas something of a hereditary problem among the Borbón royalty. Theirpassion for hunting, and for the frequent changes of habitation that that pas-sion required, seems to have been one version of that “continual business . . .[to] distract their cogitations” of which Robert Burton speaks, a standardprescription for cure.7 One might be tempted to ascribe a similar distract-ing function to the hyperactivity of some of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboardsonatas; less speculatively, the circumstances attending the arrival of Farinelliat the Spanish court are a documented case of the use of music precisely forits ability to chase away melancholy.

It has often been related, and generally believed, that Philip V, King of Spain,being seized with a total dejection of spirits, which made him refuse to beshaved, and rendered him incapable of attending council or transacting af-fairs of state, the Queen . . . determined that an experiment should be madeof the effects of Music upon the King her husband, who was extremely sensi-ble to its charms. Upon the arrival of Farinelli . . . Her Majesty contrived thatthere should be a concert in a room adjoining to the King’s apartment, in whichthis singer performed one of his most captivating songs. Philip appeared atfirst surprised, then moved; and at the end of the second air, made the virtu-oso enter the royal apartment, loading him with compliments and caresses;asked him how he could reward such talents; assuring him that he could refusehim nothing. Farinelli, previously instructed, only begged that His Majestywould permit his attendants to shave and dress him, and that he would en-deavour to appear in council as usual. From this time the King’s disease gaveway to medicine; and the singer had all the honor of the cure.8

Queen and musician-servant were engaged in a perfectly pragmatic musi-cal medicine for the king’s condition; that it was effective is indicated by theenormous privilege that Farinelli subsequently enjoyed. As Burney puts it,“By singing to His Majesty every evening, [Farinelli’s] favour increased tosuch a degree that he was regarded as first minister.”

Rarely do period writers acknowledge that music might have a more am-biguous relationship to melancholy. In one place only in his great 1621 com-pendium The Anatomy of Melancholy does Robert Burton suggest this: “As[music] is acceptable and conducing to most, so especially to a melancholy

162 a melancholy anatomy

man. . . . In such cases music is most pernicious, as to spur a free horse willmake him run himself blind, or break his wind. . . . It will make such melan-choly persons mad, and the sound of those jigs and hornpipes will not beremoved out of the ears a week after.”9

boccherinian melancholy

At first pass, the idea of Boccherini’s music as melancholy would seem tohave been a posthumous development, for the word itself first appears onlyamong his early nineteenth-century critics.

Baillot (1804): If all five instruments are made to speak at the same time, it iswith a full, august harmony which . . . takes on a somber and melancholy tint,it goes directly to the heart by means so sweet, that tears fall without our be-ing aware of it.

Schaul (1809): But what a difference between a Mozart and a Boccherini! Theformer leads us between jagged rocks in a thorny forest . . . the latter, in con-trast, into a smiling country, graced with blooming pastures, clear, flowingbrooks, thick groves, wherein the spirit gives itself up with pleasure to sweetmelancholy.

Carpani (1808): The style of the Luccan master retained something of the ec-clesiastic and of the fugato; nor did it ever divest itself, even in excited pieces,of that color of tender melancholy which is proper to mild and honest men.

Fétis (1835): His ideas, always graceful, often melancholy, possess an inex-pressible charm through their naivety.10

These critics’ idea of melancholy is tied to innocence, to an untrammeledheart, and to the Gessnerian vein of pastoral nostalgia. This is what I mightcall a species of proto-melancholy. It is a state of absorption, but not con-sumption; it is sad, but not deeply so; there is nothing deranged about it.One has the impression that Baillot will have no difficulty picking up andcarrying on, feeling much the better for his spate of involuntary tears.

The graver kind of melancholy, the kind that enfolds consumption, isnever named by Boccherini’s critics, but it is strongly implied by themthrough several different metaphorical channels. Somberness, darkness,gloom, all central melancholic qualities, are repeatedly referenced, even inthe earliest critical writings. Thus the Parisian pamphleteer Boyé in 1779:“The quartets of Boccherini have something, I know not what, of somber-ness which makes them comparable to the Nights of Young.”11 This is a ref-erence to Night Thoughts, a work by the English poet Edward Young. Nownearly forgotten, it was first published in 1741, and went through innu-merable editions in English and in French in the course of the ensuing hun-dred years.12 Night Thoughts consists of nine long poems, really homilies inpoem form, ostensibly written during nine sleepless nights; they ruminate,


Figure 10. Anon., Night the Third: Narcissa, engraving to illustrateEdward Young’s Night Thoughts, German translation of 1767. WilliamAndrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, LosAngeles. Photo copyright UCLA Photo Services.

apostrophize, and agonize upon death and the fear of death, through top-ics like “Life, Death, and Immortality,” “Time, Death, and Friendship,” “TheRelapse,” “Consolation” (see figure 10). The tone of the work is somber, asBoyé avers, but also sentimental, fretful, devout, and terribly introverted, adose of sensible, consumptive melancholy concentrated to the point of near-indigestibility for the modern reader.13

From short (as usual) and disturb’d repose,I wake: how happy they, who wake no more!Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.I wake, emerging from a sea of dreamsTumultuous; where my wreck’d desponding thought,From wave to wave of fancied misery,At random drove, her helm of reason lost.Though now restor’d, ’tis only change of pain:(A bitter change!) severer for severe:The day too short for my distress; and night,Even in the zenith of her dark domain,Is sunshine to the colour of my fate.Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,In rayless majesty, now stretches forthHer leaden sceptre o’er a slumbering world.Silence how dead! and darkness how profound!Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds:Creation sleeps. ’Tis as the general pulseOf life stood still, and nature made a pause;An awful pause! prophetic of her end.And let her prophecy be soon fulfill’d:Fate! drop the curtain; I can lose no more.

Boyé wisely says it is “I know not what” in this poetry that reminds him ofBoccherini’s quartets. We might suggest that it is just somberness, darkness,and gloom, and leave it at that; or more theatrically (and less wisely) pursuea detailed mimetic correspondence. The opening lines of the poem, withtheir imagery of a reluctant awakening, find an answer in the main idea ofthe first movement of the Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171 (see example19; CD track 39). The lower parts murmur disconsolately, “a sea of dreams /Tumultuous,” and from them awakens the first violin line, whose melody af-ter an abrupt arousal is nothing but tired and tiresome little sighs, over andover again: whether the dreamer’s “wreck’d desponding thought” de-scending “From wave to wave of fancied misery,” or the waking mind’s ob-sessive grief matters little, “ ’tis only change of pain.” A similar quality of hope-lessness attends most of the ensuing passages. Where the movement isforceful, it is rigidly, insistently, and futilely so (as in bar 5, or bars 14 and15), while the second theme (bars 8–11) bears a deadly resemblance to the


first, consisting of an emphatic gesture that turns almost immediately intoa long string of sighs. The closing theme, beginning with the pickup to bar16, is frozen into near- immobility, a disquieting echo of those “dreams [that]infest the grave” suggested by the peculiar, hollow voicing of the rinforzandochords on the third beats of bars 16 and 17. In the second part of the move-ment the misery intensifies: in bars 33–38, the harmony spirals helplesslytoward the flat side of the spectrum, the dominant of F minor resolving tothat of Bb minor, and this in turn resolving to that of Eb minor (CD track 40).

Eb minor is a truly outré key area, rarely used even in passing; a period de-scription describes it as “mocking God and the world; discontented with it-self and with everything; preparation for suicide sounds in this key.”14 Thisdescent from wave to wave of misery both fancied and executional—Ebminorbeing “little practiced on account of its great difficulty in performance”15—


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has at least been logical, moving by fifths; but with the next chord changethe helm of harmonic reason is entirely lost: the dominant of Eb minor “re-solves” to G-major harmony, the dominant of C minor (CD track 41).

C minor is the home key of the movement, and indeed this deranged shiftheralds a retransition to the reprise, which begins at the upbeat to bar 44,“(A bitter change!) severer for severe.” The main idea of this movement, re-gained in bars 44–45, is scarcely a comfortable or rewarding place to returnto (CD track 42). The lower voices of the quartet return to their “disturb’drepose” and the first violin resumes its litany of sighs. The whole concept ofreprise in such a context takes on a dire quality, a helpless return to the mainthread of an obsession.

And yet regardless of the vividness with which he can evoke an obsessionthat seems veritably to consume itself, and regardless of how he allows mor-bid doubts to infect the conventional associations of form thereby, Bocche-rini frames these dark excursions, “quarantining” them in those formal sit-uations where excess and alterity are most securely contained: in themodulating sections (what we now call the developments) of first movements,as here; and, most typically of all, in the trios of minuet-trio pairs. The quar-tets opp. 8 and 9 are especially rich in queer, obsessive trios, very often inflat keys, very often fixated upon a single idea to the exclusion of anythingelse. Op. 8, no. 5, contains a remarkable representation of melancholic ex-cess (see example 20). It comes on gently enough: the first period’s succes-sive imitations of a two-bar figure at the unison or octave seem merely a bitunimaginative (CD track 43). But the second period introduces a new pointof imitation: it is an unexpected tonic minor, and this time only three beatslong. It gasps and circles at the unison, and has plainly crossed the line fromfailure of imagination into obsession (CD track 44). Having crossed that in-visible line, this trio cannot contain its own imploding bent within normalbinary structure, and spawns its own trio-within-a-trio, an embedded sectionin the very unusual key of Db major. Here the violin lines swirl and cross oneanother scalewise, ever-subsiding downward, futile and with a slightly furtiveaffect—the result of the walking on technical eggshells entailed in playingin this key (CD track 45).

The unusual, inward-spiraling construction of this piece recalls the 1776Boccherini criticism of Carl Junker (1748–97), a Swiss critic of music andart. Unlike his French colleagues, Junker disliked Boccherini’s dark quali-ties; and he disliked them in a particular way.

Boccherini is really not the man I listen to for long with heart’s delight, whosethread (when he even has one) I can follow tirelessly; whose product (on thewhole) can excite sensory pleasure in me; really not my man, because to me heis too shadowed, too dark, too morose.

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novelty . . . be it too much inclination toward his own favorite instrument, orirresistible natural impulse; how often he sacrifices all to art there!

It is true that development is pleasing to the searching spirit, and thereforealso its complicated course, a decline into the dark minor mode; but you re-ally must not tangle things up unnecessarily; a knot should be nothing but con-trast, and its untying, gradual transition. If the composer needlessly entangleshimself in difficulties, he torments the ear without gratifying the heart, andhe interrupts the course of the sentiments’ story. The connoisseur may decidehow often this happens with Boccherini.16

In addition to the obligatory darkness and gloominess, Junker makesreference to the labyrinth, long a pictorial emblem of the melancholic’stortured and tortuous redoublings of mind. This is a topos to which the tem-poral nature of music, and the ineluctably consequent nature of tonal mu-sic in particular, is well suited, and Boccherini was in good company in us-ing it. Elaine Sisman has shown how in C. P. E. Bach’s 1781 rondo Abschiedvon meinem Silbermannischen Claviere (“Farewell to My Silbermann Clavier”)a winding trail of harmonies, a “descent within,” is accomplished throughdiminished-seventh-chord modulations and enharmonic progressions, wan-dering so far from the original key area that one begins to doubt the possi-bility of return (a “feeling that no Ariadne’s thread is to be found”).17 Theskill and subtlety of Bach’s harmonic emergence from this labyrinth of re-gret and sorrow—the gradual untying of the knot, as Junker would have it—were particularly praised by contemporary connoisseurs.

One imagines that Junker would feel encouraged by the clever way inwhich Boccherini extracts himself from his own flat-infested harmoniclabyrinth in the trio of op. 8, no. 5. Having carefully retraced his steps fromthe nearly dissolved state of Db major, through Bb minor and Bb major (andtheir former points of imitation), in the last few bars before the da capo heintroduces a rising-triplet cadential figure, taken from the minuet itself, acheerful, daylight piece in F major. Thus he “unties” the whole affair with a“gradual transition” (CD track 46).

In works like the two I have excerpted here, Boccherini/Young or Boc-cherini/Junker calls forth not only the standard-issue melancholic “somber-ness, darkness, gloom” but a good many refinements upon it: death and thefear of death; fretfulness and extreme introversion; devotion; tiredness andtiresomeness; fixation upon a single idea to the exclusion of anything else;the helpless return to the main thread of an obsession; obsessive repetition;repetitive obsession; morbid doubts; inward-spiraling, labyrinthine regret andsorrow; futility—the catalog is endless, for endings are themselves anti-melan-cholic. These qualities are none of them peculiar to Boccherini; but his abil-ity as a composer to combine them into nuanced “descriptions” of the melan-cholic condition might have been the envy of many a doctor. We may use hismusic quite as freely as any period medical text for a catalog of melancholic


symptoms. One of the finest fascinations of eighteenth-century studies is theway that music and critical discourse about music are sometimes the bear-ers of vital information and theory about very basic operations of human ex-perience. Thus can the historian of eighteenth-century music happily dab-ble in realms of physiology and psychology now considered distant indeedfrom her rightful bailiwick.

from galen to descartes

The eighteenth-century understanding of melancholy that Boccherini mod-els for us had developed over many centuries and in his day was still under-going a radical shift, from the ancient Greek humoric system summarizedin the second century by Galen, toward a more mechanical and systematicunderstanding of bodies, initially marked well back in the seventeenth cen-tury by the work of William Harvey and René Descartes. The shift was pon-derous and inconsistent. Galenic medicine had been in place for a very longtime; its uniquely apt explanatory power was deeply woven into Westernthought and language. (It remains so today: English is still full of Galenicidioms based on the four humors or cardinal fluids—blood, phlegm, choleror yellow bile, and melancholer or black bile.) In the Galenic system an in-dividual derives both physical nature and temperament from the relativeendowment of each humor; to their excesses or deficiencies all disordersof mind and body can be traced. Joseph Roach gives a vivid summary of thehumoric body: it “resembles a large bag containing juice-filled sponges ofvarious shapes and sizes. Between sponges there is seepage, percolation, andgeneral sloshing about, but not the regular cleansing action of continuouscirculation. Equilibrium of these potentially stagnant juices defines health.”18

This was the ruling conception of the human organism until the discov-ery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey in 1628; it remaineda general or implicit model far longer, especially on the Continent. In Spain,for instance, an unadulterated humoric medicine was still taught to medicalstudents in the universities well into the eighteenth century; one of Feijóo’smost impassioned missions was his campaign against this official sanction-ing of a scientific system that he knew to have been superseded—and which,furthermore, was minimally based on empirical observation. The Galenicdoctor spent precious little time in contact with bodies, living or dead, dur-ing his training; dissection as a way of teaching anatomy or physiology wasconsidered not only abhorrent but methodologically unnecessary, as all pos-sible categories of embodiment had been set forth long since by the ancients.For this same reason such a doctor was not much concerned with actuallylooking at his patients; a few symptoms, sketchily gathered by report, a littleholding of the patient’s wrist in order to assess the pulse, and a diagnosiscould confidently be prepared.19


Descartes offers the best-known model of the new physiology that wasto result from the willingness of seventeenth-century English, Dutch, andFrench doctors to question Galen and get their hands bloody.

I would like you to consider . . . that all the functions which I have attributedto this machine, such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and ofthe arteries, the nourishment and the growth of the members, breathing,wakening, and sleep; the passage of light, of sounds, of odors, of tastes, of heat,and of such other qualities into the organs of the exterior senses; the impres-sion of their ideas upon the organ of common sense and the imagination; theretention or the imprint of these ideas within the memory; the interior move-ments of the appetites and of the passions; and, finally, the exterior movementsof all the members. . . . I would like you to consider, I say, that all these func-tions result naturally in this machine solely from the disposition of its organs,no more nor less than the movements of a clock, or some other automaton,result from that of its counterweights and its wheels; so that when they occurone need not conceive in it any soul either vegetative or sensitive, nor any prin-ciple of movement and life, other than that of its blood and its spirits agitatedby the heat of that fire which burns continually in its heart, and whose natureis no different from that of all the fires which are in inanimate bodies.20

Close to four hundred years later, the materiality and specificity of theCartesian approach still informs my own inquiries into the musical func-tioning of this “machine.” Not, however, my conclusions; Descartes’s scrupu-lous separation of physical and mental functions is immensely and notori-ously problematic. To be fair to Descartes, who has been demonized oftenenough for splitting up body and soul, he knew this; his theory of “animalspirits” is an attempt to resolve the logical problems that result. (It also goessome way toward giving his system the poetic richness that makes the hu-moric system so convincing.) According to this theory, reception, sensation,and their reactive impulses to the body’s members were conveyed and re-conveyed through the body by the nerves. Nerves were “like little threadsor little tubes, which all come from the brain and which like the brain con-tain a certain very subtle air or wind, which is called the animal spirits.”21 An-imal spirits thus somewhat resembled humors in their origins in the blood,and in their elusiveness. Fluctuating within their fibrous tangle of nerves,they resisted being theorized as a system, but invited a whole host of newmetaphorical engagements. Chief among these metaphors were the twinsrefinement and sensitivity. Descartes tells us that only “the most active andfinest parts” of the blood contribute to animal spirits,22 and this was echoedby a chorus of doctors in other countries of Europe. That animal spirits per-vaded the organism down to its minutest part was demonstrated in 1672 byFrancis Glisson, who reported that for some hours following the death anddissection of the creature from which they were taken, muscle fibers con-tinued to respond to stimulation; he considered this property, which he called


“irritability,” innate and non-mechanical, since the mechanical system of theoriginal organism had been so thoroughly interrupted and dispersed.23 Somevital, supra-mechanical principle seemed to reside in even the smallest partsof the whole. “Irritability” was called “sensitivity” by other scientists in Franceand the Netherlands; it seemed to be conducted by, or perhaps was residentin, the nerves. Théophile Bordeu, Diderot’s friend (and mouthpiece in the“Rêve de d’Alembert”), wrote that “each organic part of the living body hasnerves which have a sensibilité, a kind or particular degree of sentiment.”24

Such fibrous, airy, refined, sensitive bodies lent themselves very readilyto musical metaphors—in particular, the likening of nerve fibers to vibrat-ing strings, and of the frame that housed them to the resonant cavity of astringed instrument. This was scarcely a new fund of imagery, however. Inthe fourth century b.c.e. Plato had used the stringed instrument as a meta-phor for human corporeal responsiveness to the divine in the “Phaedo”;25

Cassiodorus (born c. 490 c.e.) memorably depicted Christ’s crucified bodyas a psaltery, his agony embodied in the tension of its strings as they vibrateto God’s word,26 while in a happier vein, in Canto 15 of the Paradiso, Dantereferred to the beatified body as “that sweet lyre . . . stretched and releasedby the right hand of Heaven.”27 The metaphor still resonates during Boc-cherini’s day: “Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find, that withregard to the passions, ’tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music,which in running over all the notes loses sound after the breath ceases; butrather resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrationsstill retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays.”28 What is newin the eighteenth-century use of this metaphor, however, is its emphasis onthe idea of bodies resonating, not only with God or with the organization ofthe universe, but in sympathy with one another. Examples are legion, and comefrom nearly every theater of eighteenth-century discourse on human nature.

Boccherini too uses the metaphor—how could he not? since music rep-resented a sensible selfhood simply by being sound, and as such was themetaphor’s source. On this level, the whole complex of acts and behaviorsaround music-making, -receiving, and -conceptualizing, the complex Christo-pher Small calls “musicking,” became itself an extended metaphor for a hy-persensitized and self-conscious model of community.29 Yet Boccherini alsocomposed toward a heightened awareness, among executants and listenersalike, of this vibrational community; and it seems that the members of thatcommunity recognized what he was doing. In his violin treatise of 1835 PierreBaillot discusses the “Effect of Unisons and Simultaneous Octaves in Quin-tets” as a representation of sensibilité through the idea of sympathetic vibra-tion; and he singles out Boccherini as especially adept at this special effect,remarking, “We might consider the unison and even the octave as the mostappropriate expression of sympathy, an expression in some way above har-mony itself, since it is the result of a perfect concord. Music can express this


sympathy at any time; nothing must be neglected, therefore, in making allits beauty felt.”30

The metaphor likewise flooded the pages of sensible art, literature, and itscriticism, and nowhere more than in England. Thus a 1754 account of anactor playing Othello: “We not only see the character thus before our eyes,but we feel with him. . . . The very frame and substance of our hearts isshaken. . . . We swelled and trembled as he did; like strings which are so per-fectly concordant, that one being struck, the other answers, tho’ distant.”31

And thus Laurence Sterne’s 1768 apotheosis of the sensible condition:

Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costlyin our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ’tisthou who lifts him up to heaven—eternal foundation of our feelings!—’tishere I trace thee—and this is thy divinity which stirs within me—not that, insome sad and sickening moments, my soul shrinks back upon herself, and star-tles at destruction—mere pomp of words!—but that I feel some generous joysand generous cares beyond myself—all comes from thee, great, great senso-rium of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon theground, in the remotest desert of thy creation.32

Sterne protests strenuously against the sad and shrinking elements of sen-sibilité, but his ravings are brought about by the story of Maria of Moulines,who personifies exactly those elements: an attractive young woman who hasbeen unhinged by her grief at being abandoned, she has become a shep-herdess without a flock, given to sitting about weeping under trees. She is,in a word, melancholy, and a severe case too. Her condition is clearly causedby her immense susceptibility, and this identifies her as a particular kind ofmelancholic. Not for her the coagulation and stagnation of black bile. InGalenic terms, hers is an “adust melancholy,” active, reactive, and especiallypernicious, “caused by adustion and burning of choler [which] causes greatillnesses such as madnesses, strange melancholies, depraved imaginings, andvarious furors and manic thoughts.”33 In Cartesian terms, her nerve fibersare fine indeed, and tuned to an exquisite pitch, which not only causes heraffliction but causes Sterne to catch it from her by sympathetic vibration.

With adust or sensible melancholy (to use, respectively, the ancient and theeighteenth-century terms for it) the notion of refinement—the refiner’s fireof adustion or the excitation of invisibly delicate animal spirits—inevitablyparlayed itself into notions about the refinement of persons. This notion re-ceived an influential early articulation in Problem 30 of (pseudo-)Aristotle:“Why is it that all the men who have been exceptional in philosophy, thescience of government, poetry, or the arts are manifestly melancholic?”34 Bos-well, writing to Rousseau in 1764, stated, “I do not regret that I am melan-choly. It is the temperament of tender hearts, of noble souls.”35 And in 1733the physician George Cheyne opined that melancholy


I think never happens or can happen, to any but those of the liveliest and quick-est natural parts, whose faculties are the brightest and most spiritual, and whoseGenius is most keen and penetrating, and particularly where there is the mostdelicate Sensation and Taste, both of Pleasure and Pain. So equally are the goodand bad things of this state distributed! For I seldom if ever observ’d a heavy,dull, earthy, clod-pated Clown, much troubled with nervous Disorders.

Not merely a dangerous excess of black bile, pooling in the stomach orsome even humbler part of the body, sensible melancholy was elevating, thebadge of that impressionable nature that was the defining characteristic ofupper-class late eighteenth-century selfhood. Thus it shared with con-sumption both a labile relation to visibility and the potential to be deadly:for it laid its sufferer open to the possibility of incurable madness.

consumptions

Cheyne’s 1733 book about melancholy was entitled The English Malady.Through their detailed descriptions of this condition, English physicians en-sured that it would be reliably diagnosed among their countrymen; and in-deed French medical writers of the time called it “la consomption angloise,”a condition which proceeded “without fever, without cough, or any greatdifficulty in respiration, with loss of appetite, indigestion, and great weak-ness, the flesh becoming shrunken and consumed.”36 Here the equation ofmelancholy with consumption is strongly implied; but this “English con-sumption” is clearly not pulmonary tuberculosis. Rather, according to theauthor of the article, this is phtisie nerveuse, one of a complex of maladiescharacterized by phthisis, wasting. Pulmonary tuberculosis was included inthis complex; but so were marasmus (weight loss), “vapors” (an overly livelyimagination brought on by boredom and exacerbated by excess), and tabesdorsalis (what we now call syphilis). Today, we classify these illnesses in verydifferent ways; but in the eighteenth century they were considered to be re-lated, both as to symptom and as to cause. To use the term “consumption” inan eighteenth-century sense is to invoke any or all phthisic conditions, which,to varying degrees, were understood to cause one another; similarly, all hadcausal relationships with sensibilité and with melancholy.

The concept of consumption as neither completely physical nor com-pletely psychological recalls the Aristotelean/Galenic idea that humors, likevirtues, were “either innate or born with us, or adventitious and acquisite”37—that is, equally capable of being caused by constitution or by behavior. It isneatly summed up in a word that has (tellingly) become rather archaic inEnglish: affliction, “a passion of the soul which has much influence on thebody. Affliction ordinarily produces chronic maladies; phthisis is often theresult of great affliction.”38

Boccherini’s own affliction, pulmonary consumption, could thus have


been understood to derive from a number of things. It was most oftendeemed hereditary; it could also enter the lungs through a neglected coldor catarrh, or migrate upward, as it were, from venereal disease;39 or it couldresult from the oversensitivity and obsessiveness of melancholy. Sir RichardBlackmore, writing in 1724, tells us that

when the Patient is thin and meagre, and liable to feverish Heats . . . the tex-ture of whose Fibres and membranes is too fine and delicate, and whose Spir-its are over keen and active, when they have many years labored under a sadSeries of painful Symptoms, such as . . . great Inquietudes, wakeful Nights . . .besides many other Distempers; which, however, are attended by real and un-feigned Sufferings, that enfeeble the Body, and dissipate the Spirits; these Pa-tients, I say, their Vigour and Blood being exhausted, do sometimes fall into atrue Consumption.40

Too much study, too much solitude, indulgence in anxious thoughts—all weaken the nerves, depriving them of their “Strength, Swiftness, and Vi-vacity,” with potentially disastrous results. In these characterizations we seethe moelleux, penetrable body, whose “disposition linked to weak organs, theresult of a mobile diaphragm,”41 accounted for in terms partly Galenic—hypochondria and hysteria—and partly Cartesian—delicate fibers, overac-tive spirits. Sensible permeability is aptly epitomized in the lungs, whose veryfunction is concerned with that finest of the four elements, the invisible air.

life and art: some animadversions

According to the 1993 autopsy, Boccherini was, at least by modern standards,physically “thin and meagre.” Did he also habitually stay up too late at night?Was he overfond of solitude? Whether Boccherini himself suffered any con-sumptive symptoms at all, or exhibited the personality traits associated withthem, is something we cannot know. By recourse to the kind of interpretivefreedom employed above in relation to Young’s poetry and Boccherini’s quar-tet, we might decide that Boccherini had for “many years labored under asad Series of painful Symptoms.” Similarly, it is easy enough to suppose thatpain, physical and emotional, must in later life have been his constant com-panion: we might point to the other physical conditions detailed in the 1993autopsy (including bad teeth, which, while not fatal, can be excruciating);to the deaths of his first wife in 1785 and of all of his daughters by 1804; andmore fancifully, perhaps, to the suppressed pain of the lifelong expatriate.

We would be in good company in making these associations and usingthem to talk about Boccherini’s creative process; all his earliest biographersdo it, and they present his final years as a sad story indeed. The idea thatbodily constitution is, to some degree, destiny is at least as old as the humoricsystem itself. Any reluctance to generalize on this basis must itself be his-


toricized. In the period that is our concern, there was little such reluctance;it is a commonplace of Enlightenment philosophy that “every personal lifecan be broken down into factors that are common, homogenous, and com-patible with each other, interchangeable between one individual and an-other.”42 We move very cautiously along these pathways now, for they haveled to political situations that we do not care to repeat. As Georges Gusdorfnotes, “the triumph of this smooth geometry is only possible through theneutralization of all personal dissidences.”43

Even though Boccherini’s pulmonary consumption has been proven—indeed, in its rather grisly level of detail it is by far the most detailed directevidence we possess about the body that is the subject of this book—we post-moderns are forever constrained from making any handy “geometry” be-tween this embodied condition and its sufferer’s behavior (much less his cre-ative process). Essaying a freely melancholic interpretation of a piece of musicand doing the same about its composer’s life must and should remain twovery different things.

In any case, even if we were to try, any proposed causality would also behopelessly full of gaps and misfires. Speaking biographically, such materialsas we possess tend to imply with some persuasiveness that Boccherini wasjust the opposite of sadly ailing. Or at least he was uncomplaining, itself ananti-melancholic trait. He refers to discomfort or incapacitation in only oneor two of his letters to Pleyel, and then obliquely.

[12 September 1796]To respond fully to what you ask, I must tell you that the state of my health andthe obligation under which I find myself to compose at all times for the kingof Prussia, whom I have the honor to serve, in no sense permit me to dedicatemyself to commercial speculations, whatever they might be.

[3 July 1797]Adieu, dear Pleyel, I can continue no further, for my health is not good andmy nerves cause me to suffer a great deal.44

In general Boccherini was a man who exhibited an exemplary steadinessin every area of his life, the sort of steadiness that argues for good humoricbalance. From a perusal of his business correspondence and his manage-ment of his financial situations we get a sense of a calm sobriety in his deal-ings with the world, a level-headedness quite antithetical to the extremes ofmelancholia.45 This is further borne out by his virtuosity, that manifest abil-ity to balance exquisitely fine physical tolerances with the varied and demand-ing situations of performance. It is borne out by his sociability, his havingentered into two marriages and raised seven children. It is perhaps most de-cisively borne out by his very large catalog of works, produced with remark-able frequency and regularity through all but a few of his adult years.46

Invoking suffering will tend to produce a Romantic portrait of the artist


as either prostrated before or triumphing over the vicissitudes of his em-bodiment. In such a view, the realm of physical experience becomes some-thing to which the creative spirit is merely subjected, a difficulty to be suc-cumbed to, or an obstacle to be risen above: this may serve to locate andmanage the problem of pain, but it inevitably coarsens any consideration ofpleasure by ignoring the full geography of embodied experience itself. It isprecisely this that Boccherini refused to do. His explorations of pain andmelancholy excess are thorough, sometimes to the point of being very un-comfortable indeed; but in the end they are no more thorough than his ex-plorations of sensuousness and pleasure. Consistently, copiously, minutely,right to the end of his life, Boccherini used his compositions to explore arange of relations to physical sensation far subtler than those of mere ob-sessiveness or transcendence; they evince the very finest grain of what RoyPorter calls the “this-worldness” of the Enlightenment.47

Boccherini’s work is a window onto his world, and in matters of the bodyit is a veritable lens. Whether or to what degree he ever experienced thenight sweats, the “sueños turbulentes,” the spiraling fears of consumptivemelancholy, Boccherini clearly knew what they were, what they meant, andhow to evoke them for his listeners and his executants. Whether or not hewas himself ever subject to sad disquietudes, his music could call them forthmost expertly in his public. What is more, on occasion he goes some dis-tance past a mimetic rendering of the embodied condition in order directlyto contest the conditions of mimesis—of bodily representation at all—asthey arise in the course of performance. Some of his most interesting con-tributions take place around the melancholy-consumption complex, whichhad an especially long tradition of concern with issues of authorial voice,visibility, and authenticity.

satiric melancholy

The melancholic persona is characterized by doubleness; any state of mindthat involves much reflection will produce a certain dividedness against theself. Even scholarly works participated in this doubleness. Medical writers onmelancholy often expressed considerable empathy with their subjects, lead-ing one to suspect that they had first-hand knowledge of their condition.Robert Burton took this trope a good deal further, fictionalizing his own au-thorial presence as the arch-melancholic “Democritus,” and introducing hisbook with an “abstract” in verse which traverses the affectual range of mel-ancholy over and over again, each swing of the pendulum of unbalanced hu-mor a little wider than the last: he alternates between sweet and regretfulimaginings, pastoral and discontented reverie, serene love and tortured long-ing, celestial and demonic phantasy, and finally manic hubris and suicidaltorment, until we are so discomfited that we are half disposed to laugh.48


The very similar, and similarly disturbing, excesses of Diderot’s Neveu de Ra-meau come to mind; also similarly, one suspects that Burton is being satirical—a strange suspicion to entertain about a medical text.49

In chapter 3 I discussed Boccherini’s arsenal of extremely detailed writ-ten admonitions to the performer as a sensible tactic, while in chapter 4 Iconsidered the ways in which these admonitions can, on occasion, producea divided or alienated state in the performer. Here I want to suggest thatBoccherini actually acknowledges this dividedness in a satiric-melancholicvein, through a performance indication which I believe to be unique to him.This is the direction con smorfia or smorfioso—literally, “grimacing,” “prissily,”or “with a wry face.”50 The passages adorned with this direction—which heuses quite regularly—do not offer any immediate clues as to its “purely mu-sical” meaning; they have no obvious commonalities as to melody, harmony,key, or tempo. Boccherini sometimes associates the wry face with extremesweetness, dolcissimo, while at other times it seems to be linked to particulargestures, as in the passage shown in example 21 (CD track 47). We first hearthe figure that opens bar 33 in bar 31, without chromatic alteration. In bar33, B n becomes B#, a rising appoggiatura becomes a whine, and the first vi-olin is instructed to employ the wry face, as if in a satirical double take. Afurther question of performance practice arises: only one member of thequartet is instructed to play smorfioso. This will naturally be visible to his com-panions; ought they to be “infected” and participate in the wryness, or shouldthey remain a corps de ballet against whose serenity the grimaces, both sonicand visible, will likely seem the more peculiar? Smorfioso would seem to bewholly pantomimic in a way that specifically emphasizes the disjuncture be-tween visual and aural modes of communication, encouraging the player tovisually telegraph a certain alienation from the sounds he is making, andquite possibly from his fellow players as well. It may be indicative of unseemlyeffort, as are the wry faces among Angiolini’s comic dancers; it may pokefun at some performers’ excessive facial telegraphy. It may call in question,Diderot-like, the very idea of ever performing anything heartfelt at all.

Smorfioso is a really extraordinary direction to the performer; I know ofnothing like it in instrumental music until the advent of “performance art”in the late twentieth century. But there is a good deal that is like it in periodtheatrical genres. In Spain, the satiric-melancholic muse had come into itsown during the seventeenth century, the golden age of Spanish drama, wheredoubleness and alienation infected the melancholy lover in particular.51 Likethe dolcissimo register in Boccherini’s music, love and love-making ought tobe nothing but sweet, soft, and gratifying. Love-melancholy enters the pic-ture when the beloved is unattainable, and the lover’s procession of symp-toms furls itself around the beloved, or around her image: fixation to theexclusion of anything else; erratic behavior; neglect of responsibility, neglectof self; uncontrollable spasms of grief; and so on. This syndrome of the melan-


choly lover was still familiar to Boccherini’s audiences, for Calderón was stillin repertory in Madrid in the late eighteenth century. Yet the “and so on”that I am able to use with such confidence in describing it is precisely whatopens love-melancholy up to questions about sincerity. What lover, faced withthe possibility of rejection, would not indulge in at least a little affectationof this handy, well-known vocabulary of symptoms, as a way of emphasizinghis own condition, and perhaps inducing sympathy? Thus becoming, inDiderot’s words, “not himself, but an actor playing a part.” A satirical atti-


Example 21. String Quartet in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, i (Allegroassai), bars 32–35.

&

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Allegro assai 32

vc.

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vla.

tude follows not far behind, perhaps spurred by the bitterness of finding thatlove is, in fact, rarely ever “sweet, soft, and gratifying.”

In some of these Spanish plays, the formulae of love-melancholy issue fromthe lips of a stock character, a servant or clown called a gracioso. These char-acters further enacted doubleness through the comic tradition of asides, satir-ical addresses made directly to the audience—made, we imagine, smorfioso. Iwould propose that Boccherini uses the violinist’s wry face gracioso -style, tosignal that he knows very well that his yearning chromatic appoggiatura,his mooning moment in the midst of a busy Allegro, his reversion to love-sickness, is a stock device, and a precious one at that.

Don Juan, first set upon the boards by Tirso de Molina in 1630, is in factthe diabolical terminus of the doubleness in love-melancholy. He may affectthe late, consumptive stages of the condition—but believe him at your peril;he uses the familiar melancholic vocabulary as a tool, without any necessarysubjection to it at all. (Da Ponte and Mozart’s brilliance in their treatment ofthis theme is the same as Tirso’s: it lies in the fact that even as we recognizethis about the Don, we find ourselves half wanting to believe him.) Anothereighteenth-century locus of satirical melancholy can be found in Goya’s work.But at times his critical portrayals of the foibles of Spanish society are too harshto be labeled mere satire; his mode becomes sarcasm, in the root meaning ofthat word, which is to tear flesh. Its apotheosis appears in Goya’s Black Paint-ing of a gargantuan figure with a horrifying, horrified, haunted expression,tearing a bleeding human body with its teeth. Goya’s unforgiving vision of hiscontemporaries came at the price of a no less unforgiving vision of himself:he painted this dreadful image upon the walls of his own house. Here dou-bleness doubles consumptively upon itself with a vengeance: Saturn, icon ofmelancholy from ancient times, was the god who ate his own children.

other consumptions

If phtisie nerveuse was the national disease of the eighteenth-century Englishupper classes, then that of the French was phtisie dorsale, syphilis, “the famil-iar result and just punishment of excessive debauchery,”52 which could alsobe brought on by masturbation. A deadly imbalance was caused in the bodyby the immoderate loss of seminal fluid. Once the habit was established, bythe usual unhappy conjunction of “vicious disposition” and excessive habits,the sufferer’s fate was sealed. The Encyclopédie supplies an account of theprogress of this condition which recalls Young’s poetry in the way it displaysthe nether reaches of the melancholic-consumptive condition.

After these ejaculations which interrupt his sleep, the sufferer is plunged intoa kind of annihilation, his eyes grow dim, extreme languor takes possession ofall his senses, it seems to him that he only half exists; that terrible idea whichretraces ceaselessly his weakness and his nothingness, which often brings with


it the image of impending death, which represents to him the lifted arm, thescythe ready to reap his days, [that idea] plunges him into an overwhelmingsadness, and little by little lays the foundations of a dreadful melancholy; sleepcomes—it shuts his eyes anew, conceals him from himself, puts an end to hiscruel reflections, but this only brings him new material; scarcely is he asleepwhen the most voluptuous dreams present lewd objects to his inflamed imag-ination, the machine [i.e., the body] follows its natural bent, feeble desiresawake forthwith, but more promptly still the parts which must satisfy them yieldto these impressions, and still more to the morbid disposition by which theyare attacked; the new fire which is lit is not slow to bring about that evacuationwhich is its seal and its end; the sufferer is awakened by pleasure or by pain,and relapses with yet more force into the horrible annihilation which he hasalready experienced. In some, further sleep brings yet further ejaculations andfurther, even more terrible torments. After a number of similar nights, howmust these sufferers feel during the day? They look pale, depressed, dejected,barely able to stand up, their eyes sunken, lacking in vigor and verve, their vi-sion is weak, a frightful thinness disfigures them, they lose their appetite, theirdigestion is disordered, almost all their functions are altered, their memory isno longer active . . . soon vague pains extend through different parts of thebody, an interior fire devours them . . . a slow fever sets in, and finally phtisiedorsale, the grim result of excess in the evacuation of semen.53

All the engagements in the Encyclopédie with the topics of masturbationand nocturnal emission share this tone, nearly frantic with anxiety. The “justpunishments,” so vividly presented here, are dreadful indeed, the more soperhaps for being so entirely imaginary. What is never actually admitted isthat the excess involved is simply pleasure: pleasure that is in no way pro-ductive or constructive, pleasure in its purest, most egregious and sociallyirredeemable form, pleasure whose mere existence, socially speaking, is anexcess. The mere consideration of the ready availability of such pleasure ev-idently provoked nothing short of panic among these highly educated, so-phisticated writers, writers whose work in the Encyclopédie represents the veryculmination of the Enlightenment. A limit makes itself apparent here, evenas its exact location remains impossible to determine; within the conditionof pleasure the danger of crossing from sensibilité into consumption remainsever present because the crossing is itself pleasant. Sensitivity, receptivity tosensation, has always this potential to vibrate itself into excess, the suffererbecoming a string out of tune with the larger social sounding body. Of allthe arts, music—source of the sympathetic-vibration metaphor and of somevery sensual pleasure indeed—walks this line with an exquisite balance; andwithin eighteenth-century music, Boccherini was at times a high-wire artist,for his frankly indulgent play with sensuality through repetition and gorgeoustimbres.

As the Encyclopédie emphasized so urgently, the central difficulty, the prob-lem around which melancholic obsession and desire both circle, is whether


indulgence dissipates or intensifies the condition. Does the caress quiet orawaken pleasure? For all the quaintness of the above account of masturba-tion, the question is no idle one, for desire, like obsessive thought, can re-new itself endlessly, and as such marks the place at which autonomous self-hood spins off into the abyss of solipsism. We do well to remember that thevery generation of Frenchmen who wrote the Encyclopédie included one whoearnestly, deliberately, and insistently personified this solipsism, and who re-mains notorious for doing so: Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis deSade (1740–1814). Even as sensibilité informed cultural understanding as thetype, the model of human embodiment, Sade (who was a passionate admirerof Richardson) was compulsively involved in exploring its ultimate poten-tial, through the mechanisms of obsessive-consumptive desire, to move usbeyond any possibility of doubleness, of acting or rhetoric, display or falsity—beyond all the existential problems inherent in representation. In this ca-pacity Sade explored agony in particular as a desperate attempt to get beyondsympathetic vibration, to know the final, the real, the inarguable configur-ation of the self, the bottom of the bottomlessness of sensibilité.

The torturer, Sade’s Monsieur Curval or Monsieur Dolmancé, does notfeel the victim’s pain as pain; he feels it as domination, and it gives him plea-sure. In so doing he demonstrates that, in the final analysis, there is noth-ing that physiologically compels him to share his victim’s agony; sympatheticvibration is a social construction, no more, and sensible identificationproves, in the end, merest fiction. More than the sexualized imagery inwhich Sade habitually couches it, it is the moral detachment of this anti-sensibilité, the abominable possibleness of simply bypassing the absorptivemaneuver, that we will tend to find most obscene. But to high-mindedlydeny its possibility—indeed, its convenience, and the potential attractionsthereof—is to deny that such detachment is practiced by a great many peoplea great deal of the time, as an integral component of their power over oth-ers. Denying this, and our complicity in it, is purest foolhardiness. It is withthis fact that Sade’s work takes its power over those of us who would preferto be immune to it.

It can be protested that Sade’s works “explore” no issues, but are meretestaments to psychosis, mired in obsessive horribleness, inscribing and re-inscribing the “moral stupidity” of torture.54 Perfectly understandable as thisdismissal may be, it dismisses also Sade’s quintessentially melancholic abilityto personify some of the primary anxieties of his age. His dreadful repe-titiousness (beside which Boccherini’s repetitiousness pales into insignifi-cance) bespeaks not only his personal pathology, but the extent and the ur-gency of his generation’s anxiety. The two reflect one another endlessly,asking again and again: Where is the self ? Where is the center? How to drawthe map?

Sade makes it clear why, in the eighteenth century, one took the signs of


love-melancholy seriously. It endangered both the individual and the socialfabric. Even when there were no signs, the danger was still grave: “Immod-erate love does not always announce itself by evident signs, however; some-times it keeps itself hidden in the heart, and the fire with which it burns itdevours the substance of the one affected by this passion, causing him to fallinto a real consumption. It is difficult to know the cause of all the bad ef-fects which [the consumption] produces in silence.”55

The deadly spinning-off, the consequent consumption of selfhood andstrength, takes place in and because of silence and solitude. Here the rela-tion of melancholy to music becomes especially delicate. Melancholy’smetaphorical aspects, enacted mimetically, run up against the performativeaspect, enacted through cadences, which are, after all, endings; and endingsare inherently inimical to melancholy, just as satisfaction is inherently inimicalto desire. In the musical-melancholic labyrinth of C. P. E. Bach’s Abschied, forinstance, the skill and subtlety with which he untangles his modulations isattended by considerable reluctance: for conclusion, untying, must finallyput a stop to the whole process, must accomplish the ending, the parting,that is being so exquisitely delayed through mourning about it in the firstplace. Similarly, if we continue our parallel reading of Edward Young’s poemand Boccherini’s Quartet op. 9, no. 1 (which, I wish to reemphasize, is en-tirely and deliberately conjectural: I have taken Boyé’s vague reference andrun with it), we encounter the same difficulty. Both Young’s unwelcome re-turn from sleep into waking, “severer for severe,” and Boccherini’s return tohis mournful, futile opening idea are as short as they are bitter. But in thepoem, waking is followed again by Night, the “sable goddess,” whose primarycharacteristic in Young’s poem is dead silence.56 Nor is this pulseless deadsilence, this “awful pause,” a mere cesura. It is antithetical to music; its onlypossible mimetic representation is the end of the piece, which in this casecan mean only death. Approached in such a way, a final cadence becomes amatter for apprehensive dread rather than any normal closure or resolutionof tension. It is at this impossible juncture that Boccherini abruptly departsfrom the melancholic. The final gestures of the movement are loud, harsh,aggressively defiant, punctuated by full chords in all the parts and propelledby emphatic, almost martial dotted rhythms (CD track 48). This music makesa sudden and violent attempt at a cure; it would seem to be enacting Bur-ton’s recommendation that the sufferer from love-melancholy be “divertedby some contrary passion.” These may be entirely fictional and quite brutal:Burton suggests telling the melancholic “that his house is on fire, his bestfriends dead, his money stolen.”57 The final chords of this movement do notparticipate in the melancholy tableau, but have become its frame, and in thepeculiar mechanics of melancholy, to frame the condition is to become freeof it at last.

Another, gentler cure for love-melancholy is the simple diversion of ex-


pressive intercourse with others, Burton’s “continual business . . . [to] dis-tract [his] cogitations.” Conviviality, galanterie, was thus potentially much morethan idleness; it had a tonic and a prophylactic function. A circle of mid-eighteenth-century friends might well have invited an afflicted member tothe distractions of music-making, as a way of helping in his cure. They wouldhave known that they were taking the risk that music might intensify his ob-session rather than interrupt it, and thus begin the consumptive cycle anew;accordingly they might be rather cautious about the minor mode and slowmovements. Thus the second movement of the Quartet in G Minor, op. 8,no. 4, G. 168, shown in example 22, would not at the outset have seemedparticularly risky (CD track 49). Although marked “Grave,” it is in the ma-jor mode, it begins with dotted rhythms (possibly connoting discipline, orsome degree of backbone), and in general it does not display Boccherini’svery deepest tints of blue; its orbit is more pathetic and familial, sensible inthe consoling sense.

The movement is notable for the way Boccherini voices many chords witha loving attention to where and how they will resonate among the variousinstruments. In rehearsing and playing such a passage, the members of thequartet will be caught up in balancing and voicing certain low sonorities.For example, in both bar 2 and bar 5 Boccherini uses a favorite voicing, adominant harmony with the seventh in the bass. In this case the seventh isan A b, on the cello a soft, full, unpenetrating note. The upper instrumentsmust adjust to allow the harmonic urgency of the 4 voicing to interact withthe throatiness of its timbre. The two opportunities to do this are slightly dif-ferent. In bar 2 all four instruments are in a low tessitura, more or less au-tomatically blending the chord into the bass (CD track 50). But at the endof bar 4 into bar 5, the first violin, now somewhat separated from the sonor-ity, must take especial care with transparency of tone, so as not to distractfrom the main interest of this passage, which lies (I submit, cellist that I am)not in his part at all, nor even in the throbbing of the second violin, but inthe cello’s slow, delicious devolution from A n to A b (CD track 51).

Halfway through bar 6, the cellist is presented with a tune in his most grate-ful and sonorous register; if he is the afflicted member of the group, thenthis elegantly reflective melody gives him a chance to voice intimate longingand sorrow over it—and yet do it in a measured, contained, anti-melancholicway; the tune is nicely defined in four phrases, the first two both four beatslong and sequentially constructed, the third made up of two two-beat se-quential modules, and the last a six-beat cadential phrase (CD track 52). Itis only after this that it begins to appear that the melancholy cellist has man-aged to infect his companions. By the time of the part-crossings at the endof bar 13 into bar 14, consumption has entered the picture. It first consumesperiodicity: essentially, a half-bar extension of the phrase occurs at this point,for no better reason than to intensify the timbral possibilities in a closely


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voiced diminished-seventh chord (CD track 53). In terms of conventionalharmonic function, the chord is an ambiguous, anxious chord anyway; butits anxiety is sharpened by the way the cello pushes at the upper limit of itstenor range, while the violins simultaneously descend below it, into their dark-est registers. Harmonic ambiguity is extended into ambiguous part-writing:the whole chord swirls through three different voicings of closed positionin the first two beats of bar 14. Here the quartet members embody the verycontradictoriness of melancholy, its impossible conjunctions of mania andgloom.

With these remarks, the whole tenor of my commentary has changed. Mycritical eyes have left the score and, as it were, rolled back into my head: Iam remembering the experience of having rehearsed and recorded thispiece, and I use these tactile memories as my source of information on whatthe piece is about, what I think it expresses: a different sort of “score.” Ofcourse such memories are present in all music criticism, as the inevitable el-ement of corporeal subvocalization. Even my silent score-reader, she whochooses not to listen to the recorded examples, makes reference, in seeingthat diminished-seventh chord spun out upon the page, to some prior phys-ical experience of diminished-seventh chords: their complex, conflicted den-sity of timbre in closed position upon a keyboard, perhaps.

This is the sensible at work in music criticism. In a Sternian vein, the lis-tener will identify with the instruments as fellow sounding bodies, hernerves set vibrating as are their fibrous strings; she might further identifyboth herself and them with the great, vibrating universal sensorium. So, in-deed, might the player of an instrument consciously use it as a particularlyapt “sounding body,” an instrument not only of sounds but of explicit con-nection with his listeners. Identification, the absorptive maneuver, is central



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here. The ideally sensible listener is always a participant, by virtue of thesehalf-involuntary, bodily, sympathetic responses; an ideally sensible composerlike Boccherini knows them well, and writes directly toward exciting themin his audience.

Extreme subjectivity and volatility are of the essence in this sort of criti-cism. By rights, even necessarily, “all [our] senses are troubled, [we] think[we] see, hear, smell, and touch that which [we] do not.”58 The more fanci-ful, the more hypersensitive, the more intimately, hypochondriacally fan-tastical our reading of musical passages like this, the more in tune with themwe have become; our “most active and finest parts” have been engaged inthe music’s “most delicate Sensation and Taste.” Such criticism obviously haslittle to do with rational structures of proof or even of demonstration, andeverything to do with the listener’s willingness to submit to the sensible ge-nius, to become herself a body whose every fluctuation of the animal spiritsin the heart and breath is instantly communicated throughout its members,if not beyond them to other bodies entirely, by an excruciatingly active, res-onant nervous system.

This is not an activity without risk. There is obvious epistemological dan-ger in such deliberate immersions in experience; but the risk of which I wishto speak here is a medical one. Bodies so finely attuned can become mar-tyrs to their own sympathies; exquisite sensitivity to pleasure is necessarilydefenseless against pain. In submission to pleasure lies dormant the labyrinthof melancholy. Boccherini points directly into the abyss in the way he endseach half of this slow movement. There are no framing, distancing cadences,as there are in op. 9, no. 1; rather, each half ends with a muttering-off intodark-timbred, much-repeated chords that finally subside into silence, birth-place of melancholy and resting place of its unchecked course (CD track54). Lest the performers miss the reference, at the anti-cadence at the endof the first half (bars 17–19) Boccherini has marked three of the partsmorendo, and a fourth smorzando. The silence that follows is actually notatedby a half-bar rest, which in this Grave tempo feels and sounds almost un-bearably long in performance. “Fate! drop the curtain; I can lose no more.”

When the second half of the movement picks up after this appalling lapse,it does so in an unforeseen key, A b major. Any direct reply to utter desola-tion would be crass; only the hypothetical, fictional vein will do, the dreamof what might happen after we cease to be, arrived at by the dream-logic ofa third-related progression (CD track 55). This A b major gives way graduallyto more diminished-seventh anxieties over the next few bars, but it does notspiral off endlessly: the progression returns us in a reasonably timely man-ner to the home key of Eb major.

Harmonically, we might interpret the piece’s conventional reprise to itshome key as another example of Boccherini’s strategic ability to disentan-gle himself (and us) from melancholy; but of course, melodically and tex-


turally it is something else again, refusing to be direct or affirmative in theface of unspeakable loss, and by a means peculiar to its composer: the cellosings again. I have already discussed this reprise in chapter 3 (CD track 16).By a lovely timbral and orchestrational sleight of hand, the cello emergesout of the ensemble sound from some Place we could never have imagined,utterly unexpected—only a bar before it was playing the bass, and in fact asbass it executed the conventional falling-fifth gesture that returned us to thetonic—and marked as unearthly, disembodied, by being this time in the so-prano register: a visitation. This return to the home key is no earthly reprise,but a transmutation. In chapter 3, writing and hearing in a pastoral mode,I referred to this same passage as an evocation of the nightingale, whose“sweet but eerily disembodied song brings a complex and ancient set of as-sociations to European ears: mourning for the dead, or endless complaintover lost love.” Now, writing and hearing from a protracted engagement withmelancholy, I hear the mourning and the complaint more acutely. How theafflicted performer or listener reads such a passage, the values with whichwe invest it, whether we find in it the possibility of redemption or only of anexquisite heightening of torment, will have a good deal to do with our con-dition at the time of listening. Music can “make such melancholy personsmad,” or it can save them from themselves.

In its inherent susceptibility the melancholy body is dangerously vulner-able. The hardy postmodernist reader, inoculated against a cultural varietythat would have stunned Burton or Boccherini, may smile at such quaintwarnings, but in so doing betray the extent to which her own culture has di-vorced soul and body—an extent undreamed of by Descartes himself. Wesimply can no longer believe that too fine an attention to a melancholic pieceof music might result in physical illness; and in this inability we see the gulfof our difference from the culture that produced and consumed such mu-sic. To attempt to cross the gulf is, at least in theory, to lay ourselves open tothe possibility of making ourselves ill.


Chapter 6

“It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece”The Early String Quartets

Bordeu: Every sensible molecule [once] had its “me” . . . but howdid it lose it, and how does the conscience of a whole resultfrom 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 arti-cle on the performance of string quartets, signed “Cambini in Paris.” Aftera series of musings in an early Romantic vein on the technical and spiritualobligations of the four musicians came the following passage:

Three great masters—Manfredi, the foremost violinist in all Italy with respectto orchestral and quartet playing, Nardini, who has become so famous as a vir-tuoso through the perfection of his playing, and Boccherini, whose merits arewell 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 andwhich one still hears with such pleasure.1

The happy time recalled by Cambini took place in 1765, in Milan. His con-stellation of luminaries formed the first professional string quartet of whichwe have any record, though that record consists in Cambini’s word alone, notbeing verified by any other source.2 We cannot accept Cambini’s brave claimthat the group played some of Haydn’s opp. 9, 17, and 20 quartets; it is a claimill-served by his mistaking the last of the three opus numbers, and in any casenone 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 havebeen 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 beenop. 2, Boccherini’s first six string quartets, written, according to the com-poser, between 1760 and 1762, and first published in Paris in 1767. Boc-cherini followed the six of op. 2 with no fewer than eighty-five more worksin the same genre. His string quartets span his entire creative life in twentyopus numbers; one of his very last manuscripts is the unfinished Quartet inD Major, op. 64, no. 2, G. 249. The string quartets are outnumbered—thoughscarcely out-diversified—only by the quintets.

Slightly over half Boccherini’s works in the string quartet medium arecalled quartettini. This is Boccherini’s own usage, perhaps even his owncoinage.3 The diminutive indicates a shorter piece, often but not always intwo movements. He also calls them opere piccole; other works with a more con-ventional three- or four-movement plan are opere grandi.4 The composer men-tions this distinction, which he also employed among his trios, quintets, andsymphonies, in a letter to Don Carlo Andreoli of 22 September 1780: “I di-vide the works into small and large, because the large ones consist of fourpieces [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 selectas they please, as it is all cloth of the same piece.”5

This is an interesting claim. One might assume that in restricting himselfto a shorter format, and often to shorter movements within that format, Boc-cherini also employed a lighter, more inconsequential style. But, just as heimplies, this is not the case; the reduced length of the quartettini does not havea consistent relationship with level of invention or seriousness of tone. Theonly feature of the opere grandi that is somewhat rarer in the quartettini is thefully developed slow movement.6 The short format lends itself to concisionand immediacy, and is a great friend of the whole esthetic of the tableau. Someof the most affecting and characteristic music in the quartets can be foundamong the quartettini. Boccherini’s own typically diffident acknowledgmentof this complex and distinctive unity in his work—“it is all cloth of the samepiece”—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 atstyle periodization must be a peculiarly frustrating task. An interesting styl-istic division of the quartets has been proposed by Christian Speck. He givesop. 2 solitary pride of place as an extraordinary youthful effort (an estima-tion with which I tend to agree); he groups together op. 8 of 1769 throughop. 33 of 1781 for their interpretations and approximations of Viennese Clas-sical style, especially as regards their forays into motivic and thematic de-velopment; he connects op. 39 of 1787 through op. 53 of 1796, all initially

208 “it is all cloth of the same piece”

written for the king of Prussia (with some later published by Pleyel), by their“pleasant and brilliant style” and relative absence of motivic processes; andthe late opp. 58 and 64 he finds to be quasi-orchestral and very much dom-inated by the first violin.7

Any periodization serves to clarify certain features of an artist’s work atthe expense of others. By accepting Boccherini’s own pronouncement I pur-sue a different particularity than Speck. I do this not because I think it es-sential to take Boccherini literally (composers are, after all, notoriously un-reliable when speaking about their own work) but simply because uponexamination of the quartets I agree with him: they are indeed remarkablysimilar to one another in style. Throughout the forty years of their compo-sition Boccherini returns again and again to certain questions, frequentlyreuses favorite “solutions,” recasts the same situations over and over withinfinite variation of characters but very little change in fundamental pur-pose. The stylistic developments that Speck descries in the quartets are cer-tainly verifiable; but they are, I think, much less interesting than the re-markable samenesses.

The homogeneity observed among a large group of Boccherini’s worksis paralleled by his repetitiveness within individual works. Either feature canbe used as a way of characterizing his production as artistically stunted, withBoccherini as a sort of ancien-régime fly in amber—someone whom the marchof stylistic progress had no choice but to leave behind. Such a point of viewis nascent even in sympathetic evaluations like Fétis’s: “His works [are] soremarkable in every respect, that one is tempted to believe that he knew noother music than his own.”8 It should be obvious by now that I emphasizethe peculiar samenesses of Boccherini’s work as an exhortation to rethinkthese still current nineteenth-century notions of what style and artistic de-velopment mean.

To say that [he] was forgotten because of a change in taste has the effect ofplacing him in a certain light—[composer] to a dying class, coming at the endof a tradition in art, a bit decadent. . . . Today, praise of [him] tends to be tingedwith apology along such lines. . . . Surely, the plea is made, the . . . works of hisold age reveal a greater seriousness and more depth. But the style, public atevery stage, is the man; and in [his] case it was to an extraordinary degreethrough his style that he was able to see, to think, to perform. It was not a dis-guise he hid behind, and it was never outgrown.9

It is further in Boccherini’s nature that his engagements with the quartetgenre—indeed with any genre—are only rarely what we would call, from astyle-historical perspective, innovative. One can scarcely imagine Boccherinias the founder of a “school” of composition, and he had no imitators. Andyet neither could we deny that he is original, often profoundly so; certainly

“it is all cloth of the same piece” 209

he was widely acknowledged to be so in his own day. Few composers so aptlydemonstrate the gulf between originality and innovation.

In this chapter I will draw on examples from three early opere, 8, 9, and15, the first quartets written after Boccherini’s visit to Paris, and (importantlyin terms of his intended audience) after his establishment of firm relationswith publishers there. In so doing I will presume to let my conclusions speak,however generally, for all ninety-one of Boccherini’s quartets, and occa-sionally for his work in other ensemble media. Moreover, I will make no at-tempt to be comprehensive, but will again follow the composer’s lead, andfocus where he focuses: that is, on characteristic ideas to which he returnsoften, on the simple presumption that they are what interested him most.As well as best representing Boccherini’s marked stylistic centeredness, I thinkthis approach is consonant with eighteenth-century ideas of artistic voice andits development. As the art historian and philosopher Richard Wollheim putsit, “We should be extremely reluctant, without evidence of massive psycho-logical disturbance, to multiply styles by departing from the maxim, Oneartist, one style. . . . Surely an artist’s style should be no more thought of assusceptible to fragmentation or fission than his personality.”10

woven music

Boccherini’s cloth metaphor works on more than one level. In chapter 3 Idiscussed his penchant for forsaking or exploding any singable melodic linein favor of a kind of textural, textile-like approach to ensemble sound. Thisis beyond doubt one of Boccherini’s most consistent preoccupations in thequartets, indeed in all his ensemble music, and it is often allied to a markeddegree of repetitiveness. I have offered several related readings of these tex-tural passages: as sonic lacunae, inviting reverie rather than directing at-tention; as foregrounding the performers’ bodies; as evocation of landscape.Here I will confine myself to proposing their genesis. It seems possible thatBoccherini developed this distinctive kind of writing out of his notably solois-tic use of the cello in the earliest opus of quartets, op. 2. There, the SSABregistral roles of the conventional sonata a quattro were periodically disruptedby the virtuosity of the cello part; what had been “the bass” could abruptlyassume any one of the four roles in the ensemble. If, for instance, the cellosuddenly behaves like a second violin, playing melody in thirds with the first,the viola perforce becomes a bass, with the second violin doubling that bassas a viola more typically does. If the sheer number of instances is indicative,such part-mixing was a stronger inspiration than the urge to write solos forhis own instrument. While he continues to experiment with crossing rangeswithin the quartet, Boccherini writes only one prominent cello solo in thesecond opus of quartets (in the slow movement of op. 8, no. 4, of 1770, dis-cussed at the end of the last chapter), and there are none at all in the next


two opere, 9 and 15. In these works the impulse to sing is exercised muchmore conventionally through the violin parts. Thus Boccherini seems to bemoving away from any concertante identity for his own instrument within thequartet medium; one has only to compare these early works with the obbli-gato quartets of Boccherini’s fellow virtuoso Giambattista Cirri, publishedin London from 1766, or with examples of the flashy Parisian quatuor con-certant style exemplified by Cambini’s works, to see the extent to which Boc-cherini was deliberately forgoing his own virtuosity in his chamber music,even as he developed some of its sonic implications.11

Textile-like writing is prominent in the early string trios as well as the quar-tets, and becomes yet more subtle and complex in the quintets (even as hemaintains the concertante cello writing there): the more parts, the more pos-sibilities Boccherini uncovers for crossing, mixing, and blending them. Thusit is not surprising that some of the finest examples of his textural genius comenot from the realm of chamber music, but from the expanded resources ofa symphony—which Boccherini had a fascinating penchant for “breakingdown” into temporary concertante, chamber-musical subgroupings.12

The huge range of the cello as Boccherini used it encompasses that of an en-tire quartet, or even a symphonic group, for in ensemble music of the periodviolins rarely played higher than the highest passages in his cello sonatas. Thus,speaking kinetically, one might conceive this solo-cello-to-mixed-ensemble-texture process as the evolution of a meta-cello, an all-encompassing Levia-than Instrument, a sonic and simultaneous Proteus, its capacity for individ-ual expression sacrificed in exchange for the capacity to become many othersat once.

From an idea that may have been conceived kinetically, in the matrix ofa composer’s own half-articulated relationship to his body’s ability to exe-cute music, an ensemble treatment metamorphoses neither as simple con-tinuation nor as more complex genealogy. Instead, the whole framework ofidea-making—what originates in what, how sensation might be supposed totransform into concept—calls itself in question. This is nowhere so clear asaround the phenomena of repetition and reminiscence.

recycling the idea of recycling

In chapter 4 I discussed Boccherini’s related tendencies to repeat himselfand to recycle his own ideas in light of the concept of idiom, as a process ofkinetic self-confirmation. The deliberate or half-deliberate recycling of a pas-sage seems to model that temporally constructed notion of the self proposedby Condillac.

Consciousness not only gives us a knowledge of our perceptions; but more-over, if those perceptions be repeated, it frequently informs us that we had them


before, and represents them as belonging to us, and as affecting, notwith-standing their variety and succession, a being that is always the same self. . . .Without [these functions] every moment of our life would seem the first ofour existence, and our knowledge would never extend beyond a first percep-tion. I shall call it reminiscence.13

But such a construction immediately comes apart in an ensemble setting.What do we call it when a “repetition” is taken by a different instrument inthe ensemble? If there is a bodily center upon which this process converges,it is profoundly compromised through the fact of its social enactment: thecorporate both is, and is not, the corporeal.

In the first period of the trio of the Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G.169, discussed in the previous chapter, a two-bar-long idea is treated imita-tively at the unison (see example 20; CD track 43). The passage offers a beau-tiful enactment of the problem of “repetition” in ensembles. Any supposedidentity disintegrates in performance: for all the hours or years the quartetmay have lavished on unifying their individual styles, even an untrained earwill have little trouble hearing the minute differences of tone and articula-tion between the two violinists. Enter the viola, and the difference becomesmarked, since although the figure is still at the unison, it lies in a differenttessitura on that instrument: it will have an urgency of timbre on the violathat is absent on the violins. Enter the cello and any lingering conceit of same-ness becomes untenable: the figure is down an octave, its identity utterlychanged. At this point, if not before, the listener-observer will most likelyinterpret the sequence of utterances as dialogue. Dialogue is a broad fieldindeed; within it, the repetition of a statement can function very diversely.While it can confirm, it can also be a query or parody, an expansion, re-duction, or “correction” of the original statement. Which of these very dif-ferent options it becomes is almost entirely a matter of how the figure is ex-ecuted. The reader need only imagine the minute adjustments it would takefacially, in body posture, and in articulation and nuances of tone to makethe second violin’s “echo” an unkind comment upon the first violin’s pro-posal. Intrinsic though such performed adjustments may be to the passage’smeaning, none of them are notated, nor can they be.

As in the sonatas, so in the quartets Boccherini sometimes offers us “rem-iniscences” between movements accomplished through tertiary ideas. Ex-amples 23a and 23b hail from the second and third movements respectivelyof op. 8, no. 5 (CD tracks 56 and 57). In each case the passage comes fromthe modulating section in the second half of the movement, and has no ob-vious relationship to the movement’s main or secondary ideas. Beyond thisrough commonality, what the passages share is harmonic (a diminished sev-enth secondary dominant in both cases, and both arriving suddenly out ofmuch blander harmonies), melodic-gestural (chains of falling minor thirds),


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and textural (imitation at the unison between the violins). However, they shareneither pitches, nor meter, nor periodic structure. The first, Allegro passageis in common time with a six-bar phrase structure, while the passage from theTempo di minuetto is in triple meter and four-bar phrases. These reminis-cences are not consistently corporeal. They are not at all so in the cello or vi-ola, which play entirely different lines in the two extracts, and a corporealreminiscence can be teased out only through melodic transposition and asomewhat Procrustean rhythmic adaptation in the violin parts. It is clearly nolonger possible to do as I did in discussing such resemblances in the sonatas,and attribute the likenesses to the transcribed reflexivity of a pair of experthands, or to any sort of comforting or confirmatory kinetic impulse.

Thus does Boccherini go Condillac one better: he reminds us that in reallife, the life that necessarily involves others, reminiscence is not always oronly confirmatory. It can be perceptual destabilization, the uncontrollable


Example 23b. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo diminuetto), bars 8–14.

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permeability of current experience by the past. Through the glass of repet-itiveness he forces us to watch not only the progress but the inevitable slip-page of the “same” thought—and thus the “same” self—as a direct result ofits socialization. In ensemble settings in particular, Boccherini’s handling ofrepetition, thematic reminiscence, and cyclicity shows his sensitivity to theparadox that lies at the heart of the notion of “repetition.” His penchant forevasive, transmutational games around reprises similarly calls in question anynotion of psychological or musical “structure” accomplished through mem-ory. In the preceding chapters we encountered a number of examples: be-tween movements in the Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, and similarlywithin the slow movement of the Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168,reprise is transformed into an unearthly, unfamiliar, but consoling “substi-tute.” More markedly, over the course of the Sonata in C Major, G. 17 remi-niscences are transformed from piercing nostalgia into bitter sarcasm. Wecannot step in the same river twice; nor does the da capo (even should weelect not to ornament it), or the main theme, or yet the motive, ever reallymake the same impression upon us the second time around. Should we be-gin to imagine that we can do these things, it takes only the presence of oth-ers, executing themes and motives and da capos with all the inevitable or de-liberate inconsistency of live performance, to disabuse us of our fond notion.

sublimated caresses

Characteristic melodic devices which Boccherini had developed in thesonatas often carry over to his melody writing in the quartets, regardless ofthe instrument playing that melody. This is the simplest and yet the mostopaque solo-to-quartet “translation”: a favorite type of physical-melodic ges-ture is used primarily for its sound and its affectual associations, since its tac-tility will have been profoundly altered through being executed on anotherinstrument. I suggested in chapter 3, for instance, that in the passage fromthe Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, shown in example 5 (CD track10) sonic and affectual resonances are in some measure determined by theway a slow, much-repeated half-step descent “pulls in” physically on the cello,enacting a subtle tension-to-release gesture. On a violin, however, the “same”half-step descent moves the left hand away from the body. Its sensible, tenderassociations remain, reinforced by its resemblance to the vocalistic trope ofthe sigh; but its gestural associations have the potential to work across thisgrain. In the fourth bar of example 24, the entire quartet executes a throb-bing rinforzando that emphasizes the harmonic tension in Boccherini’s fa-vorite 4 voicing, where the most urgent tone in an urgent harmony, the sev-enth of a dominant, lies in the bass (CD track 58). When the bass “pulls in”by the obligatory half-step descent in the next bar, the rinforzando dissolvesas well; all this is as expected. But meanwhile the first violin has executed its


216

Example 24. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i (Adagio), bars 13–18.

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own half-step descent, moving from E n to Eb. In so paralleling the bass’s de-scent, it becomes the seventh of a new dominant harmony. Thus the first vi-olin mimes the expected tenderness of release through melody and volume,even as he incrementally resists release through harmony and gesture: theviolinist’s hand has not “pulled in” but expanded ever so slightly out fromhis torso, while “release” is further complicated by the addition of a subitopiano, which sounds like release, but requires increased restraint. A morecomplete release comes in the next bar. Voice-leading decrees that the firstviolin’s Eb seventh should resolve downward in another half-step descent, andthus, on the violin, a little further still from the center of the body; but Boc-cherini has the first violin take the resolution down an octave. In this regis-ter, the resolving D is best executed with an open string—that is, by brieflyreleasing the left hand from its duties altogether.

So central is the half-step descending gesture to Boccherini’s thinking thatit becomes at times a mere ideal, strongly implied but not executed. In ex-ample 25, two successive perfect cadences are linked by two possible path-ways of half-step descent (CD track 59). The first cadence confirms a mod-ulation to G minor, and has a slightly “hard” quality due to its predominanceof open strings. The second cadence, only a bar later, makes a curious, char-acteristically Boccherinian “sideways” approach to a reprise of the move-ment’s opening idea, in the much “softer,” more muted Eb major, by meansof a sort of third relation that is very characteristic of the composer.14 In theworld of tonal harmony, third-relations often summon the might-have-been,a sweet (if always temporary) alternative to logic or to fate: we have seen an-other example of this in the beginning of the second half of the Grave ofthe quartet op. 8, no. 4, discussed in chapter 5. He uses this convention hereto suggest a set of delicately subliminal tensions. Descending-half-step mo-tion is implied between the two dominant harmonies: the D-major domi-nant’s A and F # are respectively supplanted by A b and F n in the Bb-major dom-inant. But these trajectories are interrupted by three intervening beats whichcontain a series of other pitch events (including the complete resolution ofthe first dominant). They are further interrupted by the physical space be-tween bodies, as well as by the immeasurable abyss between persons: for thefirst violin’s A only becomes an A b in the hands of the second violin, whoseurgent F#, meanwhile, has been melted into an F n and dropped an octave bythe viola. (See the reduction in example 24.)

It is a stretch to maintain that these are coherent gestures in any way, sub-jected as they are to temporal deferral, potent distraction and interpersonaldisplacement. Yet the stretch is precisely the point: how better to explainthis reprise’s immense gentleness, its lingering affect of longing?

These last examples come from slow movements, the sensible hearts oftheir respective quartets. Further foregrounding their sensibilité, Boccherinifrequently associates the half-step descent with a distinctive bowing style: a


right-hand tremolando, variously notated by slurred staccati (as in example25) or by a wavy line over the note heads. The tremolando bowing and thehalf-step descent have affectual kinship—both vocalistically evoke the softlypalpitating viscera toward which the original cellistic withdrawing gesturemoved—but there is also a kinetic resemblance that is perceptible on theviolin or viola every bit as much as on the cello: both these usages, the onein the right hand and involving articulation, the other in the left and in-volving pitch, share the kinesthetic profile of the caress.


Example 25. String Quartet in Eb Major, op. 8, no. 3, G. 167, i (Largo [soto (sic)voce]), bars 22–25.

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rococo

These musical caresses epitomize the hedonistic quality in Boccherini’s work,a quality which resonates with certain values of the rococo. The word rocococomes from rocaille, “shellwork,” meaning the architectural and painterly cul-tivation of the decorative curlicue for its own sake. It seems to have had anodor of dismissal to it almost from the beginning; critics of every age arefond of attacking what they feel to be excessively ornamental.15 I use the termhere with particular reference to Norman Bryson’s characterization ofBoucher, Natoire, and several other French rococo painters as presenting adifferent kind of space from the perspectival, a space that arises from the fo-cus on erotic objects, especially nudes or trysts. The existence of perspecti-val space as the space in which interaction, drama, change, discourse—in aword, “uneasiness”—arise is abandoned by these artists, in favor of a pre-sentation of bodilyness “uniquely made to gratify and to be consumed in themoment of the glance.”16 Overly accurate location creates distance, relativ-ity, context, and so functions as an impediment to erotic absorption.

Confronted by a Boucher Venus, we will be caught up, indeed overwhelmed,by the surface of the paint, consuming and consumed by its silky finish, itsexquisitely modulated transitions of color, the bewitching para-luminosityof tones that can come only from the patient application of layer upon layerof oil pigment. But we must also admit that this apotheosis of materiality isrepresentational. There is no nervous modernist distancing from signifi-cation: all this sensual delight is served to the eye through the conventionalsignifier of a woman’s naked body. This makes it explicit that frankly eroticgazing is intended and appropriate; yet what is enjoyed here is only periph-erally “a woman.” Just as present and far more physical are the facts of theexquisitely handled act of painting itself, and of the painter’s and viewer’sown bodies summoned toward one another through a lambent Venus.Bryson suggests that this happy, unproblematized doubleness, this “interestin the duplicity of the image,”17 is one of the most deeply characteristic at-titudes of the French painterly rococo.

It inhabits certain kinds of music as well. Boccherini invites and plays withthe listener’s attention through the static passages in his music, which throughtheir repetitiveness efface any sense of aural “perspective” or “location” withina phrase or period; the temporal structuration of listening is dissolved, thelistener’s focus shifts to the immediate, and the performers’ bodies emerge,Venus-like, “to gratify and to be consumed in the moment of the glance.”What is more, in the absence of any compelling thematic information—ineighteenth-century analytical terms, any strong “idea”—hearing itself couldbe said to be “visualized” through this maneuver. Our ears’ attention read-ily settles upon the immediacy of sound, what we now call timbre. The wordis French; but in the French of Boccherini’s day its meaning was only sec-


ondarily a musical one. Its primary meanings were visual: “imprint” or “im-pression,” watermarks on legal paper, the maker’s mark attached to piecesof lace.18 The momentary rich “darkness” of a dissonance, the “luminous”properties of a particular consonance, the “silky luster” of a certain violin-ist’s mid-range tone—we routinely use visualistic terminology to get at cer-tain aspects of musical sensuousness. We are well accustomed to doing so;in English we use the even more frankly visualistic term tone color inter-changeably with timbre. Rousseau scrappily contested this synesthetic ma-neuver, calling it a “false analogy between colors and sounds.”

All the riches of color are displayed simultaneously on the face of the earth;everything is seen with the first glance. But the longer one looks the more oneis enchanted; one has only to admire and contemplate ceaselessly.

It is not so with sound; nature does not analyze it nor separate out its har-monics; she is hidden, on the contrary, within the appearance of the unison. . . .She inspires songs, not chords; she dictates melody, not harmony. Colors arethe ornament of inanimate beings; all matter is colored; but sounds announcemovement; the voice announces a feeling being.19

For Rousseau the atemporal immediacy of sensory impression, repre-sented in this passage by color, is not just absolute or untranslatable: it is “inan-imate,” inexpressive. Although he maintains with some correctness that wedo not as a rule distinguish the individual harmonics within a tone, he evadesthe fact that everything about the nature of that tone—everything that en-ables us to distinguish by ear a violin from a flute, or a mechanical flutistfrom a living one, or indeed one living flutist from another—is containedin those harmonics; only with reference to timbre are we able to determinethe rather crucial matter of which “feeling being” has announced itself to us.For all that we seem to accomplish this instantaneously, within a perceptionof singleness, the multiplicitous physics of the harmonic series were well un-derstood at the time Rousseau was writing, thanks largely to the work of hisnemesis Rameau: an apparently single tone contains any number of har-monics, and the relative proportions of those harmonics determine its “color,”its identity, to the ear. To do as Boccherini does, and linger in this realm ofthe sonically immediate, is to invite the ear to what Rousseau calls the eye’sbehavior: “All the riches of color are displayed simultaneously on the faceof the earth; everything is [heard] with the first [sounds]. But the longerone [listens] the more one is enchanted; one has only to admire and con-template ceaselessly.”

The longer one admires and contemplates a Boccherinian timbral tableau,the more the specificity, the personhood of those feeling/sounding beings,its executants, will body forth. Musical performance makes these beings evenmore personable and available than painting. We have, should we want it,the luxury of being able to talk to Venus, to make an account of what she


thinks about the landscape in which she finds herself, and the company shekeeps—including the strangers who gaze at her so raptly.

Describing this music experientially, “getting at it” with a detail and fine-grainedness that will even begin to gesture at the experience of hearing orplaying it (no question of capturing or securing it: should I begin to dreamof such success, there is Diderot’s despair to remind me of my hubris), is aconstant struggle, yet one I feel is required by the very presence of the mu-sic; every single time I play Boccherini I am moved to try anew. How do I ex-ecute the tone notated on the score before me? How did Boccherini exe-cute the F he is forever about to play in his Italian portrait? Leopold Mozarttells us how he began it: “Even the most strongly begun tone has a small, ifscarcely perceptible delicacy at its beginning: without which it would not bea tone, but rather only a disagreeable and unintelligible noise. And this del-icacy is also to be heard at the end of every tone.”20

Even in the apparently straightforward agency, the acting-upon repre-sented by causing a string to vibrate, the player is a supplicant, the playerasks of the string in courtesy, the player feels for the cooperative métier ofthe string’s very substance, which is as fibrous and as visceral as Sterne couldever have wished: the purified and stretched intestine of a sheep. Taken toheart (or more properly, to hand), this sensible receptivity parlays itself intoalmost infinite detail: how do we distinguish the rinforzando, sforzando, mi-nute crescendo, and decrescendo (or are they accent marks? What actuallyis the difference?), the strategically placed forte, the unnotated forte impliedby a subsequent piano, the tenuto, and all those especially beloved terms forplaying softly—dolce, dolcissimo, soave, sotto voce—so liberally salted into Boc-cherini’s scores?

address to a sforzando

Let us take a sforzando, for instance. Forzare is “to make an effort” or “to force”in Italian. The s-prefix, a curious, labile modifier that often resists or conflictswith the meaning of the ensuing word, here intensifies it: sforzare, then, is tomake a strong effort. But immediately a question arises: to what extent is thisa direction to simply play a note more loudly, or with a sharper attack, thanits fellows? Very little, I submit: for in playing a stringed instrument, one findsthat increased sound bears at best a complex relationship to increased effort,which very readily becomes sonically counterproductive. (The corollary, ofcourse, is the phenomenon discussed in chapter 4: extremely soft dynamicsrequire a surprising amount of muscular tension). Perhaps, then, this sforzandorequires me to resist the impulse to set the string violently vibrating throughsheer momentum; for this would be a letting-go of tension, and furthermore,“it would [then] not be a tone, but rather only a disagreeable and unintelli-gible noise.” Instead I must employ an infinitesimally brief restraint in the ini-


tial speed of contact between bow hair and string. Such a literalistic sforzandois indeed far more effortful to execute than one created by merely releasingkinetic energy. It will sound as well as look that way; and of course the resis-tance, the physical constraint in the sound production, has meaning of itsown. Neither brash nor harsh, this is a strong emphasis that is, for all itsstrength, carefully considered and fully controlled. The design of a bow suchas Boccherini used, with the stick curved slightly outward from the hair, andmuch lighter at the tip than at the frog, lends itself well to these tiny expres-sive withholdings and mitigated releases of energy. With a bow of later de-sign, built to make a more direct attack and projected sustain, the player isapt to find herself further entangled in resistance to her very equipment.

And then, in the ensemble context in which this sforzando perforce ap-pears (this marking is not to be found in the solo music), how further to ac-count for the element in its sound that is so important to good chamber-music making in general, and particularly essential to playing Boccherini’smusic—that is, the making of a sound that is transparent enough to allowother parts to emerge more clearly? I must take account of the differencebetween making that sound in D major and making it in Eb major, sincestringed instruments resonate so differently in sharp and flat keys, and be-tween making it in the tenor register and the bass, for reasons of projection.Also the difference between making it in a small room with plaster walls, fouror five musicians crammed in together—that is, a room such as those in whichBoccherini lived and probably did some of his rehearsing; in an enormouslyresonant chapel with fifty-foot ceilings, faced in marble, where one mightperform instrumental music between parts of a Mass, as Boccherini did inhis early years in Lucca; in a fine large sitting room with draped windows onone wall and tapestries on the other three, half full of gentlemen in capesand ladies in petticoated, sound-absorbing skirts and mantles—like roomsin the Spanish palaces in which Boccherini worked in the second half of hislife; and on the stage of the Burgtheater in Vienna, where Boccherini playedseveral times between 1757 and 1764, a space purpose-built to project soundoutward and enhance its clarity.

The character of the sforzando conceived and executed in isolation altersas soon as others are in the room; as Diderot tells us in the “Paradoxe,” if itis conceived and executed with express reference to those others, it is alteredat the root. Obviously, Boccherini wrote all of his music with the intentionthat it be performed; so others are present at the heart of even his most deeplyintroverted moments. His lifelong gravitation toward chamber music, whichforms the great bulk of his output, bespeaks his concern with it as an ex-tended metaphor for what the sforzando so microscopically embodies: socialinteraction, the negotiations between urgency and decorum, the mechan-ics of getting along. This is the sense in which we still understand and val-orize chamber music today. The very term chamber music—musica da camera—


had long signified music made privately (and thus, until the present age,pretty much necessarily by the well-to-do). In the eighteenth century it be-came a more detailed mimesis of social behavior, a site of that period’s anx-iety over what happened to selfhood when it encountered society: the So-cial Contract in tones, as it were.

This partial and still abstract address to a single sforzando took an hourand a half to write, and a further hour to revise. Any more extended suchaccount, any that deals with Boccherini’s large vocabulary of articulationalterms, each one unique by virtue of its peculiar tactile configuration in thecontext of a specific piece, will, while being the only true bearing-out of thecritical apparatus that I have assembled over the preceding chapters, runinto insuperable problems around the incommensurability of act and de-scription. This is a type of attention that is out of the reach of most of us,whose pace of life and onslaught of necessities scarcely permit such extendedreveries over a single act, a single word. It requires real leisure, and as suchit bespeaks the very social class for which most of Boccherini’s chamber mu-sic was published. Being able to spend such time on a small and delicate thingwas, and is, the most delicious luxury. And in the matter of really under-standing this music, it is also no less than essential.

two analyses: op. 15, no. 3

The six quartets of op. 15, written in 1772 and dedicated to the Infante DonLuis de Borbón, were published in Paris the following year by Vénier. Thesepieces form Boccherini’s first opus of quartettini, the shorter works that wereultimately to comprise over half of his quartet output; and they are entitled“Divertimenti” in the first edition. I have already mentioned that in Boc-cherini’s case brevity does not consistently imply lightness or inconsequen-tiality; neither should the published title be taken to mean that they are lessserious or personal works.21 On occasion these little pieces present some oftheir composer’s most characteristic musical thinking in a kind of stripped-down form.

Also characteristically, in the Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179,this thinking is at its most idiosyncratic not at the beginning of the work, norindeed in the first movement at all, but tucked away in an episode in the sec-ond movement. This movement exhibits a typical Boccherinian “exploded”melodic line for much of its duration; but unlike most examples of this ef-facement of the melodic impulse it is marked “Prestissimo” and is far fromdreamy (see example 26). While it is easy enough to describe the movementin terms of what it is not—melodic, peaceful, expressive—saying what it is,naming its affect, character, and topos, is a more difficult matter. We are es-pecially taxed by passages such as bars 25–48 (CD track 60). How are we tointerpret this strange, awkward chunk of perpetuum mobile? Can it be a dead-


pan sense of humor reflected upon us and our melodic, linear expectations?Can it be a kind of motoric simple-mindedness, an inability to perceive anduse those sophisticated interactions between periodicity, line, and listener-memory that form one of the highest achievements of the so-called Classi-cal style? Such readings scarcely acknowledge the high-mindedness and sub-tlety that I have been at pains to demonstrate in Boccherini.

The passage in question is only one of a number of difficulties and con-tradictions with which this little quartet confronts us; it happens to be theone that first caught my attention in the course of reading through op.15.My initial reaction was amusement at its oddity and opacity; then bemuse-ment, for I was convinced that its peculiarity was not anomalous, but somekind of Boccherinian essence. Analysis, as I propose to practice it here, is theattempt to distill this essence by description, comparison, and interpretation.

Analysis 1To the extent that I will begin not with what I find most interesting, but withthe beginning—the first movement of the quartet, reproduced in its entiretyin example 26—I will practice analysis conventionally. (For the reader whois using the CD, it will work best to listen to the entire first movement at thispoint, track 61, before reading my discussion of it.) The movement is a strik-ing exercise in certain samenesses. Out of its ninety-eight bars, fifty-threeare voiced with the violins playing a tune in octaves, and the viola consis-tently above the second violin, in parallel thirds or sixths with the tune. Ina further thirty-four bars, the violins continue to play the tune in octaves,while the viola detaches itself to play independently, or in brief lockstep withthe second violin or cello; but its tessitura remains above that of the secondviolin. In a handful of bars the violins play in octaves, with the viola movingmore conventionally below the second violin. The only extended passage inwhich the violins do not carry the tune is the eight bars at the beginning ofthe second half (bars 45–52), where the prevalent texture is essentially re-versed: the viola and cello play a tune in parallel sixths to the accompani-ment of drones and arpeggios from the violins (CD track 62).

There is no four-part writing proper in this entire movement; it is all inthe “extended two-part texture” remarked upon by Speck and Amsterdam.22

The tune flows along unhindered, reinforcing its textural and timbral con-tinuity on multiple levels: the dynamic (all but twelve of its ninety-eight barsare piano, pianissimo, sotto voce, or soave), the melodic and rhythmic (it is largelyin conjunct sixteenth-note motion), and the articulational (almost all of itfalls under four-note or eight-note slurs). The piece is even continuous onthe most basic level of all, that of making sound as opposed to silence. Breath-ing places at the ends of the tune’s phrases, such as at bars 16 and 36, tend


sotto voce

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Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino).

(continued)

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to be filled in by melodic figures from lower voices, or, in the case of bars 28and 82, the music resumes on the same harmony (with an added seventh)and in the same register, minimizing the hiatus.

The silences in bars 56 and 58 constitute the only significant interrup-tions of sound or gesture in the entire movement; we are alerted to them bythe way the respective preceding bars, 55 and 57, disrupt the prevalent har-monic rhythm, rousing it from sleepy halves and quarters to move, in thesecond half of each bar, in decisive cadential eighth-notes (CD track 63).Within the framework of the general seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryunderstanding of music as speechlike, musical silences are equivalent topunctuation in speech; and, as in speech, tiny gradations carry a good dealof meaning. One has only to speak the next sentence aloud to demonstratethis. “The pause and falling of pitch for a comma, as for the ones punctu-ating this clause, may be only a fraction of a second shorter than the pauseand fall for the semicolon at its end; but in speech the difference betweenthe two is perfectly clear to the listener, and both are distinct from the longerpause and fall occasioned by a full stop such as the one with which this state-ment closes.” A piece as sonically continuous as this movement of Bocche-rini’s has moved far from any speechlikeness, toward something really un-rhetorical. The four bars punctuated by silences, 55–58, are the movement’sonly foray into a demonstrativeness that might be taken as speechlike. Thiscan be interpreted as the pathetic rhetoric of the unanswered question orentreaty, as follows: the statement in bars 55–561 meets silence; is repeatedin bars 57–581 at a lower pitch and level of conviction (the harmonies be-ing less tense), with another answering silence. With the resumption of con-tinuous sound in bar 59 begins a retransition to the reprise, accomplishedthrough a two-bar 5/V→V formula, repeated once, and followed by a sadlittle breath (end of bar 62); those four bars are then repeated note for note,and the whole profile becomes the very portrait of resignation.

In rehearsal, bars 55–58 proved disruptive in another sense, in that theywere the site of some contention over interpretation. The pathetic readingproposed above was not accepted by all quartet members. Another inter-pretation of the passage saw the second statement-and-silence (bars 57–58),with its harmonic closure on the E tonic, as an explicit and affirmative an-swer to the first, resulting in a very different rhetoric of satisfaction and fulfill-ment, and further confirmed by the subsequent retransition.

These small areas of contest aside, this is a single-minded piece. There isessentially only one object of interest here—the tune—but its very smooth-ness, its insistence on continuousness, effaces it affectually and even per-ceptually. It does not change its countenance, nor move us anywhere new(save to the dominant key area and back, a motion so utterly conventionalas to barely qualify as motion at all). With the brief exception of the inter-ruptions described above, this tune fails to tell much of a story about any-


thing except its own small, momentary vicissitudes. The effect is a tableau vi-vant, a living picture of melodiousness.

The second movement’s obvious contrasts with the first begin immediately:it is extremely rapid, staccato, and—excepting, curiously, the second violin’sopening gesture—loud (see example 27). (As before, the listening reader willdo well to listen to the entire piece, CD track 64, before engaging with mydiscussion of it.) The movement is as brash as the first movement is suave:sixty-two out of eighty-eight bars are forte or fortissimo. Whereas in the firstmovement phrasing is maximally smoothed and elided, here it is sharply dis-tinguished; the entire piece parses into unambiguous eight-bar phrasesdefined by clear cadences and sharp articulations. Most of these phrases arefurther divided into one-, two-, or four-bar blocks in the proto-architecturalmanner described by Speck (see chapter 3 above). These smaller chunks com-municate with one another in various ways. There is exact repetition (as be-tween bars 9–10, 11–12, and 13–14, or between bars 65 and 66, 67 and 68,and so on); repetition with “open” and “closed” endings (bars 1–4 and 5–8);23

the antecedent-consequent relationship (bars 17–20 and 21–24, or bars 25–26 and 27–28); and sequencing (bars 57–60 and 61–64). On the governingeight-bar level, however, communication or interrelation between sectionsis kept to a minimum. There is a return of the opening idea at the upbeatto bar 49, and one other return of a device (the second violin triplets at bar25 reappear, though less prominently, from bar 73 to the end); a crescendolinks the section at bars 65–72 with that at bars 73–80; but that is all. Theruling principle, then, is one of simple succession.

For all its noisiness, it is the quiet sections of this piece that prove mostmemorable. The piano that marks the upbeat to bar 65 serves as a classicsubito beginning for a crescendo, and makes the only really forceful con-nection between two successive eight-bar blocks in the piece (CD track 65).(As in the first movement, teleology is chiefly striking here because of its rar-ity.) As for the passage that begins in bar 25, the one that originally recom-mended this quartet to my closer attention (CD track 62), the second violinline, though it dominates the texture, can scarcely be called a melody, evenby the somewhat relaxed standards of melodic interest and engagingness setby the movement to this point. The first violin’s bird-like comments are hope-lessly snarled in the second’s triplets, by virtue of sitting exactly in the mid-dle of them, both rhythmically and registrally. What direction the passagehas comes through the harmonies outlined in the cello and viola parts. Theyare unremarkable harmonies indeed: two two-bar antecedent-consequentpairs, followed by two four-bar blocks that cadence, respectively open (6–I)and closed (V–I), in the ambient B major. This entire period is then repeated.The reprise of the movement’s opening arrives with the upbeat to bar 49,without benefit of any perceptible preparation.

Where the first movement was an indolent tableau vivant, this is a chain


10

17

24

231

Example 27. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii (Prestissimo).

(continued)

31

37

43

49

232


58

67

75

82

cres.

cres.

cres.

cres.

233


of miniature tableaux joined by little save rhythmic propulsiveness and a pre-vailing atmosphere of slightly wild gaiety—a hurried visit to a fair or circus.Our topical progress through this little carnival has an unpredictable qual-ity; we several times round a corner onto a scene of unexplained celebra-tion, and in the passage at bars 25–48 are granted one extended peek at thehushed, frenetic workings of a mysterious piece of musical clockwork. As ina real carnival, such surprises are an integral part of the experience’s charm.

The analysis I have so far presented is readable through the music ex-amples printed within this chapter, and its main points audible through theperformance of the quartet included on the CD. The suggestions I have madeas to the work’s structure and expressive purposes are verifiable (or deniable)chiefly through the reader’s reference to these examples. For the musicallyeducated reader who elects to read the score and not to listen, the visual,silently subvocalizing cooperation in this project produces a strange “per-formance,” heard only in the mind’s ear, visually constituted and confirmed,and temporally unbound: it is obliged neither to proceed in order, nor tobegin at the beginning, nor to finish. The score-reader can “fast-forward”through the parts already understood or considered uninteresting; she canrepeat other sections obsessively; she can juxtapose widely separated sectionsof the piece as though they were adjacent.

The analytical listener to the enclosed recording exists in a curious, lim-inal relationship to the score-reader. By virtue of the tracking of my exam-ples on the CD, he can in fact mimic many of the score-reader’s atemporalhabits; and although his being able to hear this music brings it a giant stepcloser on the corporeal plane, he too is cut off from the living, breathing ex-perience of the bodies that perform the quartet, since they are forever, andincreasingly, distanced in time and place (the recording was made in SanFrancisco in 1996). There is ultimately very little of the necessarily time- andgesture-bound experience of embodiment in either analytical performance.

Analysis 2

Violist: There is very little of us, either.Second Violinist: It’s true. If you are going to address the experience of

bodies in this analysis then I think you should attach themto people. That’s how they come in real life, you know.

Author: You’re right. Perhaps I should introduce you all to thereader. In a quartet, obviously there are four of you . . .

First Violinist: Four of us, you mean. You are one of us.Author: Yes, but I want to split off the cellist from the author. For

clarity.Violist: Isn’t that contrary to your whole project?


Cellist/Author: Well, um . . . I must say it’s quite uncomfortable to do itthis way. Um, so, I was going to introduce you—I mean us.We’ve played together for a long time.

Second Violinist: As Cambini says, we’ve “often repeat[ed] the foremostworks in this style, thereby learning all the nuances of the intended execution.”

Cellist/Author: There are four of us, and then there are the ghostly,composite bodies of our interactions. These wouldinclude the quartet as a unit, and various subsets andtemporary alliances within it; mathematically, this breaksdown to six potential pairs and four trios.

First Violinist: Then there’s Boccherini, or is it his ghost? I mean hisvirtual presence, the one you propose in chapter 1?

Cellist/Author: Yes, he’s here too, and very important, though he canonly speak through us.

Second Violinist: And don’t forget the bodies of your listeners and readers,and the physical fact of the score and parts.

Cellist/Author: All right. So there are quite a few of us on the stage rightnow!

Violist: I hope you know what you’re doing.Cellist/Author: Well, there’s certainly a fine potential for confusion.

To try to contain it somewhat, I took notes during ourrehearsals.

Violist: Yes, you certainly did. Every time I looked over, there you were, scribbling. It got annoying.

Cellist/Author: I’m sorry, I know it did. Whatever structure thisconversation is going to have came from that, though.

Second Violinist: (to the Violist) Don’t be too hard on her. There’s just noway to use a bow and a pencil at the same time. (to me)So what did these notes tell you?

Cellist/Author: Well, predictably enough, the first thing I found in mynote taking was that the two main sources of informationon which I had relied in examining the sonatas hadshifted in relative importance and in nature.

Violist: And those were?Cellist/Author: I called them “eyes-closed” and “eyes-open”: what I felt

kinesthetically, and what I could see in a mirror. “Eyes-closed” information—passages oriented to my body-sense,and essentially inward-turned—the places where what I


surmise to have been Boccherini’s own technical comfortor enjoyment was the clearest motivation for a gesture orpassage: well, this was still to be found, but it was alwaysmitigated in some way by the, the, um—group situations.

First Violinist: You mean, by our being there with you.Cellist/Author: Yes.

Violist: Certainly closing one’s eyes in a room with others is quitea different matter from doing it while alone.

Cellist/Author: “Eyes-open” information came, obviously, from lookingand was confirmed by asking. However, looking at thethree of you play, I was never “simply observing,” but wasconstantly projecting myself into your actions, making a kind of cellistic subvocalization or translation all thewhile.

First Violinist: I can see how you’d do that. The cello and the violinssound and are held very differently, but their tuning,fingering, and tone production are all part of the samesystem. One sort of knows roughly how it’s done: I can“get around” on your instrument, or you on mine.

Cellist/Author: And so while playing, in your presence, my comfort orpleasure was no longer entirely of my own creation; whateach of you did, the sounds you made, and even, I think,the feelings you had in making them, all figured in myresulting experience.

Violist: That sounds exactly like the sensible permeability you keeptalking about.

Second Violinist: Yes, and I think I see arising from it a third class ofinformation: interaction, communication, cooperation.

Cellist/Author: Diderot is so eloquent on just this point, and since he isthe presiding genius of this dialogue, I can’t resist . . .

Violist: (to the reader, resignedly) She does this all the time.Cellist/Author: Diderot’s image is of the corporate entity of the hive,

arising from the several and specific actions of individualbees. Here’s Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse. She’s giving usan account of her friend d’Alembert’s strange spokendream, and her waking responses to it. (reads)

He began to shout: “Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse!Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse!—What do you want?—Haveyou ever seen a swarm of bees leave their hive? . . . TheWorld, or the general mass of matter, that’s the hive. . . . Have


you seen them go and form, at the tip of a branch of a tree, along cluster of little winged animals, all linked to one anotherby their feet? This cluster is a being, an individual, some formof animal. . . . If one of these bees decides to somehow stingone of the bees to which it is linked, what do you believe willhappen? Tell me.—I’ve no idea. . . .

—That bee will sting the next one; it will arouse as manysensations in the cluster as there are little animals. . . . Thewhole will become agitated, will move about, change situationand form; a noise will arise, little cries. . . . Anyone who hadnever seen such a swarm arranging itself would be tempted to take it for a single animal with five or six hundred headsand a thousand or twelve hundred wings.”24

First Violinist: So an account of “a quartet,” which is really a groupactivity, will end up being an account of the minuteactions of the individual beings in that group.

Second Violinist: How we stung one another, and how we reacted.Cellist/Author: Exactly. The minuter, the better.

Violist: I hate to be a troublemaker here, but can’t that easily gooverboard? I mean, is the reader really going to want toknow that I played out of tune just here because my nosewas itching fiercely—I wanted to scratch it, oh, how Iwanted to scratch it—I lost my concentration and somebad notes popped out—and then you played flat all thatnext phrase, something you often do in reaction, it seemsto me—

Cellist/Author: (laughing) Yes, it becomes clear right away that there haveto be some guidelines. I’ve spent a goodly amount of timeworking out what those might be.

Violist: That’s right—let me see: pleasure/unpleasantness, andease/difficulty.

First Violinist: And the beehive image suggests another continuum.What about connection/isolation?

Second Violinist: Well, what about another one, very important, it seems to me: good or bad results?

Cellist/Author: You know we have a few days of rehearsals ahead of us . . .First Violinist: Yes, goodness, we have to learn all six of these op. 15

quartets, so we can record them. It’s a bit alarming.Violist: Fortunately they’re the opera piccola kind—only two

movements apiece.Cellist/Author: What I’d like to propose is this. Let’s keep those four


continua in mind as we work. I’ll take notes the wholetime—

Violist: Just kindly remember you have some notes to play, too!Cellist/Author: And then at the end, I’d like to do one complete play-

through of the E-major quartet—you already know I find that one particularly interesting. And I’ll ask you—I mean, us—some explicit questions based on thosecontinua, and we’ll continue this discussion from there.

Second Violinist: So this analysis will not be temporally unbound at all, butspecific to that one performance of the piece.

Cellist/Author: Yes; but within the context of our long association, andour having learned it together previously.

First Violinist: This sounds fine, but I’m getting worried about learningall this music. Let’s begin straight away.

(There follow three days of rehearsal, interspersed by tea and coffee breaks, at the endof which the quartet gathers, a little nervously, for the “analysis.”)

Cellist/Author: So I have written down a series of questions. Really, itcame out a sort of questionnaire. I want us to direct ourattention to them before we play through, and then try to answer them specifically right after we play eachmovement.

(Hands out sheets of paper with the following questions on them; the quartet spendssome minutes in perusal.)

Questionnaire: Quartet Bodies

1. What part (i.e., violin 1 or 2, viola, cello) are you playing in this quartet?

2a. Where in each movement do you feel the strongest connection toanother instrumental part?

2b. Which part in each case?

2c. With which element in your body do you most strongly feel thatconnection in each case?

2d. To what element in the body of that other part’s player do you feel thestrongest connection in each case?

2e. What is happening structurally in the music at each point?

3. Where in each movement do you feel the least connection to the otherparts? What does this feel like physically in each case?

4a. If the quartet as a whole is a metaphorical “body,” what part of orelement in it is your part?

4b. Is this different for Boccherini than for other composers? How?


5a. What is the most physically pleasant moment for you in eachmovement? Where in your body do you feel this pleasure?

5b. What is the most physically unpleasant moment in each movement?Where in your body?

6a. What is the easiest thing you have to play in each movement?

6b. What is the hardest thing in each movement?

7a. What is the best-sounding moment in your part in each movement?What makes it sound good?

7b. What is the worst-sounding moment in each? Why?

Second Violinist: Well, I can see the four continua here—First Violinist: But what is this business about a “metaphorical body”?

I mean questions 4a and 4b.Cellist/Author: That’s the beehive, you know, our sense of the whole . . .

Violist: This is a lot to keep in mind while playing.Cellist/Author: I do know that. I mean us to use these questions as

guidelines, as starting points for discussion. It’s scarcelymeant to be a scientific survey.

Violist: Fair enough. So. Shall we play?Cellist/Author: Just the first movement for now.

(The quartet plays through the first movement of op. 15, no. 3, and then each mem-ber spends fifteen minutes writing down some responses to the questionnaire.)

First Violinist: Well! What a hard piece. And thinking about all that stufftied me up terribly . . .

Cellist/Author: All right, here I go: tell us where it was hard. And why.First Violinist: Ummm. . . . That would be in bar 43. Yuk, that’s where

I sound the worst too.Cellist/Author: Where in your body do you feel that?First Violinist: Well, in my torso, I guess. (gesturing at her midriff ) Where

one feels revulsion.Cellist/Author: I have to say I thought that was one of the worst-sounding

places too. But I thought it was just me, actually. I alwaystense up and sound scratchy at that sudden forte in bar 43:I hold my breath in my chest. Did anyone else feel this wasa special locus of difficulty or bad sound?

Violist: No—for me that comes in bars 17 and 18.Cellist/Author: Really? Whatever for?

Violist: Right there it’s hard to be “in” my part, to play it in tune,


to know how to balance with the other parts. Not only isthis the hardest and worst-sounding place, it’s also themost unpleasant for me. (CD track 66)

First Violinist: Good heavens, I had no idea you were experiencing that!In fact it’s just before that—let’s see, bars 15–17—that Ifelt especially connected with the group—and it was reallyquite pleasant. One of my favorite passages.

Cellist/Author: (to the Second Violinist) So where was it most difficult foryou?

Second Violinist: Oh, that would have to be in bars 25 to 27. All those trills,too many sharps, I have to keep shifting position to playany of it—it’s really awkward writing. I experience it asthe most unpleasant place too, and I suspect it’s where I sound worst. (CD track 67)

First Violinist: I noticed I sound bad there too—my E string feels sostrident. But since we’re in octaves, maybe it’s not me at all. (to the Second Violinist) You’re fluffing around therein an unresonant part of your violin, and not helpingsupport my tone, the way the lower octave ought to do.

Violist: This seems as if you two are feeling connected throughsomething that feels bad.

First Violinist: Yes . . . I guess I’m pretty aware that he’s struggling overthere. It doesn’t help me out. Sort of a negativeconnection, a misconnection, as it were.

Cellist/Author: Is the feeling of misconnection mutual?Second Violinist: Not at all. I’m so caught up in my part right there, I wasn’t

the least bit aware of her.First Violinist: That’s an interesting distinction, isn’t it: no connection at

all, versus misconnection. And I suspect that the one playssome part in causing the other.

Cellist/Author: I’m struck by how our discussion immediately gravitatedto the things that went badly. It’s what musicians alwaysdo.

Violist: Well, we’re trained to, aren’t we? It’s how we know what to improve.

Cellist/Author: Yes, but you know we go well beyond that into beingobsessive about it.

Violist: I’m also struck by how things going badly was so welded to unpleasantness for each of us.


Second Violinist: Well, it would be a strange player who enjoyed it whenthings went wrong!

Cellist/Author: True enough. But I’m wondering if those experiences arealways necessarily connected. Did anyone experienceunpleasantness on any other basis?

Violist: Well—there are a few places in this piece where I’mfinding it unpleasant, but not because of my execution, or any of yours either. In the place I mentioned before,bars 18 and 19, I think I’m having trouble because theharmonies and the voice-leading are tricky—no, I’ll befrank, I think they’re inept. Passages like these just don’tfeel good, even when we play them well.

Cellist/Author: You’re saying that the one who’s doing badly in thoseplaces is old Luigi himself, with his non-textbookhandling of the 2 chord—both the seventh and the third of the chord resolve in parts and octaves other than where they first appear.

Violist: I’m afraid I am.Cellist/Author: Let’s turn to things that were pleasant, or went well,

or feel particularly connected; I’m assuming that thesecriteria are linked, just as their opposites were. (to the First Violinist) How about you?

First Violinist: As I said before, I very much enjoyed bars 15–17.Cellist/Author: And did you think they sounded especially good?First Violinist: Well, to be honest, not especially so. The pleasure there

was more interactional than sonic. It came through mysense of connection to your part.

Cellist/Author: With what part of your body did you feel it?First Violinist: Oh, in my chest, in my heart. I imagined it connecting

with your chest too. Didn’t you feel that at all?Cellist/Author: I have to say I wasn’t aware of it. It’s interesting, though.

Just before the passage you’ve pointed out, I experienceda long stretch—bars 5–12—in which I was feeling quitedisconnected from all of you, frankly. Solid, independent,marching to my own drummer. I was taking considerablepleasure in the fact.

Violist: And you stopped feeling “independent” shortly before thefirst violin felt particularly connected to you?

Cellist/Author: Yes. . . . Could it be, I wonder, that she picked up my“rejoining the group” subliminally?


Second Violinist: Well, we could speculate endlessly about that sort of thing.Cellist/Author: (to the Second Violinist) So, where did you feel especial

pleasure?Second Violinist: Oh, I think in bar 56.

First Violinist: But that bar’s mostly silence!Second Violinist: Exactly. (This can be heard in CD track 63.)

Cellist/Author: What sort of pleasure was it? Where in your body did youfeel it?

Second Violinist: I felt it all over my upper body. Just, well, relief. Abreathing place.

First Violinist: Oh, how strange. Because that’s really a very unpleasantplace for me—I feel terribly unconnected there,ungrounded—why, I hold my breath in that silence.

Cellist/Author: (to the Violist) And how about for you?Violist: I think I get the most active pleasure in bars 88–90. My

part is a little more independent there than it is for mostof this piece, so I feel I’m contributing something of myown for once. (CD track 68)

Cellist/Author: Where in your body . . . ?Violist: Well, it feels like it’s my voice at first. But then—it’s

curious—in bar 90, the locus of pleasure in my bodychanged to my heart, my face, and my eyes.

Cellist/Author: Why the change, do you think?Violist: Just there at bar 90, I start to feel a strong connection

with the second violin part. (to the Second Violinist) I’vebeen playing above you there, and syncopated andsuspended against your line; and then we finish togetherwith that nice little lockstep gesture in bar 90.

Cellist/Author: Where before you felt a general independence, aseparateness, right?

Violist: Right.Cellist/Author: So with a change of role within the group, came a change

of locus of pleasure within the individual. (to the SecondViolinist) Just out of curiosity—did you feel any reciprocalsense of connection to her there?

Second Violinist: At bar 90? No, I can’t say I did.First Violinist: I’m starting to wonder if there were any places at all

where all of us felt the same thing.


Violist: Or even similar things. Or whether we were ever aware of our simultaneities of feeling as a sense of connection.

Second Violinist: Well, on a certain level, I do feel uniformly connected to the First Violinist throughout almost all of this piece,since I have to double her part so much. If you want bodyparts, it’s as if my ear were glued to her voice, or her lefthand.

First Violinist: While I can’t say I have such a constant sense, there are a few places where I feel connected to you too—bar 9, at the top of the line; or bar 29, where the resonancebetween our parts is particularly nice.

Second Violinist: In the latter of those two places, I’ve just reemerged into a sense of connection, after my little difficult, unpleasant,disconnected episode in bars 25–27. (CD track 69)

First Violinist: Which bars I had also experienced as unpleasant andsounding bad, though for slightly different reasons. Sothere’s a kind of simultaneity between us at bar 29.

Violist: (to me) What about you and me?Cellist/Author: Well, I too took pleasure in bars 88–90, which you said

were particularly pleasant for you. I felt it in mystomach. . . . But you said you were taking pleasure inyour part’s separateness there, and so was I in mine. So it was simultaneous pleasure, but not connected pleasure.

Violist: Unless you want to say that there is a certain tacit level ofconnection in the agreement to pursue separate pleasuresat certain times.

Cellist/Author: It’s ironic that so many of our most similar experiencescluster around those rare places where the music’s textureor character becomes less “similar”—that is, lesshomogenous. This induces the suspicion that we felt at least as much constrained as enabled because of thesamenesses between our parts: the plentiful octavesbetween the violins, for instance, which take real vigilanceto balance and to tune. A certain level of tension betweenindividuality and cooperation seems to become a themeof this piece as—and only as—expressed in performance.

First Violinist: What about at the cadences at the end of each half ? Hadwe any simple unity of feeling there? I, for one, felt Isounded bad and felt unpleasant in bar 43. In my torsoagain. (This can be heard in CD track 62.)


Cellist/Author: So did I—right in my stomach. And similarly in bar 97.(CD track 70)

Second Violinist: That wasn’t really my experience, though. . . . It still seemsthat there was no one place where all of us felt the samething.

Cellist/Author: You’re right, alas. The heterogeneity of our responses isstriking, and pretty dismaying to my analytic compulsionfor order! Furthermore, it is sobering to put my ownsensible assumptions about the nature of making chambermusic next to this evidence of the profound extent towhich a single “piece” of ensemble music can be anexperiential patchwork of tenuously related impressions,assumptions, and failed connections.

Violist: It is only one short piece, after all; it can’t be a microcosmof all chamber music, or even of all of Boccherini.

Second Violinist: And even as detailed as they are, there is a certain crudityto these questions. They focus only on the poles of eachcontinuum, and so our accounts consist of isolated pointsand episodes—the most pleasurable moment, the worst-sounding passage, and so on. Transitions betweenexperiences are not represented, nor are subsidiary statesof being.

Cellist/Author: I’m thinking of my friend Tiepolo again. He paints thosebig, active crowd scenes, but no one in them is looking atanyone else.

Violist: Are you saying they’re alienated from each other? Andthat we are too?

Cellist/Author: No. Not necessarily anyway. In their effort to make senseof this tendency in Tiepolo’s paintings, Baxandall andAlpers suggest a scenario based on Goldoni. They seem to be getting at the cheerful many-voicedness of the comic finale as a way of explaining these disjunctures and misconnections. Here’s another quote:

They do not exchange expressive glances with each other or in any usual sense interact. They all carry on at once. It is less what they say than the pitch or pose with which they say it (or perhaps sing it?) that matters. Fine distinctions aremade between levels of attention and address. . . . They makefor a particular kind of performance which is theatrical butanti-dramatic.25

Doesn’t that sound like us?


Violist: I suppose the comic finale, as much as anything, does get at all those broken lines of questioning, the doublingsand treblings of intention and response, the webwork ofthought that happens in a group dialogue, whether it’s in words or in tones . . .

Cellist/Author: I wish we could take better account of all the myriadcontradictions, shadings, and sub-narratives of actualperforming experience. But we haven’t time, ever, toarticulate it all.

First Violinist: Nevertheless, your questions did clarify some othertendencies you haven’t mentioned. Each one of us seemsto favor very personal sites for our sensations, anddifferent “feeling-styles.” (to me) You and I favor chest,stomach, and torso as sites of experience.

Cellist/Author: Yes, that’s true; (to the Second Violinist and Violist) and youtwo seem to locate a lot of your experiences in your earsand hands. That brings me to my question 4a, an attemptto elicit some sense of a unitary quartet “body” from itsmembers.

First Violinist: Yes, what on earth were you asking for?Cellist/Author: Perhaps I’ll know better what I was asking for by seeing

what I got. What part of the quartet “body” were you?First Violinist: Um, the voice . . . the heart. The part that sings . . .

Second Violinist: I was a head. A sleepy head.Violist: I was connective tissue. I mean that physically and

psychologically. The inner source of encouragement and confidence.

Cellist/Author: I felt I was the seat, like in riding a horse: the site ofbalance and placement.

Second Violinist: That’s a pretty peculiar body. No hands or arms.Violist: Nor legs.

Cellist/Author: Nevertheless there is a certain orderliness in theseresponses, along the lines of the traditional metaphoricaluse of “high” and “low,” which seem to indicate not onlyrange, but bodily proximity to the ground. I identifiedbelow the waist, and you violinists well above it. (to theViolist) And your self-identification as “connective tissue”makes sense because in this movement your part is sothoroughly intricated between the violins’. Here, and also in that place in bars 18 and 19 where you so disliked


Boccherini’s part-writing, you take what I would havecalled a “structural feature of the music” as a bodilyexperience.

Violist: Yes, I suppose I do.Cellist/Author: This degree of identification, in which the piece becomes

an articulation of the performer’s own body—its learnedresponses and its physical quiddity—marks a difficultboundary in the framing of my questions: it is the edge of the deep woods of irreducible subjectivity.

Second Violinist: Hm. Well, on that note: what about the secondmovement?

Violist: Yes. Let’s play that, and see if it has anything to add.

(The quartet tunes, plays through the second movement, and writes down its responses.)

Cellist/Author: Well, let’s start by seeing how the quartet “body” haschanged for this piece. I, for one, felt quite similar—if not a seat, I was a leg, but a rider’s leg: maintainingbalance and support, but not actually providinglocomotion.

Violist: I seem to have shifted a bit. In this piece I’m the feet. Also the knees . . . and muscles in them . . .

Second Violinist: Here I’m a torso—a very agitated, a caffeinated torso.First Violinist: I was, um—the stomach.

(general laughter)

Cellist/Author: Well this “body” is even odder than the first movement’s.Not even a head! But I can see some reason for some of this. (to the Violist) Your part is so different in thismovement. Instead of being welded to the violins, you’rein octaves with me much of the time. So I can see thatinstead of being “connective tissue,” metaphorically you’dbe something, well, lower down. As indeed you were: “feetand knees” to my “leg.” So—did you experience this asconnection with me? And was it pleasant or otherwise?

Violist: Well, it varied. But I’d say that the most extended passageof connection, which would be bars 25 through 48, werean experience of connection all right. I felt enslaved toyou. (CD track 60)

Cellist/Author: Enslaved! That’s a radical form of connection. That goeswell beyond the chamber music ideal of blendedindividuality, and into self-obliteration.


Violist: (to me) What did you feel through there? I do hope itwasn’t mastery!

Cellist/Author: Well, I felt those bars were one of the easiest places for meto sound good.

First Violinist: What made them so easy?Cellist/Author: The texture separation—my part is far below the others

there. I can hear myself clearly. And then there’s . . .there’s . . . oh, well, I don’t know.

Violist: What?First Violinist: Come on, I can tell you’re hanging back on something.Cellist/Author: Well . . . I feel I get to be “in the driver’s seat” in phrasing

that whole passage.First Violinist: You mean, you get to control things?

Violist: Ah! I knew it! You do feel mastery there! I bet you evenenjoy it!

Cellist/Author: I’ll just say that the passage suggests to me that there’s aparticular kind of disconnection from others that comesfrom feeling in control, and that during it I soundedparticularly good to myself. I’m going to leave it at that. It was you who articulated it as a master-slave relation.

Violist: Or is feeling in control of others really a particular kind of connection?

Cellist/Author: I don’t know. I suspect control relationships involvestrategic amounts of both connection anddisconnection—and on both parties’ parts, I might add.The Marquis de Sade is hovering around this somewhere,I fear. . . . Anyway, I’m curious about what was going onduring bars 25–48 with the violins.

First Violinist: Well, I feel I sound good through there too. It’s easy toplay, lies well on the instrument. So for me it’s a site ofpleasure as well.

Cellist/Author: Is it a site of connection?First Violinist: Well, yes. With you, actually. I enjoy “bouncing off” your

part.Violist: You don’t feel you’re being controlled by the cello part?

As if she’s taking you over somehow?First Violinist: Oh, heavens. Not enough to bother me. (to the Second

Violinist) What about you? You’ve been awfully quiet overthere.


Second Violinist: You know very well you’re talking about the worst part of the whole piece for me.

First Violinist: Worst? In what way?Second Violinist: It’s a terrible passage. By far the hardest thing in the

quartet—almost impossible to make it sound good—the extreme awkwardness of the writing, all the moreawkward for having to be contained and suppressedwithin piano, makes it really unpleasant to play. And I getso wrapped up in just trying to get through this—thisminefield, that I end up feeling completely disconnectedfrom the rest of you.

Cellist/Author: So, all the negative qualities rolled into one passage, eh?Second Violinist: Very much so.

Cellist/Author: Any particular bodily site of unpleasantness?Second Violinist: Well, it sounds silly, but it’s in my left index finger. The

way it’s written, that finger is likely to stumble, and then I lose the rhythm, and then there’s a domino effect on the rest of you.

Violist: So I think you do feel a sense of connection: I’d call itapprehensive connection. You’re afraid of having a badeffect on us.

Second Violinist: Yes, I am. In its way, it’s a motivation to make it throughthe passage. But what about all of you? From all you’vebeen saying about control and mastery and feelingconnected to each other, you seem mightily unconcernedabout my struggles.

First Violinist: (uncomfortably) Well, we can tell it’s awkward for you. . . .What else are we supposed to do?

Cellist/Author: If you do stumble, we generally adjust the rhythm, youknow. That’s just so basic to this kind of music-makingthat we don’t have any strong feelings about it.

Violist: (to me) That’s interesting, though. You said you felt “in the driver’s seat” throughout this passage; yet youautomatically adjust to his part.

Cellist/Author: I’m tempted to continue both his and your analogies, andsay that any sane driver, while in a minefield, will attemptto drive around the mines.

Violist: Hmmm. . . . I’m thinking that this passage suggests yetanother analytic continuum. What about experientialconsonance/dissonance?


Second Violinist: How so?Violist: Well, during this peculiar passage, these bars 25–48,

we’re each having pretty vivid experiences, but radicallydifferent ones. I’d call that experiential dissonance. Thecellist and First Violinist each enjoy experiences of easeand of sounding good to themselves—experiences thatseem rather solipsistic and insensible, given thesimultaneous physical and social struggles of the SecondViolinist: Meanwhile, I enter into a helplessly mechanicalrelation to the cellist—

Cellist/Author: Interesting that you’d call it “mechanical,” since in mypreliminary analysis of this piece I suggested amechanical-clock topos for this passage.

Second Violinist: That’s a pretty problematic mechanism. (to the Violist)Neither your “enslavement,” nor my difficulty andunpleasantness are generally recognized features ofmechanism—to the contrary, in fact: a mechanism issomething presumably not open to subjective vagaries at all.

Violist: The more troubling to be a human being forced into a mechanical role, then.

First Violinist: But why do you suppose Boccherini wrote those bars soawkwardly? He is so sensitive to the capabilities of stringedinstruments.

Cellist/Author: For that very reason I think we must suppose that thiscruel piece of writing is not composerly carelessness but a finely calculated effect. And if we do so, a furtherrange of meanings becomes available to us. Somepotential incompatibilities of the mechanism topos withfallible human nature are rather heavily underlined; thecarnival topos is enriched by the addition of a clown orgrotesque—

Second Violinist: Oh, thank you very much! Really!First Violinist: It’s only a role. Don’t take it personally.

Violist: I’m not so sure—I think he’s uncannily well cast in it—Cellist/Author: (speaking over the others) And the quartet even enacts a

brief, sharp picture of disaffection and disconnectionwithin itself, the antithesis of the string quartet ideal.

First Violinist: Why, we’re doing that when we talk about the passage, let alone play it!


Cellist/Author: But perhaps we can recollect ourselves enough to agreethat such music, in the making, is far indeed from simple-minded?

Others: Yes, certainly, absolutely, etc.Cellist/Author: (to the reader) A good deal of the interest and charm of

this little quartet is opaque to traditional analytic methods,since it contains little save harmonic, thematic, andstructural ordinariness, even banality. My initial analysiswas intended to show how attention to the piece’stextures, affects, and topoi can suggest a more adequateexplanatory language. But in referring to performedphysical experience, we find a mode of interpretation thathas something like the complexity and conflictedness ofthe puzzling little piece itself. With care and refinement, I think such a method can begin to articulate the elusivequalities in Boccherini’s genius. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that there are many hitherto elusive qualities ineighteenth-century music in general that can find newarticulation through such an approach.

Suite de la Conversation(Several weeks later. The quartet has now recorded the piece discussed above, and, incompany with L———, the producer, has just finished listening to playbacks of thefirst edit.)

Violist: Well, that was edifying. Not to say excruciating.Producer: So shall we compare notes?

Cellist/Author: Yes; I’d be especially interested to do so in reference to some of the parameters we worked out through myquestionnaire.

Violist: Ease/difficulty, good/bad, all that stuff ?Cellist/Author: Yes. You remember.

Violist: Well we just finished making a long series of decisionsabout what sounded good or bad; that’s what editing is.

Cellist/Author: True enough; I suppose in the end the recording itself isthe clearest testimony to that process. But what about theother parameters?

Second Violinist: Well, surely we all noticed that there were some very clearsites of difficulty in the recording process. And it seems tome that L——— is in the perfect position to point them


out, since she was taking notes in the score every time weplayed.

Producer: Well, there’s a very simple level on which I can addressthat: my list here shows how many “takes,” that is, timesthrough, you all needed in order to record each passageadequately. That should be a pretty direct indicator ofease and difficulty! (shuffling through her notes) Let’s talkabout the first movement. The most takes and retakeshappened around the double-bar repeat signs. That wastrue whether they repeated, or went on to the followingsection.

First Violinist: Well, that certainly reinforces my unhappy experience of bars 43 and 44. (This can be heard in CD track 62.)

Producer: Yes; there were persistent intonation and tone qualityissues. But I think it was more than that—the worstproblem at those places was ensemble.

Violist: Really! Right where we all come together in the samecadential gestures!

Cellist/Author: Well, exactly. If our prior experience with these questionshas taught us anything, it’s that an executional “comingtogether” isn’t a particularly inevitable or natural process,despite our tendency to idealistically assume so.

Producer: Yes, just look at the last sixteen bars of the piece, bar 83 to the end. You did seven takes of that the first timearound—in order to take the repeat, I mean—and eleventakes for the second time, in order to end the movement.And six of those last eleven were simply in order to get thelast bar’s final cadence right.

Violist: Ouch . . . But I seem to remember that one of theproblems we were dealing with in recording that finalcadence was the difficulty of coming up with an endingthat sounded emphatic and demonstrative enough, whenin fact we hadn’t actually played the whole movementprior to it.

Producer: Yes, that’s true. That’s a fact of modern studio recording:things are usually stitched together out of many differentshorter takes, and so sometimes you have to sort of re-create coherence and momentum.

Cellist/Author: (peering over L———’s shoulder at the list of takes)Nevertheless, it’s interesting to me how in stitchingtogether our first edit, we chose so many passages from


the longer takes, takes where we’d played an entire half of a movement at a stretch.

Producer: Yes, I’d say about two thirds of this whole first edit camefrom the same four or five longer takes.

First Violinist: (likewise peering at the producer’s notes) I notice that thatgnarly passage that begins in bar 25, where the secondviolin and I experienced so much unpleasantness anddifficulty in rehearsal, wasn’t so problematic in recording.(CD track 67) We used the longer, earlier takes in our edit.

Second Violinist: That suggests to me that continuity of execution can, atleast sometimes, “carry” us through quite a lot of a piece’sdifficulties.

Violist: Isn’t that exactly what we practice for? I mean, that the“flow” of a piece not be broken by its difficulties?

Cellist/Author: Well, yes, it is. What I’m noticing here is that this seems to go two ways. When the piece stops flowing, it createsdifficulties: hence our problems recording the cadences.

Producer: Yes, and that bears out in the difficulties you had with bars55–58, the passage with the silences. Six takes to get thatright. (CD track 63)

Second Violinist: This is making me curious about the second movement,of course, since it’s anything but flowing and continuous.

Producer: Well now, that was interesting. The piece is a choppy onewith a lot of internal cadences, but the cadence at the endof the movement was still much the most problematic.Five takes for the repeat, six for the ending.

First Violinist: So it’s not just continuity-versus-cadences that’s the issuehere, I guess. It’s endings.

Violist: It’s occurring to me that cadences may be “where we allcome together,” but they’re also inevitably where energydisperses. No wonder they’re problematic.

Second Violinist: Dare I suppose that the cadence issue was moreproblematic in recording than was my “minefield”passage?

Producer: Oh, no, I’m afraid not . . .Second Violinist: All right, give me the bad news. How many takes?

Producer: Well . . . All told, thirteen. Not all of them complete.Second Violinist: And how many of those did we end up using in the edit?

Producer: Well, that’s interesting too. In the end, we pretty much


stuck with just one take, your fourth time through thepassage.

First Violinist: (in exasperation) Then why ever did we record nine furthertakes?

Second Violinist: There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns independably executing passagework of that kind, and itjust took us a while to realize that I’d passed that point.

Violist: (to the Second Violinist) The funny part was how, when youhit the neurological wall and started messing up, we allwent with you.

Producer: Yes, that was really striking: the whole ensemble got worse,not better, through repetition. Out of the last five takes,four were false starts, where you couldn’t even begintogether.

Cellist/Author: There’s a down side, I guess, to the metaphor of the bees.One bee loses it, and there goes the whole hive . . .

Second Violinist: You better be careful about insulting me any more, oryou’ll be the one stung . . . “a noise will arise, littlecries . . . ”

(The group moves into the kitchen for tea, and the conversation turns to gossip.)


Chapter 7

The Perfect ListenerA Recreation

In 1781 Boccherini sent the following inquiry through the Viennese publish-ing house Artaria, with whom he had just established a working relationship:

February 1781I hope you will do me a favor, which I will value greatly, and it is that if one ofyou gentlemen (as is probable) should be acquainted with Signor JosephHaydn, writer, who is held in the highest regard by me and by all others, youmight offer him my respects, saying that I am one of the most passionate con-noisseurs 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 Artariabut, as far as we know, to no avail.

[27 May 1781]I send herewith the letter from Herr Boccherini; please give my most dutifulcompliments to him in return. No one here can tell me where this place Are-nas is. It must not be far from Madrid; but please let me know this, so that Ican write to Herr Boccherini myself.2

[late July 1782]Accordingly I send both letters, regretting only that I cannot write to Herr Boc-cherini with my own hand at this time; if you will pay my most devoted respectsto his honorable self at a convenient time, I shall be obliged to you.3

Despite assertions of their subsequent enduring friendship in the obit-uary for Boccherini that appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung andelsewhere, we can be fairly sure that the two men never made direct con-tact.4 But Haydn would have had plenty of opportunities to become ac-quainted with Boccherini’s music. Boccherini first made his name in Aus-

254

tria through his early appearances in Vienna, and his reputation was main-tained there by means of scores in Parisian editions, made available throughViennese 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 Vi-ennese establishment of the copyist Simon Haschke; from 1771 to 1776,trios, quartets, the sonatas for violin and keyboard, and some symphonieswere purveyed by the bookseller Hermann Joseph Krüchten; and from 1776Artaria itself offered for sale the Parisian prints of “an entire series of Boc-cherini’s compositions.”5 Once Boccherini began to be printed in Viennain the mid-1780s, his music, especially the string quartets, sold extremelywell there, putting him “in the first rank of quartet composers.”6 Not justin Vienna, but in London too: by the time of Haydn’s first visit to the En-glish capital in 1791–92 he would scarcely have been able to avoid Boc-cherini’s presence there in editions both legitimate and pirated.7 That Boc-cherini’s music had been popular in London as early as 1781 is attested bythe exchange between Burney and Twining regarding its merits, which be-gan in that year.

The opportunities were there, then; in the end, however, we do not knowthe extent to which Haydn was acquainted with Boccherini’s music. We canbe more sure of the other side of the equation. Cambini tells us that Boc-cherini had performed Haydn’s music as early as 1765 in northern Italy;more speculatively, we can assume that he would have had opportunities tohear Haydn’s symphonies and chamber music in Paris in 1769. But his mostextended contact with Haydn’s works undoubtedly came in Spain. By 1781,the year of Boccherini’s first attempt to communicate with him, Haydn’s mu-sic was known and esteemed in Spain (“his musical compositions . . . herereceive all the acclaim that in strict justice they deserve”). The channels ofits arrival and distribution in that country have been thoroughly docu-mented.8 Haydn was a pet of the afrancesados, and this more than anythingelse 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 forthe Benavente-Osuna household, he became responsible for choosing, copy-ing, rehearsing, and performing the numerous works by Haydn held in theirlibrary, which formed the most complete Haydn collection in Spain.

Although we cannot be sure of the precise extent of their knowledge ofeach other’s work, in their virtual, printed embodiments the two composerswere fellow guests in countless musical establishments large and small,professional and amateur, there savored, admired, and inevitably comparedwith each other. Late-century music-lovers variously represent the Haydn-Boccherini polarity as light-dark, comic-tragic, male-female, intellect-sensi-bility, introverted-extraverted. I have examined a few of these comparisonsabove; they have varying degrees of subtlety, and naturally the more thought-ful writers tend to be more nuanced about it. Thus Burney takes Twining to

the perfect listener 255

task for his underestimation of Haydn, and Twining Burney for his failureto acknowledge Boccherini’s strengths. Cambini, as we have seen in chap-ter 3, associates Boccherini with tragedy, and Haydn’s instrumental musicnot just with comedy but with the comédie-larmoyante, and a specific one atthat: Rousseau’s Le Devin du village. In 1799 an anonymous reviewer for theAllgemeine musikalische Zeitung denied Boccherini’s quartets “that greatnessof bold genius in layout, scope, and strikingness” that was to be found inHaydn’s;9 and in 1809 Johann Baptist Schaul allowed Haydn’s quartets “asatisfaction of the intellect, of willful construction,” while Boccherini’s works,“in contrast, set [one] aquiver, agitated, cast into restless motion.”10 The 1805obituary of Boccherini in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung implied thatHaydn’s music was “difficult, artificial, and learned,” as against “the melodicelement” in Boccherini;11 Pierre Baillot continued this vein of comparisonsomewhat more poetically by telling us that Haydn “embraces all creationin one glance” while Boccherini “seeks to return us to our primitive inno-cence.”12 Others were more poetic still, or downright aphoristic. CharlesChênedollé wrote in 1808 that Boccherini “is more intoxicating thanHaydn”;13 the violinist Jean-Baptiste Cartier is recorded as having remarked,“If God wished to speak to men, he would make use of the music of Haydn;and if he wished to listen to music, he would have that of Boccherini playedto him”; and finally, most famously and most lamentably, there is the remarkof the Italian violinist Giovanni Puppo: “Boccherini is the wife of Haydn.”14

Puppo’s reductio ad absurdum (and its regrettable repetition in Boccherini crit-icism ever since) emphasizes the limited usefulness and interest of criticalpolarities. At its most bald and least useful, we have Haydn as comic, witty,and cleverly structured at the expense of depth, and Boccherini as intro-verted, soft, and morbid at the expense of plan and design. By engaging ina more detailed and experientially grounded consideration in this book, Ihave tried to give empiricism a chance to do what it does so well: to muddythe pristine waters of stereotype.

What then of the Haydn end of this much-inscribed polarity? It works wellto look at Haydn’s music through the Boccherinian lens I have been grind-ing: that is, to treat his music as evidence of, and meaningful engagementwith, the physical processes of execution and performance. His delight inperformative play (pauses, double entendres, an endless vocabulary of sur-prises) is one of his best-known and best-documented features as a composer.Further, we have evidence—much more direct evidence than for Boccherini—that Haydn approached composition through execution. In one fascinatingpair of linked statements, quoted by his early biographer Griesinger, Haydnmade it clear that he incorporated the idiom of his main instrument intohis inventio, and that he regarded first-hand experience of vocal idiom as es-sential to compositional mastery. One could even read him as implying that

256 the perfect listener

the coherence of his ideas was due in some measure to their executional gen-esis and working-through.

Haydn always composed (dichtete [the same word as that used for composingpoetry]) his works at the keyboard. “I sat myself down and began to fantasize,according to whether my mood was sad or happy, serious or trifling. When Igot hold of an idea, my whole endeavor went into executing and sustaining itaccording to the rules of art. Thus did I seek to help myself; and it is this whichso many of our new composers lack; they string one bit after another, they breakoff when they have scarcely begun: but when one has heard [their work], noth-ing rests in the heart.”

He also disapproved that these days so many musicians compose who havenever learned to sing. “Singing,” he said, “is almost to be counted among thelost arts, and instead of song one allows instruments to dominate.”15

Would that we had such reliable anecdotes for Boccherini! Nevertheless,there are some radical differences to be noted here. The kinesthetic inven-tio which informs Haydn’s compositional decisions differs from Boccherini’s,by virtue of the fact—baldly simple to assert, endlessly complex to describe—that playing a keyboard uses the body in different ways than playing a stringedinstrument. Furthermore, Boccherini was a virtuoso string player; Haydn,although plainly a very good keyboardist, is not remembered as a virtuoso.There is a potential world of difference in this distinction.16

Contemporary accounts as well as his grateful and inventive writing forthe instrument make it plain that Haydn was also no mean violinist. Moresurprisingly, perhaps, his writing for the cello—which he did not play—showsa really extraordinary sensitivity to matters of sonority and technique. Itwould not be difficult at all to show how Haydn’s cello writing from differ-ent periods constitutes a series of executional “portraits” of the cellists withwhom he worked: Joseph Weigl’s virtuosity, as represented in the “Times ofDay” symphonies of 1761 (Hob. I:6, 7, and 8), differed in many telling par-ticulars from that of Anton Kraft, memorialized in the Cello Concerto in DMajor, Hob. VIIb:2, of 1783.17

I leave such tempting projects for another time or place, however, sinceI hope that I have by now sufficiently adumbrated a methodology. It is in-stead the position of the listener, the kinesthetic outsider, that I wish to de-velop at this point—that “outsider” who is no outsider at all, being in factintrinsic to the whole performative equation, whether as that coolly evalua-tive, Diderotic part of the executant’s mind that hears and judges even asshe plays, or as that separate person who sits and listens to another’s efforts(and whose separateness is utterly compromised by sensible absorption). Thelistener has also her processes of execution, after all: she executes reception,evaluation, and identification, and does so in her body.


the perfect listener

As we adjust our speech to the one spoken to, as I write to a particular imag-ined reader, so the composer-performer of Boccherini’s generation shapedsound and action to the tastes of a more or less precisely imagined audience.The age of an “absolute” music created with explicit disregard for mattersof listeners’ taste (even as that disregard simply implied other tastes, tastesfor abstraction and disinterestedness) was yet to come. Just as the composer-performer’s embodied experience informed musical choices on every level,so did that of the listeners, and every bit as constantly and essentially. In thissense, the whole affair of performance is one of repeated mutual confirma-tion, negation, and refinement of the hypothesis: This is a body and this iswhat it means to have one.

The bodies of eighteenth-century listeners have frequented this book withsome consistency. What I wish to do here is to bring them into a more activedialogue with their living counterparts. This is, then, a form of historical per-formance practice; I theorize and perform the Perfect Listener with the ex-press understanding that my reader (you who are, of course, the PerfectReader!) will make some attempt to accommodate her, adapt to her, ab-sorptively engage with her: in the last degree, become her. In effect, I makehere the same demand of my reader as did Condillac in the preface to hisTraité des sensations. The following passage stands as a gateway to all that fol-lows, in his book and in my chapter.

Important Advice to the Reader. . . I therefore advise that it is very important to put yourself exactly in theplace of the statue which we are going to observe. You must begin to existwith her, having but one sole sense when she has but one; acquiring onlythose ideas which she acquires, contracting only those habits that she con-tracts: in a word, you must be only what she is. She will judge things as we doonly when she has all our senses and all our experience; and we will judgeas she does only when we suppose ourselves deprived of all that she lacks. Ibelieve that those readers who put themselves exactly in her place will haveno difficulty in understanding this work; others will confront me with innu-merable difficulties.18

The Perfect Listener is, however, hydra-headed. At even a moderate levelof detail, the differences between her faces become as significant as the com-monalities. We have a bewildering range of choice: shall we take the Parisian,or British, or Viennese sensible amateur as our model? The Madrilenian tertu-lista with populist affectations? Is she melancholy? consumptive? Has shesome proficiency on the instruments involved or is she innocent of it? Is shea habituée of the opera, or of “lower” kinds of theater—or does she preferprivate venues? The honorific “Perfect” is of course ironic; if anything has


emerged clearly in this book so far it is that acts of trans-historical identifi-cation are necessarily gross compromises.

The Perfect Listener’s living manifestation is, by contrast, pretty definable:you are almost certainly musically educated, academic, and by extension,middle-class (by adoption if not by origin). More importantly, having readthus far you would seem to be a willing participant in extended thought-experiments about musical meaning; I would dare infer from this (and cer-tainly hope!) that you value speculation as an intellectual tool.

Our experiment begins with walking into the performance space, an actwhich has its sonic reenactment a few minutes later when the sonata begins.Let us posit an intimate but still public concert. Other people are probablyhere already, some of whom we know and some of whom we don’t. We arefaintly and immediately self-conscious at their presence, and this persists forthe duration of the event. The fact is that they can see us, as we them, andthis has a good deal to do with the next level of physical framing. Very muchas for the players, for us listeners many, in fact most, physical possibilities areexcluded. We are not free to wander about; “a certain basic position is man-dated.”19 We are seated on chairs, quite close to other listeners. We are notfree to vocalize; although we may respond physically to what we hear, the rangeof acceptable response is very circumscribed indeed, being pretty muchconfined to shifting within that seated position; a discreet amount of rhyth-mic response (we may twitch our toes, perhaps, but not tap our feet; bob ourheads, but not regularly or too often); restrained facial expressions; and ap-plause, which may come at the end of a sonata but not between its movements,and certainly not while the music is sounding. There is also considerable re-striction on looking directly at the other listeners, which would disrupt ourtacit contract of mutual peripherality. The only places to which it is entirelyacceptable to direct our gaze are the floor, the ceiling (though there is anaura of affectation to this), the insides of our eyelids, or the executant.

All this amounts to a severe containment of our listening bodies’ exteri-ority, making them nearly (but, crucially, not completely) invisible and in-audible to others. We listeners cooperate in doing this to one another. It canbe vexing and taxing to do, as any young person can attest; it must be painstak-ingly learned. It resembles a style of engaging with paintings which arosealong with the development of perspectival illusion.

The picture in this tradition is bossy. As viewers, we are accustomed to stop andstand still, immobilized, in front of it. The axis on which we stand is deter-mined. . . . Taken in and taken over, we lose ourselves (forgetting our situation)in the illusion. The illusionary world in the picture, in this unlike the real world,appears unchanging. Its unchanging aspect is a value in the culture.20

For all its vexation, submission to these restrictions on a viewing or lis-tening performance has its own complex satisfactions. The requisite de-


emphasis of exteriority forces our focus willy-nilly toward interiority. This maybe the “interior” of a sonata, that hierarchy of pitch relationships both heardand implied, the conceptualization of which was brought to a pinnacle byHeinrich Schenker; or it may be the interior of our listening bodies, delin-eated by a sensible hyper-consciousness of the breath, the heart rate, and thedelicate sensations that follow upon changes in these semi-autonomic func-tions. What I wish to emphasize here is that both these musical experiencesarise out of already established traditions of embodied gesture. A vigilant,hyper-alert, physically immobilized listener will tend to produce minutely self-conscious, intellectualized musical experiences.

What would an alternative be? What would it be like if looking at a paintingtook place, instead, in the ordinary conditions of our moving about in theworld? Can we imagine a painting as part of the environment, in which the de-picted objects and figures appear to move and change, sculpture-like, as wemove by?21

In listening, of course we can! Since the advent of sound recording, andof the concept of the soundtrack, we can and do do just this, all of us, almostevery day, and in so doing we reconceive what “pieces” are, radically and ef-fortlessly. I think of my father happily making bread of a Sunday morningto the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts—Meistersinger, Turandot, and otherworks one might not at first associate with culinary domesticity. I think ofmyself driving on the freeways of Los Angeles, letting a CD of a Boccheriniquintet provide me with a transparent, gracious reality through which thewarehouses, skyscrapers, and maniac drivers slip by.

Lacking radios, our eighteenth-century counterparts had still their ownmobile and environmental modes of reception; and evidence suggests thatthey were, by and large, rather freer than we are to engage in them at liveperformances. My fond thesis is that these modes allowed a vividness of em-bodied experience beyond the reach of the strait-laced modern concertgoer,made accessible through a diversity of internal metaphors for interpretinga performance—painterly, dramatic, danced-kinesthetic, a Diderotic synes-thetic freedom—and a ready fluency in bringing them to bear upon whatwas heard and seen. Richardson’s example points further, into intellectuallyand emotionally promiscuous experiments with transposing listeners’ reac-tions into the mind of the composer-performer. In re-creating my eighteenth-century counterpart, I find I am free to spend a fair amount of time look-ing about at the accoutrements of the room, researching the possibility offood or drink, and above all the attire, the postures, the facial expressionsof my fellow guests (“to see whether Mr. So and So was accompanying MissSo and So, and whether her dress was in better taste than the one she hadworn the previous day . . . ”).22 I am as much a creature of eyes as of ears. Myattention flits here and there among various attractive objects.


Whether I speak during the music, or gesture in response to it, seems, ina small gathering like this one, to be a matter of social rank—something Iwill probably have in common with the other guests at this salon, since at-tendance is by invitation. As invited guests we share values about such things.If, at the theater, we typically inhabit the mosquetería or parterre, then the un-lucky performer at this tertulia or salon can pretty well expect us “to take ad-vantage of the opportunity to chat with friends . . . [and to] make signs andgestures to the [players] during the performance.”23 Barbara Hanning hasargued persuasively that paintings and engravings of apparently talkative au-diences in eighteenth-century salons represent the range of possible behav-iors at the gatherings, rather than simultaneous ones.24 There is an assump-tion here, however, that talking during the sonata is not a form of listeningto it; I would like to broaden out from this. There can be no doubt that talk-ing to a friend while music is being played is very different than doing so with-out that sonic and visual accompaniment. I want to acknowledge this activityas another mode of listening, albeit a complex and problematic one.

In salons the Perfect Listener has considerable freedom to get up andmove about. We might choose to sit attentively for one sonata or for onemovement of a sonata, and not for others, and our choices would probablyhave to do with our own prior familiarity with the selections offered, or withthe immediacy of their presentation of ideas that are of value to us or to ourcommunity. In the Parisian salon a favorite movement, treasured for its sen-timent, would occasion an attention every bit as absorbed as Diderot couldwish. In the tertulia it might be the minuet that attracts us, though our at-tention to it might be less “absorbed” than physically galvanized; we mightbe “lifted from [our] seats,”25 if not precisely to dance, then into the banked,suppressed mobility of a standing posture. In either case, the very next move-ment might bore, or ask something of us that we are not interested in ex-ploring, or remind us that we are hungry—and off we would go, mentally ifnot physically, in search of more relevant fare. We are preeminently mobilein relationship to the act of listening.

Re-creating this mobility poses several problematic possibilities. Firstly,unless we are as bold as brass, in most latter-day public concert situationsthere are insuperable constraints on this kind of behavior. Inevitably, per-haps, a Perfect Concert begins to suggest itself: really, given the type of mu-sic that is my concern here, a Perfect Salon, one which the audience is asfully cognizant of performing as are the instrumentalists. Where is such ahandy, savvy, willing group of people to be found?

A second problem is that I would seem to be moving toward an accountof a Perfect Listening that simply vacates the premises, attentionally speak-ing, whenever concentration slips: “During the third movement, I began tothink about asparagus with mayonnaise for lunch . . . “ Surely this sort ofthing is not useful to include in my account. Not, that is, unless such an at-


tentional ellipsis were to occur consistently at a certain juncture or type ofjuncture: this is a very different class of event, one deserving of careful as-sessment. Opera seria audiences, for instance, tended to converse duringrecitatives and to be silent during arias, especially those sung by popularprincipals. Martha Feldman has characterized this intermittent style of en-gagement with music as no mere inattentiveness, but attention strategically,even ritually distributed.26 In a performance of instrumental music, whichpaints from a more restricted palette than opera, inattention tends to arisearound moments of insufficient information within a performance. Askilled performer will instantly sense when he is “losing” his audience, andhas a repertory of information he can supply to regain them: enhanced phys-ical gesture, enhanced sonic contrasts (dynamics, attack), ornamentation,or crude but occasionally necessary measures like omitting repeats. As wehave seen, Boccherini at times pushed this envelope rather hard by resort-ing to “laconic imagery” in his music, deliberately withholding informationin order to prompt a response from his listener. He will get one: attentionalnature abhors such vacuums, and rushes in with whatever may be available.But should that listener be somewhat less than Perfect, what rushes in maybe a plate of asparagus. It is not ideal, not theatrical or poetic, but its pres-ence as a potential response underlines the tendency of embodied beingsto gravitate directly toward pleasure and the fulfillment of desires: and inperformance this is what the composer-performer has to work with.

In re-creating a Perfect Listener who better incorporates visualized re-sponses to what she hears, an interesting problem arises with regard to thepresentation of this book. The recent availability of supportive visual mediahas made revolutionary immediacies possible. It is a sorely tempting busi-ness: the non-linear playfulness, the spark of thought and association arcingacross the suggestive gaps of a multi-media presentation—hyper-text, soundexample, illustration, film clip. By hugely expanding the reader’s agency, suchpresentation reconfigures and electrifies the whole literary relationship, mak-ing real the very performativity I seek to reconstitute here.

Much of the music discussed in this book is included on a bound-in CDof sound examples—a wonderful luxury, and yet for all that, utterly inade-quate to address the visual component. In regard to the visual, we are thrownback into precisely the relation of Diderot and the far-flung subscribers tohis “Salons,” who could not see the paintings described, but must needs en-vision them through his prose. This is the literary practice of ekphrasis, thedescriptive mode, and I want to suggest that in the end it is no mere stop-gap on the way to a hypothetical future “interactive edition.” I would evensuggest that ekphrasis is capable of reconstituting embodied musical rela-tionships in a specifically eighteenth-century way, through modeling thereflective, receptive “descent within”; and that such a descent is quite difficultto attain through interactive media. The computer-user’s impatience with


reflection, seeking after stimulation, and fidgetiness might or might not ap-proximate the Perfect Listener’s attentional mobility; but the identities pos-sibly contained in such an approximation are matter for another explorationthan this one. For the present, while I do not presume to Diderot’s virtuos-ity, the ekphrastic exercise in sustained, energetic, and inventive re-creation,both visual and auditory, is very much to my point. In support of this exercise,the Haydn piece I discuss in this chapter does not appear here in score, noris it included on the accompanying CD.

Numerous eighteenth-century accounts of listening to instrumental mu-sic show us that the Perfect Listener’s visualistic responses will tend to referto the stage; and in so doing they will be as specific as possible. Here anotherdifficulty presents itself. Angiolini warns of “the indifference of spectators tounknown personages.”27 But if familiarity with a dramatic character is of pri-mary importance, as Angiolini suggests, then I am at a distinct disadvantage.I have seen some classical tragedy, and some of its eighteenth-century deriv-atives, but my experience is pitifully tiny as compared to the experience ofmy historical counterpart. On the other hand, thanks to television and thecinema, my imagination is populated with quite a host of classical tragedy’sgreat-grandchildren. What will happen to this exercise if, instead of painstak-ingly reconstructing Dido, I visualize Bessie Smith? What if my Galatea looksand acts like Audrey Hepburn? Surely the relative immediacy of these trans-posed associations will outweigh their anachronism? This is, of course, theslippery slope on which any historical re-creation inevitably finds itself.

Lastly, in re-creating my counterpart I must achieve great descriptive de-tail in my accounts of my listening, not only as to visual but as to kinestheticresponse; this is clearly mandated by any number of eighteenth-century mod-els. The ideal here is, ultimately, absurd: to “relate exactly every Change ofmy Countenance; number all my Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale,Glances, Pauses, Full-stops, Interruption; the Rise and Falling of my Voice;every Motion of my Eyes; & every Gesture.”28

I have spent this book developing receptive contexts and practices for Boc-cherini’s music in order to end, looking outward toward only the most ob-vious of many other pastures, with Haydn’s. The piece I have chosen isHaydn’s G-major keyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39, of 1780. It was performedfor me by a colleague as a private event, that I might the more freely exper-iment with a listener’s mobility, attentional variety, possible question-asking,and the inevitable note-taking.

One more issue requires explanation. All the efforts I have been makingthroughout the writing of this book, and distilling into this chapter—to col-lapse distances historical and epistemological, to refine the absorptive ma-neuver, to find ways for musical performance to perform itself anew through


prose: all this means that now, in the end, I may no longer use the narra-tive nor reflective forms of address. They are too distanced. To talk of music-making as if it were in any way a thing, even the thinghood of an event, isno longer an option. If music-making is an interaction among persons, assuch it demands direct address.

November 2001Dear Colleague/Dear Haydn,

To which of you shall I address this letter? In the end it must be each, Ithink—or rather both, the composer-performer, a corporate being en-scripted by the one and embodied by the other, but not coterminous witheither of you. The indistinguishability in English of the second person sin-gular and plural permits me to play with this ambiguity.

You are well known to me, each and both; I have worked quite a bit witheach of you independently, and have considerable experience of your unitedbeing as well. Furthermore, crucially, I seem to be well known to the both ofyou. Ordinary enough with a living colleague, less easy to explain with a long-dead one, perhaps; but it often seems so when Haydn is involved. You, Haydn,are a fine host to this performative “space” within which I am a guest: ex-tremely attentive and responsive. You seem to have a good, indeed sometimesuncanny, idea of the ways in which certain of my expectations for a perfor-mance can be most worthily played out. Using the accoutrements of this spacehost-fashion, things like consonance and dissonance, basic tonal functional-ity, periodicity, the character and countenance of themes, you make it yourexpress duty to anticipate me; to enlarge upon me in the most complemen-tary way possible, making my desires and responses, and their consequence(in both senses of that word: their procession one to the next, and their impor-tance), seem the most natural things in the world. All this I know and expectalready from my acquaintance with the Haydn-side of your incorporation.

From my acquaintance with the performer-side I know and expect afiercely delicate precision, presenting not only every tone but every expres-sive gesture with great clarity. You have refined long and hard, using all theresources of a formidable intellect and musicianship, to achieve a superbmarriage of virtuosity with sensible transparency in Haydn’s work; it is in somemeasure an inspiration to my own efforts in prose.

And yet, of course, you have not achieved it: for it is unachievable. Thevery virtuosities, intellectual and physical, which you have brought to playin this endeavor ultimately make you opaque to it, make you your own man,performing nothing more than yourself in a state of heightened presenceand concentration. “Voice, tone, gesture, action—these are the things thatbelong to you, their actor; and it is these that strike us. . . . It is you who givethe discourse all its energy; you who convey to our ears the force and theverity of its accent.”29 Here I borrow once again, paraphrasing, from Diderot,


who theorized the dualities of performance long ago and unsurpassably. Notonly do his fine words facilitate my own, but I find myself resorting to themat those times when the situation arouses more discursive intimacy than Ican support. For what I seek to capture here, what I am bound to by the na-ture of my whole project, is nothing less than your doubly embodied pres-ences as they act within and upon my own; and I could scarcely be said tobe entering fully into this experiment if this prospect did not make me trem-ble at my own temerity. “When my ear is struck, I will become the sensationwhich I experience. I will be like the echo of which Ovid says, sonus est quivivit in illa; it is the sound which lives in her. . . . Hearing does not give meany sense of an object situated at a certain distance.”30 Thus I reserve theright to a doubleness of my own: to let Diderot and his compatriots be myvoice betimes, their eloquence serving as my screen, my fan, that display ofelegance behind which I may summon my composure.31

Perhaps in order to reinforce decorum, I have asked you to play me thisparticular sonata, a piece more pastoral than impassioned. It would be so con-ventionally, by virtue of some of its topoi and its key alone; it is doubly so byvirtue of its position within a series of six sonatas, published together and pos-sibly conceived as a cycle.32 Within the cycle, which proceeds ineluctably fromcarefreeness to tragedy (in the form of the final sonata, in C minor, Hob.XVI:20), this piece comes fifth. Its calm, then, is the calm before the storm.

You begin. The tune at the opening is so simple, so candid, as to be almosta blank slate perceptually. This is a particular sort of laconicism created bythe utterly conventional. “Let us—by its means—enter into the naive and ten-der sentiment experienced by a pretty village girl, still a virgin, in reproach-ing her lover for the infidelity which she has so little merited. Give her a char-acter even more naive than that of Colette in Le Devin du village. She knowsnothing of spite, listens only to her affection, and says only the following words:

What! You could be unfaithful to me!Who will love you more than I?You may find me less beautiful,But is my heart nothing to you?

—or something similar.”33 The fact that she speaks right at the beginning ofthe piece; that it is sounding where a moment before there was no sound;that you are seated here playing it—all ensure my attention; but just as I knowwhat poetry like this will say without really having to read it, I do not needto hear this first phrase even once to know how it will end. The invitationpresented by this opening is the gentlest possible: the advent of the famil-iar.34 But why, in fact, do I know it as well as I do? Why this sense of redis-covery? The experience is akin to hearing a language learned in childhoodand not spoken since. My own competence within it is faintly unnerving.Mine, but not mine; familiar, yet mysterious.


The tune’s very familiarity proves an ideal canvas, upon which the linesand arabesques of variations can be drawn with due clarity; because I “al-ready know” the tune there is no confusion as to what constitutes it, and whatnow emerges as decoration. Indeed there is some small satisfaction in theexercise of comparing the variations to the original that is so effortlessly heldin my mind’s ear as a sort of template. This is a simple form of an activity forwhich I, like a great many others, have so often found Haydn’s music theideal theater: the play with a listener’s memory and expectation.

For all that I am actively trying not to devolve into an ahistorical “struc-tural hearing,” I find that you do irresistibly invite that particular comparisonof past and present event, so crucial to this style of receptive engagement. Asit is a kind of listening, so is it a kind of self-constitution. “The more frequentlythe memory is used, the better it works. It is in this way that I form the habitof recalling without effort the changes through which I have passed, and ofdividing my attention between what I am, and what I have been. For a habitis nothing more than facility acquired through the reiteration of actions.”35

Physically this invitation to compare past and present produces an almostbreathlessly attentive stance: I tend to hold my breath when something un-expected and challenging is happening (which with you, Haydn, is quiteoften). I also sit (or stand) very still, rather rigidly in fact, so as better to fo-cus on this rapid, constant dialogue between events, recollections, and expec-tations. These are classic physical enactments of concentrated consciousness,and they are tiring if maintained for long. You pay off the exhaustingness oflistening at this level very handsomely, of course; and at those pay-offs, whenyou resolve a challenge cleverly or unexpectedly, my physical fixity can bequite abruptly and pleasantly broken—the diaphragm, tense before, releaseswith a snort (surprise, amusement) or a sigh (gratification), or a soft, shortintake of breath (sensual heightening).

The periodic phrase structure and the building-up of phrases throughidentifiable, discrete sections, hallmarks of late-century Viennese music andexceptionally clear in this simplistic tune, also serve an important functionin providing relief from this diaphragmatic intensity: frankly, they keep thelistening experience from becoming too anaerobic. I shift position andbreathe at “structural” breaks. These moments, whether they are short cesura-silences, or clear-cut changes of texture, tune, or harmonic rhythm, serve toreturn me briefly “to myself,” out of the piece altogether; and my attentionis incrementally renewed thereafter.

The variations also produce another sort of canvas-painting, background-foreground relationship: your performing embodiment steps discreetly for-ward through the formal procedure. For one thing, within the conventionsof variations, there is no certain way (short of recourse to the score, whichI have eschewed) that I can know which of you is responsible for which dec-orative nicety. For another, though the variations are scarcely virtuosic, they


are significantly more active than what has gone before; I am drawn to no-tice your gestures, the interestingly fluid motions of your right hand out awayfrom the center of your body (a muted, stylized, but unmistakable versionof the expository gestures of the orator); the slight leaning forward; yourown gaze, directed now for a few moments at the keyboard, and so direct-ing my own as if to say, “This is no soundtrack to your reminiscences: this isbeing performed, and I am the one performing it.”

Toward the end of the movement there is an episode in E minor in whichyour tender accents become insistent, ostentatious. The village virgin appearsto have donned a tragic mantle, and stepped before us in a manner morestaged than candid. What does this mean? At just the point where my puz-zlement has grown acute, you strike a severely earnest pose on a long, lowB, becoming at once a tableau of Ariadne’s wounded incredulity and thepersonification of my question. And as the question stretches anxiously intothe sound’s decay, I guess the answer—remembering, only just in time (per-haps tipped off by the wry tilt of your head as you move your arm across spaceto begin the next phrase), that B is the pitch with which the movement be-gan. On the axis of that one tone, the scene shifts neatly back to the villagegreen and the sonata’s unadorned G-major opening tune and harmony.

It is a welcome shift, and a sweet one, but also curious. That question, forall its urgency, did not receive an answer: rather an evasion, a sidesteppingof the issue through the fortuitous commonality of a single pitch. Perhapsthere was not much choice: how could such innocence even begin to ad-dress Ariadne’s anguish? But then, where did Ariadne come from, and why?You invite me to forget such troubling questions for the bucolic remainderof the movement. And indeed I am disposed to do so.

Now the slow movement, the key relaxed into C major, the tempo relaxedinto an Adagio. “It is the season where the Earth is covered with the giftsthat she bestows upon the travail and sweat of men.”36 I am reminded thatadagiarsi means “to lie down, to stretch out.” I am entirely ready to relax my-self back, as well, to simply leave behind the little disquiets which the firstmovement, for all its face of innocence, has awakened in me. I shut my eyes,the better to unite with the “quiet rest and gentle, undisturbed felicity”37 sug-gested to me by the spaciousness of opening gestures, the regular opportu-nities they provide to breathe; the better to allow Night to steal over me. Butnot that I may sleep. Rather that, “following the attraction of my heart, I maymingle my tears with the crystal of a fountain; tread light-footed upon thetender grass of the meadow; traverse fertile fields with slow steps . . . flee intothe depths of forests.”38 I hesitate among these delicious choices; the hesita-tion is itself delicious; “I abandon myself to the spectacle of nature. My chestis raised. I breathe with force . . . I am under a spell.”39

And as I stand in this enchanted suspension, unmoving save for the breathsthat buoy along my fantasy, an unforeseen new tune reveals itself to me. The


spell is dissipated; I shift; I sigh. The tune has an unbroken accompanimentagainst which unfold sweetly fantastical peals of song. “Have you, Philomel,through this tender song—has a lurking woodland god awakened me, or anymph, that rustles shyly through the bushes?”40

Unforeseen but not unfamiliar. There is again in this second tune thatspecter of an unbidden familiarity. Why, how can I know it as if I had knownit before?—So might her former companions inquire before the laurel thatwas Daphne. The countenance metamorphosed from former life, the lin-eaments of a dear face translated into wood and foliage, might, with timeand reference to a score, be proven to be a motivic relationship. Or this mightmerely be a type of reflective second theme of which I have heard a greatmany, the resemblance of one laurel tree to all laurels, the familiarity ofspecies.41 In the end, I submit, the nature of this hearkening does not mat-ter, but rather its effect: the slight dislocation, the refraction of perceptionand memory it has caused in me.

So meditating on the strangeness of familiarity, I continue toward the rest-ing place you now offer me, in the form of gentle, registrally descending ca-dential preparations. I prepare to seat myself on this mossy bank: and as myweight gives way into its verdure, I am brought up hard! There is a stone, anedge, something—all I perceive at first is its wrongness, so unexpected is it;there has been no warning, no breath of dismay in the movement up to now.Only in my shocked aftermath (sharp intake of breath, held through the en-suing cesura) do I identify it: a deceptive cadence, voiced low and dark sothat its pitch content is obscure, and further obscured by a grinding doubleappoggiatura.

It is only here that I think to wonder where you had been while I had myeyes shut, trained upon such delectable interior vistas. At that deceptive ca-dence, my eyes flew open: I wanted to see if this could possibly have beenright, if you had simply made a mistake in execution. Plainly you had not;you hung upon the contracted voicing of that sonority with a contracted pos-ture, enacting its painfulness, the way pain suspends the desire to move. “Solong as the objects we touch do not hurt us, we will continue to stretch outour arms without fear; but at the first pinprick, this confidence will desertus and we will remain motionless.”42

Although you promptly soften the pain with the proper resolution andcadence formulaically delivered, this does not erase the memory of rude-ness, the brief, harsh refusal of a repose you had given me every reason toexpect. Doubt has entered the idyll, and with it, alas, vigilance; no longercan I wander trackless, unmindful of where I go. This is the dark side of thoseprocesses of memory by which we come to a sense of ourselves. Not all mem-ories are happy ones; not all hurts can be forgotten. We walk around the worldnursing and shielding our wounds.

At the equivalent cadential preparations in the second half of the move-


ment, therefore, I am tensed against the possible arrival of another such de-ceptive cadence. It comes; that it was expected this time does not make itwelcome. It only confirms that the pastoral illusion has been corrupted, andthat it has been corrupted in your person, by your execution of a painfulevent. So again your performing embodiment has stepped forward, but notso discreetly now; this reminder has something in it of reproach: This is be-ing performed, I am the one performing it—and you, listener, forget myembodiment, my human presence, at your peril.

Why must it be so? What peril could there have been in my obliviousness?Perhaps, I will admit, it is that my reverie had “disposed my soul to feel-

ings that are too tender, which are then satisfied at the expense of virtue.”43

Should I admit to this, I would then have to admit that it was high time I wasreminded of your presence in the room, before I forgot all propriety. Butwhy then lead me thither? Why invite me to tarry in such loveliness, and yetfurther invite me to forget that it and I are literally held in your two hands?“I do not accuse you of being a trickster precisely, but of cultivating by everymeans possible the talent of deceiving people, and of practicing habits which,being innocent only in the context of performance, cause nothing but harmelsewhere. Such men as you, so well got up, so well practiced in the tone ofgalanterie and in the accents of passion, do you never abuse your art in theseduction of receptive persons?”44

I enter the last movement with this protesting question strong in my mind.(I am pacing to and fro as you begin.) Your objectionable performative per-son, target of my question and disrupter of my reverie, is very much in theforeground now: the movement is a Prestissimo, and filled with disjunct, man-ic hopping gestures, visually attention-getting to the point of obtrusiveness.Yet as I watch and listen, my earlier mobility is curtailed by fascination withyours, my resentment abates by degrees; or rather it is caught up and trans-formed in my kinetic response to the infectiousness of the implied dance.The fast, precise, complex gestures of your hands, my gradually elevated heartrate, become through sheer momentum their own reverie. I am summonedto a dancerly embodiment; my pacing becomes lightly rhythmicized. As itdoes for the rustics who have been politely waiting in the wings of this pas-toral, dance permits me to forget.

This kind of embodiment achieves its resolutions of doubt and of dou-bleness through my willing surrender of memory and anticipation into im-mediacy of sensation, the hurrying-on from one beat to the next. Given thebetrayal I have recently suffered at your hands—indeed, now that I think ofit, given your unexpected transformations in the first movement—is this re-ally a desirable resolution? I have not time to reflect on this possibility: themovement is simply too fast.

At the end of each half I am checked in my surrender by a curious littlemaneuver, a short cadential phrase, a neatly arpeggiated, quiet, legato utter-


ance enunciated in octaves between your two hands. So the piece ends. I amleft between one breath and the next, not yet believing it, clutching my ques-tions unspent, wondering if you intended this final gesture as the evasion Ihear in it: the evasion of any sort of honest, emphatic ending, an ending inwhich I could feel resolution. Rather I have been dealt a comic slyness, mydoubts inevitably renewed at the very point where you, in your now-concludeddouble embodiment, have no longer any obligation to answer them.

I must contend with my lingering questions, then, on my own. I reflectafterward, and I think: This piece has in it a severe problematization of ca-dences. Tension to release, departure to return, what we nowadays call dom-inant to tonic, at crucial moments this relationship does not proceed nor-mally. Then, at the very end, it proceeds far too easily, slipping past withsardonic ease. What does such conflictedness about closure bespeak?

It is not, I think, some tortuous melancholic evasion of ending, but a moregeneral problematization. This sonata will end, it must do so; each internalcadence is a little acknowledgment, a prefiguration of that eventual fact. Andafter it will come—what? As it happens, if we conceive these sonatas as a cy-cle, what comes after is certifiably dire, that tormented piece in C minor. Buteven without that knowledge, this difficulty with cadences reminds me thatthere is a problem with the afterlife of any sonata. For after it will come—something else; probably not music. This charmed world in which we havedallied will disperse, will be very nearly as if it never was. Our vicissitudeswithin it, our moments of enthusiasm, the surprises, indignations, softenings,the fine resolves and new vistas, all will be but faint memories. And further-more this is a pastoral piece; there is that face of the pastoral that knows it-self already irrecoverable. Much more than in other media, the pastoral inmusic encourages such reflections upon the evanescence of experience andthe knowledge gained thereby. Its vistas are toward a forsaken past; its in-nocence is recalled rather than uncritically embodied. And this sonata re-sists such nostalgia even as it offers it. Its ambivalence is, I think, entirely apt;for with these observations on ending, I find I am now quite regretfully atthe end of my experiment, and so of this book.

“And when the weight of the day has fallen away we’ll continue on ourway, and in a more distant time we’ll still recall this enchanted spot, and thedelicious hour we’ve passed here.”45

Thanking you each and both, I remainYour humble servant,Elisabeth


appendix

Chronological Table of String Quartets

Date of Composition Opus and Gérard No. First Edition

1760–62 op. 2 (G. 159–64): 6 quartets 1767, Paris, Vénier (as op. 1)1768–70 op. 8 (G. 165–70): 6 quartets 1769, Paris, Vénier (as op. 6)1770 op. 9 (G. 171–76): 6 quartets 1772, Paris, Vénier (as op. 10)1772 op. 15 (G. 177–82): 6 quartettini 1773, Paris, Vénier (as op. 11)1775 op. 22 (G. 183–88): 6 quartettini 1776, Paris, La Chevardière

(as op. 26)1776 op. 24 (G. 189–94): 6 quartets 1778, Paris, Sieber (as op. 27)1778 op. 26 (G.195–200): 6 quartettini 1781, Vienna, Artaria (as op. 32)

(see also note to op. 39)1780 op. 32 (G. 201–6): 6 quartets 1782, Vienna, Artaria (as op. 33)1781 op. 33 (G. 207–12): 6 quartettini unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime1787 (part of) op. 39 (G. 213): 1 quartet1 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as part of op. 39)2

1788 (part of) op. 41 (G. 214, 215): 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as part of op. 39)2 quartets

1789 op. 42 (G. 216, 217): 2 quartettini unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime1790 op. 43 (G. 218, 219): 2 quartettini unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime1792 op. 44 (G. 220–25): 6 quartettini unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime1794 op. 48 (G. 226–31): 6 quartettini unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime1795 op. 52 (G. 232–35): 4 quartets 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as part of op. 39)1796 op. 53 (G. 236–41): 6 quartettini 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as op. 40)1799 op. 58 (G. 242–47): 6 quartets 1803, Paris, Sieber (as op. 58)1804 op. 64 (G. 248, 249): 2 quartets unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime

(second unfinished)

271

notes

introduction

Epigraph: “Nulla ottiene il compositore senza gl’esecutori: questi è necessario chesiano ben affetti all’autore, poi devono sentire nel cuore tutto ciò che questi à no-tato; unirsi, provare, indagare, studiar finalmente la mente dell’autore, poi eseguirnele opere. Allora che si arrivano quasi a togliere l’applauso al compositore, o almenoa partir la gloria con lui, mentre che, se è pregio sentir dire, che bell’opera è questa!parmi che sia di più sentire aggiungere, oh, che angelicamente l’anno eseguita!”Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon,1988), 274.1. I owe it to the unusual scrupulousness of my undergraduate cello teacher, Bon-

nie Hampton, that I never did learn “the” Boccherini Concerto in Bb Major, aFrankensteinian pastiche by the nineteenth-century cellist Friedrich Grützmacher(1832–1903). This work has merits all its own; what is inexcusable is that it isstill regularly taught, performed, and even recorded as Boccherini’s composition.For an interesting contextualization of Grützmacher’s life and work, see LudolfLützen, Die Violoncell-Transkriptionen Friedrich Grützmachers: Untersuchungen zur Tran-skription in Sicht und Handhabung der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg:G. Bosse Verlag,1974).

2. “Une pièce [de théâtre] est moins faite pour être lue que pour être représentée.”Denis Diderot, “Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel’” (1757), in Oeuvres, ed. André Billy(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951), 1205. Due to a parting of ways with the origi-nal record label, the Artaria Quartet Boccherini recordings are only now (ten yearslater) in the process of commercial release. With the help of the Asociación LuigiBoccherini (Madrid), six quartets, op. 9, will appear in summer 2005 on the la-bel of the Festival de Aranjuez. It is hoped that the other two opere will appear inthe next couple of years.

3. The most useful to an English speaker is Christian Speck’s summary in the NewGrove, which is accurate and up to date, but not book length. Christian Speck andStanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Musicand Musicians Online (London: Macmillan, 2000–), www.grovemusic.com.

273

4. Jaime Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano en la España ilustrada (Madrid:Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2002).

5. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 48.

6. “We talk and think ‘off ’ the object rather as an astronomer looks ‘off ’ a star, be-cause acuity or sharpness are greater away from the centre.” Baxandall, Patternsof Intention, 6.

7. See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.8. “L’art dramatique a toujours inspiré ces grands maîtres, même dans les ouvrages

où elle ne peut se montrer aux yeux.” Giuseppe Maria Cambini, Nouvelle Méthodethéorique et pratique pour le violon (Paris: Naderman, c. 1803; facsimile reprint,Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 22.

9. “Changez le tout, vous me changez nécessairement. . . . L’homme n’est qu’uneffet commun.” Denis Diderot, “Le Rêve de d’Alembert” (1769), in Oeuvres, ed.André Billy (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951), 899.

10. Christian Friedrich Hübner, “Coenasthesis, dissertatio . . . quam praeside J. C.Reil, pro gradu doctoris” (Ph.D. diss., University of Halle, 1794). Quoted andtranslated in Jean Starobinski, “A Short History of Bodily Sensation,” in Fragmentsfor a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and NadiaTazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 2:353.

11. “Ce sixième sens qui est en nous . . . Le coeur est fait, il est organisé pour . . .objets touchants.” Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (abbé), Réflexions critiques sur la poésie etsur la peinture (Paris: Chez Mariette, 1740), 179. Quoted in Georges Gusdorf,Naissance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières (Paris: Payot, 1976), 298.

12. “Notre statue, privée de l’odorat, de l’ouïe, du goût, de la vue, et bornée au sensde toucher, existe d’abord par le sentiment qu’elle a de l’action des parties deson corps les unes sur les autres, et surtout des mouvements de la respiration:voilà le moindre degré de sentiment où l’on puisse la réduire. Je l’appelleraisentiment fondamental; parce que c’est à ce jeu de la machine que commence lavie de l’animal: elle en dépend uniquement. . . . Ce sentiment et sonmoi ne sontpar conséquent dans l’origine qu’une même chose.” Étienne Bonnot de Condil-lac, Traité des sensations (1754; reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1984), pt. 2, chap. 1, “Dumoindre degré de sentiment où l’on peut réduire un homme borné au sens dutoucher,” sec. 1, “Sentiment fondamental de la statue”; sec. 2, “Il est susceptiblede modifications”; sec. 3, “Il est la même chose que le moi,” 89–90.

13. “C’est vers la région de l’estomac que ce sens interne paraît surtout résider.” Jeanle Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur les éléments de philosophie (1795), ed. Richard N.Schwab (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1965). Quoted in Gusdorf, Naissance de la con-science romantique, 301.

14. “Je ferai de ces sensations une classe particulière, sous le nom de tact intérieurou sixième sens, & j’y rangerai les douleurs qu’on ressent quelquefois dans l’in-térieur des chairs, dans la capacité des intestins, & dans les os mêmes; les nausées,le mal-aise [sic] qui précède l’évanoüissement, la faim, la soif, l’émotion qui ac-compagne toutes les passions; les frissonnemens, soit de douleur, soit de volupté;enfin cette multitude de sensations confuses qui ne nous abandonnent jamais,qui nous circonscrivent en quelque sorte notre corps, qui nous le rendenttoûjours présent, & que par cette raison quelques metaphysiciens ont appellées

274 notes to pages 3–8

sens de la coexistence de notre corps.” Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de L’Aulne,“Existence,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers,ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris: Briasson,1751–72). Searchable online at the University of Chicago ARTFL Project,www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc. Gusdorf, Naissance de la con-science romantique, 300, dates this article 1756.

15. “Lorsque son oreille sera frappée, elle deviendra la sensation qu’elle éprouvera.Elle sera comme l’echo dont Ovide dit: sonus est qui vivit in illa; c’est le son quivit en elle.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 1, chap. 8, “D’un homme bornéau sens de l’ouïe,” sec. 1, “La statue bornée au sens de l’ouïe est tout ce qu’elleentend,” 59.

16. “Les desirs de notre statue ne se borneront donc pas à avoir un son pour objet,et elle souhaitera de redevenir un air entier.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 1,chap. 8, “D’un homme borné au sens de l’ouïe,” sec. 6, “Les plaisirs de l’oreille,consistent principalement dans la mélodie,” 61.

17. “Si [la Nature] lui donne une sensation agréable, on conçoit que la statue enpourra jouir, en conservant toutes les parties de son corps dans la situation oùelles se trouvent, et une pareille paroit tendre à maintenir le repos plutôt qu’àproduir le mouvement.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 2, chap. 5, “Du plaisir,de la douleur, des besoins et des désirs d’un homme borné au sens de toucher,”sec. 2, “Comment un homme borné au toucher découvre son corps et apprendqu’il y a quelque chose hors de lui,” 101.

18. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “comfort,” http://dictionary.oed.com.19. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 52.20. For an unbearably vivid (and artistically brilliant) demonstration of just how large

it could loom, the reader is referred to Fanny Burney’s account of her mastec-tomy, performed in 1811 without benefit of anesthesia. The Journals and Lettersof Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow et al. (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1972–84), 6:612–13. Quoted in Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burneyand the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989),68–70.

21. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is the classic presentation and analysis of thistopic. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. AlanSheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

22. Charles Emil Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1932), 111.

23. “Parce qu’elle rencontre tour-à-tour de la solidité et de la fluidité, de la duretéet de la mollesse, de la chaleur et du froid; elle donne son attention à ces diffé-rences, elle les compare, elle en juge, et ce son autant d’idées par où elle apprendà distinguer les corps. Plus elle exercera ses jugemens à ce sujet, plus son tactacquerra de finesse; et elle se rendra peu-à-peu capable de discerner dans unemême qualité jusqu’aux nuances les plus légères.” Condillac, Traité des sensations,pt. 2, chap. 8, “Observations propres à faciliter l’intelligence de ce qui sera diten traitant de la vue,” sec. 4, “Premières idées qu’elle acquiert,” 120–21.

We find a precursor to this acknowledgment of embodied refinement in thewritings of the extraordinary Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo: “There are a great many

notes to pages 8–11 275

more stars, which being of very inferior size, are only discovered thanks to theingenious or happy invention of the telescope: in the same way with our bodies,beyond those signs of the affects of the soul which even common people dis-play, there are many others which by their delicacy can only be discovered witha very reflective perspective.” (“Hay muchísimos mas [Astros], que por ser demuy inferior tamaño, solo se descubren á favor de la ingeniosa, ò feliz inven-cion del telescopio: del mismo modo en nuestro cuerpo, fuera de aquellas señalesde los afectos del ánimo, que aun al vulgo se ponen de manifiesto, hay otrasmuchas, que por su delicadeza solo se dexan descubrir á una perspectiva muyreflexiva.”) Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo, “Nuevo arte physiognomico,” in Thea-tro crítico universal (Madrid: Imprenta Real de la Gazeta, 1773), 5:66.

24. I included a fifth party in a short additional conversation: the producer of ourrecording of op. 15, no. 3, since I consider the producer’s experiences to befully as integral to the recorded product as those of any of the artists.

25. Cambini asserts something very similar: “I have always thought that he who said,sonata, what do you want of me? was right only because the musician who pro-duced and executed the sonata was at fault. . . . Had it been otherwise, that manof wit would not have had the time to take exception; he would instead havecried out, sonata, you touch me . . . you move me!” (“J’ai toujours pensé que celuiqui disoit, sonate, que me veux tu? n’avoit raison que parce que la musicien pro-ducteur et exécuteur de la sonate avoit tort. . . . S’il en eut été autrement,l’homme d’esprit n’eut pas eu le tems d’en avoir; il se fut plûtot écrié, sonate tum’émeus . . . tu m’attendris!”) Cambini, Nouvelle Méthode, 22.

chapter 1. “cello-and-bow thinking”

1. “Sarà se non bene, che l’Organista habbia prima data un’occhiata à quel Concerto,che si ha da cantare, perché intendendo la natura di quella musica, farà sempremeglio gli accompagnimenti.” Lodovico Viadana, Cento concerti ecclesiastici (1607;reprint, Mantua: Istituto Carlo d’Arco per la Storia di Mantova, 1964), 122.

2. While obvious, it is probably worth mentioning that my numbering of fingersrefers to string-playing and not keyboard-playing custom: thus thumb = un-numbered, index = 1, middle = 2, ring = 3, pinky = 4.

3. Along with his countryman Francischello (Francesco Alborea), Boccherini hasan informal reputation among cellists as the inventor of thumb-position on thecello. This is not strictly true; there is plentiful evidence in the works of Boc-cherini’s Parisian contemporaries Jansson, Bréval, and especially the Duportsthat the use of the left thumb in the upper register was already a familiar tech-nique. What is true is that Boccherini exploited, expanded, and emphasizedthumb-position to an exceptional degree. He uses it more than anyone else; itis very much his signature.

4. I am grateful to Steven Lehning, who first pointed this out to me.5. “Der Tremolo ist eine Auszierung die aus der Natur selbst entspringet, und die

nicht nur von guten Instrumentisten, sondern auch von geschickten Sänger, beyeiner langen Note zierlich kann angebracht werden. Die Natur selbst ist dieLehrmeisterin hiervon. Denn wenn wir eine schlaffe Seyte oder eine Glocke starkanschlagen; so hören wir nach dem Schlage eine gewisse wellenweise Schwebung


(ondeggiamento) des angeschlagenen Tones: Und diesen zitterenden Nachklangnennet man Tremolo, oder Tremoleto.” Leopold Mozart, Gründliche Violinschule(1787; facsimile reprint, Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1966), chap. 11, sec.1, 243.

6. David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 153.

7. “Commencez donc par bien connoître le caractère du chant que vous avez àrendre, son rapport au sens des paroles, la distinction de ses phrases, l’Accentqu’il a par lui-même, celui qu’il suppose dans la voix de l’Exécutant, l’énergieque le Compositeur a donnée au Poëte, & celle que vous pouvez donnez à votretour au Compositeur. Alors livrez vos organes à toute la chaleur que ces con-sidérations vous auront inspirée; faites ce que vous feriez si vous étiez à la foisle Poëte, le Compositeur, l’Acteur & le Chanteur.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Exé-cution,” in Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: veuve Duchesne, 1768), trans. WilliamWaring, “Execution,” in A Dictionary of Music (London: J. French, 1779).

8. “Recevoir quelque impression par le moyen des sens. . . . Il ne se dit point dessimples perceptions de la vue & de l’ouie.” François d’Alberti de Villeneuve,Grand Dictionnaire français-italien (Bassano: Remondini, 1811), s.v. “sentir.”

9. “Termine generico, col quale si esprime communemente il soffrire, o riceveretutte quelle impressioni. . . . Si dice più particolarmente d’alcuni sensi. E prima,e più frequentemente, dell’udire.” Francesco Alberti di Villanuova, Nuovodizionario italiano-francese (Nice: Gabriele Floteront, 1780), s.v. “sentire.”

10. Just as unspoken cognates hover around Rousseau’s directions to the executant,so does the meaning of the Latin root of poignance hover around this word inEnglish: what is now sharpness and keenness to the emotions derives from a phys-ical action, the Latin pungere, to pierce.

11. While the manuscript does not show a slur over the top line, the whole-note Ebbelow it indicates that the bar should be played with a single bow stroke.

12. “La soavità delle melodie di Boccherini . . . assume talvolta la forma “aperta” dimessaggio celestiale annunciato al centro di un’opera, indipendente dal con-testo e in ogni caso non inserito in un sistema preordinato di proposta, replicae ripetizione, come è d’uso nella musica del periodo classico. Sono frasi ad untempo elaborate e semplici, ogni nota, ogni valore ritmico tocca la corda giusta,avviando un discorso che trova un’immediata eco nell’anima.” Luigi DellaCroce, Le trenta-tre sinfonie di Boccherini: guida e analisi critica, introduction by PinaCarmirelli (Turin: Eda, 1979), 237.

13. Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of LuigiBoccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). The“Chronological Table of Compositions” begins on 671.

14. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1994), 51.

15. A rare glimpse into composerly engagement with these processes is provided tous by Beethoven, writing to a distinguished pupil:

To the Archduke Rudolph, Vienna, 1 June 1823

Let Y.I.H. continue particularly to practice, when at the keyboard, imme-diately writing down those fleeting inspirations that may come to you. For


this a small table belongs near the keyboard. By this means not only is theimagination strengthened, but also one learns how to instantly secure themost remote ideas. It is also necessary to write without a keyboard, and some-times to develop a simple choral melody, with simple, or again with variousfigures according to counterpoint, and even beyond that, will surely giveY.I.H. no headache, but rather, when one finds oneself so absorbed in themidst of art, a great satisfaction.

An Erzherzog Rudolph: Wien, am 1. Juni 1823

Fahren E.K.H. nur fort, besonders sich zu üben, gleich am Clavier Ihre Einfälleflüchtig kurz niederzuschreiben. Hiezu gehört ein kleines Tischchen ans Clavier. Durchdergleichen wird die Phantasie nicht allein gestärkt, sondern man lernt auch die entle-gensten Ideen augenblicklich festhalten. Ohne Clavier zu schreiben ist ebenfalls nöthigund manchmal eine einfache Melodie Choral mit einfachen und wieder mit ver-schiedenen Figuren nach den Contrapuncten und auch darüber hinaus durchführen,wird J.K.H. sicher kein Kopfweh verursachen, ja eher, wenn man sich so selbst mittenin der Kunst erblickt, ein großes Vergnügen.

Beethovens Briefe, ed. Richard Elchinger (Munich: G. Hirth, 1924), 206.

16. Visually speaking, downbows move out from the center of the body, upbows intoward it.

17. Alpers and Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, 53.

chapter 2. “as my works show me to be”

1. The further (very extensive) editorial liberties that Pleyel took with the worksthat he received are discussed at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/bocche-rini, and in Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Worksof Luigi Boccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press,1969), 64–65, 208, and 405–6.

2. “Sono presto 40 anni che sono scrittore, e non sarei Boccherini se avessi scrittocome voi mi consigliate, né voi sareste Pleyel, e quel Pleyel che siete. . . . Tenetepresente che non vi è cosa peggio che legare le mani ad un povero autore, cioèmetter limite all’idea e immaginazione di questo.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce,Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 270. Bocche-rini’s use of the term “scrittore,” the word for a writer or poet, is a measure ofthe seriousness with which he approached his work.

3. “Tous ceux qui me connaissent et qui ont des rapports avec moi, me font l’hon-neur de me juger homme probe, honnête, sensible, doux, aimant, tel que mesoeuvres de musique me révèlent; il serait vraiment drôle que pour le seul Pleyelj’eusse changé ma nature! Non, mon ami, je suis le même pour tous.” Quotedin Germaine de Rothschild, Luigi Boccherini: sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Plon,1962), 80. Translated by Andreas Mayor as Luigi Boccherini: His Life and Work(London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 71. According to Della Croce, theItalian originals of this and certain other letters, once contained in the Pleyelarchive, have been lost; the most authoritative text we have for them is this,


Germaine de Rothschild’s 1962 French translation. Della Croce, Il divino Boc-cherini, 243.

4. Yves Gérard, “Luigi Boccherini and Madame Sophie Gail,” The Consort 24 (1967):294–95. Gérard wrote this at a time when it was still difficult to gain access toSpanish archives, and Jaime Tortella’s work has since gone some way toward re-dressing the situation; but as of 2004, we still have no reliable first-hand per-sonal accounts. See Jaime Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano en la Es-paña ilustrada (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2002).

5. See note 28 below.6. “Ein trefflicher Violoncellist, der besonders durch unvergleichlichen Ton und

ausdrucksvollen Gesang auf seinem Instrument bezauberte.” Obituary, Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung, 21 August 1805. For the full text, see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

7. “Questo valentissimo professore di violoncello.” Giuseppe Carpani, Le Haydine,ovvero Lettere sulla vita e le opere del celebre maestro Giuseppe Haydn (1808; Bologna,Forni Editore, 1969), 70. For the full text, see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

8. “Le 2 Avril 1768. Le sieur Boccherini a joué du violoncelle avec aussi peu d’applau-dissements, ses sons ont paru aigres aux oreilles et ses accords peu harmonieux.”Quoted in Rothschild, Boccherini: sa vie et son oeuvre, 33. Trans. Mayor, Luigi Boc-cherini: His Life and Work, 33.

9. The disparity between Boccherini’s and Batoni’s fame and status at that time makesthe attribution unlikely. Charles Burney met and socialized with Batoni in Romeduring his Italian tour of 1770; he writes, “We went together to the celebratedpainter Il Cavalier Battoni, who is always visited by the great. . . . He has a verylarge house and lives in a great way.” Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners inFrance and Italy (1770), ed. H. Edmund Poole (London: Folio Society, 1969), 149.

10. Daniel Heartz has remarked that “Batoni, if it was Batoni, captured the dashing,extrovert qualities of the solo cellist who pushed the technical limits of his in-strument to new heights.” Daniel Heartz, “The Young Boccherini: Lucca, Vienna,and the Electoral Courts,” Journal of Musicology 13, no. 1 (March 1995): 104.

11. Liotard’s contemporary prestige rivaled that of Batoni; but here the attributionis firm. The quality of both these portraits is very high, and their having beencommissioned at all bespeaks Boccherini’s standing among his contemporaries—or (and this may be more likely) his and his father’s considerable ambition.

12. Dr. Christmann’s process of identifying Boccherini as the sitter for the portraitwas a fascinating one, involving police forensic experts who compared the facein the portrait to the bone structure of Boccherini’s exhumed skull.

13. Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini, 2nd ed. (Milan: Zanibon, 1992), 25.14. A useful compendium of Luccan musical activities can be found in Amachilde

Pellegrini, Spettacoli lucchesi nei secoli xvii–xix (Lucca: Regia Accademia Lucchese,1914).

15. See Jaime Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano, chapters 1–4.16. Gabriella Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni: Boccherini, Angiolini, la Toscana

e Vienna,” in La figura e l’opera di Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, ed. Federico Marri (Flo-rence: Olschki, 1989).


17. Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini, foreword Emilio Maggini (Lucca: Maria PaciniFazzi, 1988), 29. See also Pellegrini, Spettacoli lucchesi, 451 ff.

18. Zechmeister tells us that “a Ludwig Boccherini was already engaged from 1759to 1764 as a figurant [i.e., a member of the corps de ballet]” (“ein Ludwig Boc-cherini war schon von 1759 bis 1764 als Figurant tätig”). Quoted in Gustav Zech-meister, Die Wiener Theater nächst der Burg und nächst dem Kärntnerthor von 1747bis 1776 (Vienna: Böhlau im Komm, 1971), 331, but this can nowhere be cor-roborated. Bruce Brown has remarked that “Zechmeister was probably conflat-ing various entries in the Hofzahlamtsbücher (HZAB), housed in the VienneseHofkammerarchiv,” in which, he adds, “ [salary] info. is lumped together so thatit’s impossible to tell who [among the Boccherinis] got how much.” Brown, per-sonal communication, 22 November 2001.

19. See Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 103. Much of the following section drawsupon this concise and thoughtful reconsideration of the composer’s earlybiography.

20. “A dì 4 di Agosto 1756 Messa, e Vespro in Musica al Monastero di San Domenicoper la Festa di detto Santo . . . Luigi Boccherini, per fare un Concerto di Vio-loncello che Lo fece il giorno dopo il Primo Salmo e suonò ancora per favorirme, a Messa e Vespro.” Giacomo Puccini, “Libro delle Musiche Annue ed Avven-tizie fatte da me Giacomo Puccini M.ro di Cappla della Seren.a Repubblica diLucca . . . dal Anno 1748,” 3 vols., Archivio di Stato di Lucca. Quoted in Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” 39. Daniel Heartz has pointed out Puccini’s in-teresting use of the word “fare,” which could be translated as either “compose”or “perform,” and in this case probably meant both. Heartz, personal commu-nication, 3 December 2001.

21. There is as yet no firm evidence for this. Coli mentions a record from Novem-ber 1753, which states that Leopoldo has been granted a seven-month leave ofabsence by his employers, the Signoria of Lucca, “per essere a Roma, avendo iviaccompagnato il figlio a studio,” but this could just as easily refer to Luigi’s el-der brother Giovanni, as could a record of a similar absence three years later.The records of permission granted for Leopoldo’s 1757 journeys to Venice makeno mention of any of his children. (This despite Coli’s assertion that “Nel 1757,a Carnevale e a Pasqua, Leopoldo è a Venezia certo insieme al figlio, o agli figli,”Luigi Boccherini [1988], 29.)

22. “On 19 March 1761, in Florence, the ‘celebre suonatore di Violoncello’ earnedmuch applause for a concert of music by himself, its mode of composition be-ing described by the diarist who mentions it as being ‘of a completely new kind’(‘d’una maniera del tutto nuova’, I-Fas, Ospizio dei Melani Ms.34, p. 230).”Christian Speck and Stanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The NewGrove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online (London: Macmillan, 2000–),www.grovemusic.com.

23. Ibid.24. Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 107.25. At the première of Don Juan in 1761, Maria Ester danced in such a capacity op-

posite Francesco Turchi, and in 1763 she married Onorato Viganò. Both balle-rini had appeared at Lucca some years previously, which makes one wonder aboutthe extent to which the eldest Boccherini child’s professional troc with the dance


elite of her day may have been responsible for that first, surely risky, familial jour-ney to Vienna.

26. Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” 51–52.27. Salieri set Don Chisciotte, divertimento teatrale, 1770; Le donne letterate, commedia per

musica, 1770; La secchia rapita, dramma eroicomico, 1772, presented in Mannheimas Der geraubte Eymer, heroischkomische Oper, in 1774; and La fiera di Venezia, drammagiocoso, 1775. I rovinati, commedia per musica, was set by Gassmann in 1772, Il tam-buro notturno, dramma giocoso, by Paisiello in 1774, and an azione sacra, Il ritornodi Tobia, by Joseph Haydn in 1774–75. See Gino Arrighi, “Giovan Gastone Boc-cherini,” Lucca: Rassegna del comune 6 (1962): 13–23; and Biagi-Ravenni, “Calza-bigi e dintorni,” app. 2, 60–71.

28. “Il suo figlio che suona il Bassetto nelli Concerti nel Teatro della Corte è moltoapplaudito.” Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” 44. Heartz comments, “To winapplause at these concerts, which were performed at the Burgtheater, Luigi musthave been performing as a soloist.” Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 106.

29. The two records of 1763 are contained in an account of activities at the courttheaters from 1758 to 1763 written by Philipp Gumpenhuber. On 15 April, “Con-certs ont joué . . . le Sr Boccherini sur le violoncel, pour le 1.ere fois après sonretour.” (“Concerts . . . in which Signor Boccherini played upon the violoncello,for the first time since his return.”) and on 21 October, “Concert a joué le SrBoccherini le fils sur le violoncel.” (“Concert in which Boccherini the son playedupon the violoncello.”) Philippe [sic] Gumpenhuber, “Répertoire de tous les spec-tacles qui ont été donnés au Théâtre près de la Cour” (1761–63), Vienna, Öster-reichische Nationalbibliothek, Mus. Hs. 34580a–c. Quoted in Bruce AlanBrown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),96. Finally, in 1764, the accounts of the Viennese Hofkammerarchiv mentionpayment “dem Bocherini [sic] Ludwig Violoncellisten für gespielte Concerts, by de-nen Music Academien und 1. hierzu auf 2. Violoncelli componiertes Concert, mit Inbe-griff.” (made to “Boccherini, Ludwig, violoncellist, for concerts played at the Mu-sic Academies, and for one concerto for two violoncelli, composed for this.”)Quoted in Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 109.

30. This was his surname until 1773, when he received the patent of nobility, be-coming Ditters von Dittersdorf. See Thomas Bauman, “Ditters von Dittersdorf,Carl,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online.

31. “E chiamato per due volte a Vienna passò in seguito presso tutte le altre CortiEletorali [sic] dell’Impero, dove ha riportato tutto il compatimento nel suono delVioloncello.” MS. Register of the deliberations of the Council, 1764, Lucca,Archivio di Stato. Quoted and translated in Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 109.

32. Ibid., 115.33. The phrase comes from Bruce Alan Brown, “Maria Theresa’s Vienna,” in The

Classical Era: From the 1740s to the End of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Neal Zaslaw(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 99.

34. Performers with complimentary tickets sat in this section of the hall.35. Brown, “Maria Theresa’s Vienna,” 99, 102.36. “On exécute régulièrement deux Ballets chaque jour de Spectacle, sur les deux

Théâtres.” Gumpenhuber, “Répertoire de tous les spectacles” (1761–63). Quotedin Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 96.


37. “As a cellist at the Kärntnertortheater Boccherini played almost exclusively bal-let music. Gassmann, Gluck, and above all, quantitatively speaking, Starzer servedas composers of ballet music. The influence of ballet music on Boccherini’s workseems to me . . . to be of great importance.” (“Boccherini spielte als Violoncel-list am Kärntnertortheater fast ausschließlich Ballettmusik. Als Komponisten derBallettmusik fungierten Gassmann, Gluck, vor allem aber, quantitativ über-wiegend, Joseph Starzer. Der Einfluß der Ballettmusik auf Boccherinis kom-positorische Schaffen scheint mir eine wichtige . . . Große zu sein.”) ChristianSpeck, “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik in europäische Musikzen-tren des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 111.

38. Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 71.39. The last movement of the Symphony in D Minor, op. 12, no. 4, G. 506, of 1771,

is “an Allegro con molto [sic] described (in the first edition and in the eighteenth-century MS copy in Milan) as ‘Chaconne qui représente l’enfer et qui a été faiteà l’imitation de celle de M. Gluck dans le Festin de pierre.’” Gérard, Thematic,Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 575.

40. Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 325.41. According to Bruce Brown, a manuscript from the 1780s by Ferrère is one of

the very few sources of actual choreography for pantomime ballet; for the more“serious” and exalted reform phase, there exist only verbal descriptions. BruceBrown, personal communications, 22 November 2001 and 15 August 2003.

42. Some of these descriptions may have been prescriptive material supplied by thechoreographers to the composers, or to Durazzo (general director of produc-tions at both the Burg- and Kärntnertortheaters) for vetting before a produc-tion proceeded. Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 163.

43. “La significazione de’ gesti, seguitato il loro legamento, e la loro corrispondenza,conosciutone il valore, e l’armonia.” Gasparo Angiolini, Lettere di Gasparo Angi-olini a Monsieur Noverre sopra i balli pantomimi (Milan: G. B. Bianchi, 1773), 15.Quoted and translated in Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 285.

44. Christian Speck has examined this feature in considerable detail, and his analy-ses of Boccherini’s phrase structure acknowledge the influence of dance. Seehis Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschicht-lichen Stellung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), 39.

45. Guglielmo Barblan, “Boccheriniana,” pt. 1, Rassegna musicale 29, 2 (1959): 126.(Its pt. 2, “Il ritrovamiento dell’Oratorio ‘Il Giuseppe riconosciuto,’” appearedin vol. 29, no. 4).

46. The different census methods employed at this time make such statements per-petually arguable. The other candidate for largest-city status was Naples.

47. That the two young men first visited Genoa has been established by Coli. SeeLuigi Boccherini (1992), 39–40.

48. In response to the endless series of restrictions placed upon them by the royallysanctioned institutions, the popular theaters “displayed amazing ingenuity inforging a tortuous path around repression.” Robert Isherwood, “Popular Musi-cal Entertainment in Eighteenth-century Paris,” International Review of the Aes-thetics and Sociology of Music 9 (1978): 295.

49. See Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the EighteenthCentury, trans. Marie Evans and Gwynne Lewis (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987).


50. Daniel Heartz, “The Concert Spirituel in the Tuileries Palace,” Early Music 21,no. 2 (May 1993): 240–48.

51. William Weber, “The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-century Musical Taste,”Musical Quarterly 70, no. 2 (spring 1984): 175.

52. “Le caractère traînant de la langue, le peu de flexibilité de nos voix, et le tonlamentable qui règne perpétuellement dans notre opéra, mettent presque tousles monologues françois sur un mouvement lent; et comme la mesure ne s’y faitsentir ni dans le chant, ni dans le basse, ni dans l’accompagnement, rien n’estsi traînant, si lâche, si languissant, que ces beaux monologues que tout le mondeadmire en bâillant: ils voudroient être tristes, et ne sont qu’ennuyeux; ilsvoudroient toucher le coeur, et ne font qu’affliger les oreilles.” Jean-JacquesRousseau, “Lettre sur la musique française” (1753), in Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Hachette, 1891), 6:190.

53. “[Il porte] le violoncel à un tel degré du supériorité qu’il étonne toujours etcharme à la fois.” Avant-coureur, 1767, 716. Quoted in Constant Pierre, Histoire duConcert spirituel 1725–1790 (Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 1975), 149.

54. “M. Duport a fait entendre tous les jours sur le violoncelle de nouveaux produitset a mérité une nouvelle admiration. Cet instrument n’est plus reconnaissableentre ses mains: il parle, exprime, il rend tout au-delà de ce charme qu’on croy-ait exclusivement réservé au violon.” Mercure de France, April 1762, 189. Quotedin Pierre, Histoire du Concert spirituel, 127.

55. “Une exécution précise, brillante, étonnante; des sons pleins, moelleux, flatteurs;un jeu sur et hardi, annoncent le plus grand talent et un virtuose dans l’âge des-tiné à l’étude. Il a été entendu avec l’admiration par les connaisseurs.” Mercurede France, February 1768, 214. Quoted in Pierre, Histoire du Concert spirituel, 148.For a helpful summary of the careers of the Duport brothers, see ValerieWalden, One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and PerformancePractice, 1740–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

56. “Boccherini déjà connu par ses trios et ses quatuors, qui sont d’un grand effet,a exécuté en maître, sur le violoncelle, une sonate de sa composition.” Mercure deFrance, April 1768, 199. Quoted in Rothschild, Boccherini, sa vie et son oeuvre, 33.

57. Bouffonidor, Les Fastes de Louis xv, de ses ministres, maîtresses, généraux, et autres per-sonnages de son regne (Ville-Franche: Chez la veuve Liberté, 1783). Quoted andtranslated in Herbert Turrentine, “The Prince de Conti: A Royal Patron of Mu-sic,” Musical Quarterly 54 , no. 3 ( July 1968): 311.

58. “The music publisher Lachevardière [sic] presented [Boccherini and Manfredi]to the famous Baron de Bagge, who was as well known for his patronage of artistsas for his incredible pretensions as a violinist.” (“L’éditeur de musique, Lachevar-dière les présenta au fameux baron de Bagge, aussi célèbre par la protectionqu’il accordait aux artistes, que par ses incroyables prétentions comme vio-loniste.”) Louis Picquot, Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini, suivie ducatalogue raisonné de toutes ses oeuvres (1851), 2nd ed., enlarged by Georges deSaint-Foix as Boccherini: notes et documents (Paris: Legouix, 1930), 56.

59. “Baage (Baron de) Amateur, tient tous les Vendredis en son hôtel, pendant l’hiverun des plus beaux Concerto particulier de cette Capitalle. Il s’y fait un plaisird’admettre tous les Virtuoses étrangers & amateurs qui désirent débuter en cetteCapitale, ou s’y faire connoître par leurs talens.” Tablettes de renommée des musi-


ciens, auteurs, compositeurs, virtuoses . . . pour servir à L’Almanach-Dauphin (Paris:Cailleau, Duchesne, et al., 1785), n.p. Quoted and translated in Jean Mongré-dien, “Paris: The End of the Ancien Regime,” in The Classical Era, 71.

60. Georges Cucuel, “Le Baron de Bagge et son temps,” L’Année musicale 1 (1911): 145.61. “He had learned to play the violin, and although he played badly, believed him-

self to be of the first rank. . . . This ridiculousness [i.e., paying professionals totake lessons with him] earned him the name of ‘the Francaleu [see below] ofthe violin.’ Emperor Joseph II once said to him, ‘Baron, I have never heard any-one play the violin like you.’” (“Il avait appris à jouer le violon, et, quoiqu’il jouàt[sic] faux, il croyait être de la première force . . . Ce ridicule lui fit donner le nomde Francaleu du violon. L’empereur Joseph II lui dit un jour: Baron, je n’ai jamaisentendu personne jouer le violon comme vous.”) François-Joseph Fétis, “Bagge(Charles-Ernest, baron de),” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873;facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972).

Franc-aleu was a legal term referring to the inheritance of property. The En-cyclopédie boasts no fewer than six articles by Boucher d’Argis, discussing differ-ent kinds of franc-aleu (franc-aleu naturel, noble, par privilége. roturier, par titre,and “coûtumes de franc-aleu”). Fétis appears to be using the term as a metaphorfor laying claim to a title one has done nothing to earn. Boucher d’Argis, “Fran-caleu,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed.Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris: Briasson, 1751–65). Search-able online at the University of Chicago ARTFL Project, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/ency.

62. This similarity has also been noted by Aldo Pais, editor of the commendableZanibon edition of Boccherini’s works. “Note introduttive,” in Boccherini: con-certo n. 11 in do maggiore, G. 573 (Padua: Zanibon, 1995).

63. Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, G. 25–30.64. Burney, Music, Men, and Manners, 19–20.65. As “op. 1”; they are op. 2 in Boccherini’s personal catalog, and G. 159–64 in

Gérard.66. As “op. 2”; they are op. 1 in Boccherini’s catalog, and G. 77–82 in Gérard.67. Boccherini does not list this work in his catalog; it is G. 500 in Gérard.68. See Coli, Luigi Boccherini (1988), 41–42. The Italianness of London virtuosi is

beautifully demonstrated by Charles Burney’s 1789 roster of the city’s virtuosocellists around 1730: “The elder Cervetto . . . with Abaco, Lanzetti, Pasqualiniand Caporale, about this time [the 1730s] brought the violoncello into favour,and made us nice judges of the instrument.” Charles Burney, A General Historyof Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 2 vols. (1776–89; reprint, NewYork: Dover, 1957), vol. 2, 1005. Closer to Boccherini’s own age would have beenGiovanni Battista Cirri (1724–1808), who debuted in London in 1764.

69. During the reign of Carlos III (1759–88), this circulation became regularized.In January, the royal retinue left Madrid for nearby El Pardo, on the banks ofthe Manzanares, returning after a few weeks. At Easter they traveled to Aran-juez, which, like El Pardo, was heavily wooded; on 28 July they departed Aran-juez for the mountains and the castle of San Ildefonso de la Granja; and in Oc-tober they removed to El Escorial, returning to Madrid only by December.


70. See Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 28–29. The libretto of this work tellsus that “the final aria of the second act was composed and accompanied on solocello by Signor Luigi Boccherini of Lucca” (“el aria final del acto segundo escompuesta y acompañada con el violoncello a solo del Sr. Luis Boccherini,luqués”). Emilio Cotarelo y Morí, Orígenes y establecimiento de la ópera en Españahasta 1800 (Madrid: Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas, y Museos,1917), 199n1.

71. See Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 29–31. There exists a corroboration—like all corroborations in Boccherini’s biography, it is tantalizingly indirect—ofthis sequence of events in the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, who recounts ameeting in Valencia in September 1768 with a María Teresa Pelliccia—also asinger in the Compañía—her husband, her younger sister (whom Casanova doesnot name but who was in fact Clementina), and “a famous first violin who wasto marry her some time afterward” (“un celebre primo violon che la sposeràqualche tempo dopo”). A “primo violon” could be the leader of an orchestra,or a virtuoso violinist, or even a virtuoso cellist; the presumption here is thatCasanova was acknowledging the virtuosity, without being very particular as tothe instrument involved. See Remigio Coli, “Casanova incontra Boccherini: iprimi anni del musicista in Spagna (1768–1771),” Nuova rivista musicale italiana4 (1993): 557–62. In 1769 the city of Valencia contracted Marescalchi and Creusto establish a season of comic theater there, the two partners offering “to adornthe plays with costly dancers and even with stage decorations, giving a numberof intermedios of the best music,” and using “the operas [i.e., the productions]and the entire company that worked in the Sitios Reales.” (“‘adornar las come-dias con bailarines costosos y mejor con decoraciones del teatro, dando algunosintermedios de [la] mejor música [y sirviendo] ‘con las óperas y entera com-pañía que trabajaba en los Sitios Reales.’”) Antonio Gallego, La música en tiem-pos de Carlos III: ensayo sobre el pensamiento musical ilustrado (Madrid: Alianza Edi-torial, 1988), 74.

72. Tortella has established that the formal contract between the Infante and Boc-cherini postdates the beginning of their relationship by some months. “With re-gard to the beginning of Boccherini’s employment by the Infante, it must bedated to the spring of 1770, and not 8 November, which is no more than thedate contained in His Highness’s decree.” (“En cuanto al inicio de la relaciónde servicio de Boccherini con el infante, hay que situarlo en la primavera de1770, no el 8 de noviembre, que no es más que la fecha contenida en un de-creto de S. A.”) Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 34.

73. “It is . . . understood that one who enters into the service of a nobleman staysthere, even if unable to work, until his death. Almost as rigorous is the rule whichholds that the children of a servant may always find livelihood and shelter in thelord’s house.” (“Il est . . . entendu que [celui] qui est entré au service d’un grandy demeure, même impotent, jusqu’à sa mort. Presque aussi rigoureuse est larègle qui veut que les enfants d’un serviteur trouvent toujours vivre et couvertdans la maison seigneuriale.”) Jacques Chastenet, La Vie quotidienne en Espagneau temps de Goya (Paris: Hachette, 1966), 52. See also Tortella, Boccherini, un músicoitaliano, 46: “[Whether he was] conscious or not of the future, in entering into

notes to page 57 285

the service of Don Luis it is probable that he had begun to conceive a long staythere.” (“Consciente o no del futuro, al entrar el servicio de don Luis, es pro-bable que empezara a concebir una estancia prolongada.”)

74. Tortella considers these places and the fortunes of Luis’s court among them insome detail. Boccherini, un músico italiano, chaps. 3, 4, and 5.

75. “At the end of the eighteenth century as at the beginning of the nineteenth,there was, as we have said, more a variety of Spains than one Spain; nor did thereexist a [single] Spanish specificity.” (“À la fin du xviiie siècle comme au débutdu xixe, il y a, avons-nous dit, plutôt des Espagnes qu’une Espagne: il n’en exis-te pas moins une spécificité espagnole.”) Chastenet, La Vie quotidienne, 35.

76. “The choice of a few determined genres of music, as well as concrete mannersof singing and playing them, is, as much as are costume and vocabulary, a wayof distinguishing classes—but with one peculiarity: with rare exceptions, thereare no special complexes about that choice, rather instead pride and continualdesires for reaffirmation.” (“La elección de unos determinados géneros demúsica, así como de maneras concretas de cantarlas y tañerlas es, al igual queel traje y el vocabulario, un modo de distinción de clases, pero con una particu-laridad: no hay, salvo raras excepciones, especiales complejos ante esa elección,sino más bien orgullo y continuos deseos de reafirmación.”) Gallego, La músicaen tiempos de Carlos III, 111.

77. “Madrid was one of the most important European courts as far as the cultiva-tion of Italian opera.” (“[Madrid era] una de las más importantes cortes euro-peas en lo que al cultivo de la ópera italiana se refiere.”) Antonio Martín Moreno,Historia de la música española, vol. 4: Siglo XIII, ed. Pablo López de Osaba (Mad-rid: Alianza Editorial, 1985), 364.

78. As with all Boccherini’s vocal music, this piece is undated by the composer.Gérard has assigned it a tentative date of 1775 in his catalog, while in his linernotes to a recording of it by Christoph Coin and the Ensemble Baroque de Limo-ges (Astrée Auvidis, E8517, 1993) he goes so far as to suggest that this and G.542 (the Almería insertion aria) are one and the same piece. However, the textfor G. 542 is “Larve pallide e funeste.”

79. “Niccolò Piccinni’s La buona figliuola was given in Aranjuez in the spring of 1769with Boccherini’s overture G. 527, based on the Symphony G. 490.” ChristianSpeck and Stanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictio-nary of Music and Musicians Online.

80. “Con el gusto de oír a tantos cantores famosos las mejores arias de Italia, se ex-tendió por Madrid el nuevo gusto de su música, y su decidida afición corrió alinstante por todas las capitales de provincia. Apenas habrá un joven, unaseñorita, un oficial mozo que no supiese y cantase de memoria el Misero pargo-letto, el Padre perdona, el Son Regina, Se tutti i mali miei, etc. Corrió, pues, este gusto(ya hecho gusto de moda) por los estrados en todas las funciones particulareso caseras.” José Antonio Armona y Murga, Memorias cronológicas sobre el teatro enEspaña (1785), vol. 1 of Alaveses en la historia, ed. Emilio Palacio Fernández,Joaquín Alvárez Barrientos, and María del Carmen Sánchez García (Vitoria:Diputación, 1988), 273. Quoted in Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española,355. The first, second, and fourth of these Metastasian aria texts come from De-mofoonte, the third from Didone abbandonata.


81. Charles Emil Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1932), 79–80.

82. “The great drama of Spanish music in the eighteenth century is that of the lackof an efficient printer of music.” (“El gran drama de la música español del sigloxviii es el de la falta de una eficiente imprenta de música.”) Martín Moreno,Historia de la música española, 262.

83. “Fortunately, Carlos IV did not take into account his father’s last order, and didnot obey it. He limited himself to having those paintings placed in a restrictedhall at the Academy of Fine Arts, accessible only to those whose work requiredtheir study.” (“Afortunadamente, Carlos IV no tuvo en cuenta la última ordende su padre y no la obedeció. Se limitó a hacer colocar estos cuadros en una salareservada de la Academia de Bellas Artes, accesible sólo a quienes por su obraprecisaran de su estudio.”) José Del Corral, La vida cotidiana en el Madrid del sigloxviii (Madrid: Ediciones La Librería, 2000), 24. Del Corral points out that noteven the hyper-religious Felipe IV of the preceding century had gone so far.

84. For a useful account of this crucial alliance between monarchy and Church, seeRichard Herr, The Eighteenth-century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1958), esp. chaps. 6 and 7.

85. See ibid., chap. 3.86. Ibid., 73.87. “Yo, ciudadano de la República Literaria, ni esclavo de Aristóteles ni aliado de

sus enemigos, escucharé siempre con preferencia a toda autoridad privada loque me dicten la razón y la experiencia.” Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo, “Phy-sionomía,” in Theatro crítico universal (Madrid, J. Ibarra, 1765–73), 5:33.

88. “A Spanish translation was published in 1784 of [Condillac’s] La logique [ . . . ],not one of his most famous works but one that summarized his philosophy.Within two years a portion of his Cours d’études pour l’instruction du prince de Parmedevoted to his epistemology also appeared in translation. In the same volumewas included . . . Maupertuis’s Essai de philosophie morale, which gives a version ofthe theory . . . that morality is based on the natural desire to seek pleasure andavoid pain.” Herr, Eighteenth-century Revolution in Spain, 70–71.

89. Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 17–18.90. “Au lieu de cette bigarrure de vêtemens et de coîffures, qui, dans les autres lieux

publics de l’Europe, jette une variété sans laquelle il n’y a point de plaisir, onne voit à pied, au Prado, que des femmes uniformément vêtues, couvertes degrands voiles, noirs ou blancs, qui dérobent une partie de leurs traits; que deshommes enveloppés dans leurs vastes manteaux de couleur sombre pour la plu-part; en sorte le théâtre de la gravité castillane. Il le paraît surtout, lorsque chaquesoir, au premier coup de l’angelus, tous les promeneurs, sans exception, se dé-couvrent, s’arrêtent subitement, comme paralysés par une main invisible, in-terrompent les discussions les plus animées, les conversations les plus tendres,pour se recueillir pendant quelques minutes.” Jean-François, baron de Bourgo-ing, Tableau de l’Espagne moderne (Paris: Tourneisen fils, 1807), 1:267–68. Trans-lated as Modern State of Spain (London: J. Stockdale, 1808), 1:248.

91. “Los ay quando se cantan las arias, están durmiendo, en oyendo seguidillas selevantan del asiento.” Ramón de la Cruz, Los payos críticos (1770), in Cinco sainetesinéditos de Don Ramón de la Cruz, con otro a él atribuido, ed. Charles Emil Kany (New


York and Paris, 1924), 35. Quoted and translated in Kany, Life and Manners inMadrid, 336.

92. “Ahora bien, ¿qué efecto produce ni puede producir la algarabia de la MusicaItaliana! Sacamos acaso de ella más utilidad que el placer pasagero de oir unainfinidad de combinaciones de sonidos, que nada dicen al alma ni al corazon? . . .Yo no puedo sufrir que esta Musica Italiana haya corrompido nuestra Musicanacional, sencilla, graciosa, expresiva, propio de nuestra caracter, que movia losafectos, que intentaba, que divertia, que interesaba, que se pegaba al corazon,y se conservaba en la memoria con sola una vez que se oyese. . . . En fin, graciasa los idiotas en la Musica, que nos conservan todavia algunas gracias de la Mu-sica Española en sus boleras, tiranas &c. que á no ser por ellos, ya cantarian nues-tros cocineras arias Italianas con riesgo evidente de que nuestras ollas podridas,pidiesen macarones, fideos, &c. en vez de carnero, jamon, gallina, &c.” Diario deMadrid, 5 September 1795. Quoted and translated in Kany, Life and Manners inMadrid, 337.

93. It is puzzling that this charmingly republican dedication should have been usedwhen Boccherini was, according to the catalog of his works prepared by his grand-son Alfredo Boccherini y Calonje, already in the Infante’s exclusive service. Fora consideration of possible reasons for this, see Tortella, Boccherini, un músico ita-liano, 97–98.

94. Madrid’s noble population was rather more sizable than that of other cities: thePlanimetría de Madrid, a survey of municipal property ownership initiated in 1750,indicates that those claiming noble blood made up no less than 8 percent of thetotal population of the city. Del Corral, La vida cotidiana, 14.

95. Nicolás Solar-Quintes, “Las relaciones de Haydn con la casa de Benavente,”Anua-rio musical 2 (1947): 87; and Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española,276–79.

96. Noches hay que se hallan congregadosveinte y acaso más aficionadosque su parte ejecutan de repente.Mi manejo no es mucho ni muy pocoy entre ellos logro así lugar decente,pues, cuando no el violín, la viola toco. . . .Gozamos de un depósito abundantede la moderna música alemana,que en la parte sinfónica es constanteque arrebató la palma a la italiana.Si alguno al contrapunto se dedicay cualquier obra suya manifiesta,la aficionada orquestase la prueba, examina y calificay con benignidad los circunstantesoyen mis sinfonías concertantes.

From a letter written by Tomás de Iriarte, quoted in Gallego, La música en tiem-pos de Carlos III, 108; Gallego remarks, “This refers to that new, Enlightened bour-


geosie which is fond of music and not only listens to it, but performs it” (“Serefiere a esa nueva burguesía ilustrada que es aficionada a la música y no sólola oye, la interpreta”).

97. Gallego summarizes Valls’s position in the Mapa armónico-práctico as follows: “Heshows himself to be especially proud of the Spanish practice of his day, whichhe values even above the Italian, only preoccupied with flattering the senses,and the French, mere flatterer of the intellect: the Spanish, bringing togetherboth qualities, was more scientific and more solid.” (“Se muestra especialmenteorgulloso de la práctica española de su tiempo, a la que reputa incluso superiora la italiana, sólo preocupada de halagar los sentidos, y a la francesca, mera ha-lagadora del intelecto: la española, reuniendo ambas cualidades, era más cien-tífica y más sólida.”) Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III, 31.

98. There has been much speculation among biographers about Boccherini’s sup-posed visit to Prussia in the late 1780s (during which period the general lack ofinformation about the composer becomes a veritable blackout). There is a cer-tain logic to such speculation, since Boccherini had been engaged by FriedrichWilhelm II as a composer of chamber music, but there is, in the end, no hard ev-idence to support it, and Tortella has ammassed enough circumstantial evidenceto pretty well demolish it. See Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 251–62.

chapter 3. gestures and tableaux

Epigraph 1: “Si leurs gestes & leurs physionomies sont sans cesse d’accord avec leurâme, l’expression qui en résultera sera celle du sentiment, & vivifiera votre ouvrage. . . .On ne réussit dans les compositions théâtrales qu’autant que le coeur est agité; quel’âme est vivement émue; que l’imagination est embrasée; que les passions tonnent,& que le génie éclaire.” Jean-Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets(1760; facsimile reprint, New York: Broude Brothers, 1967), 58–59. Translated asThe Works of Monsieur Noverre (1782–83; facsimile reprint, New York: AMS Press,1978), 1:55.

Epigraph 2: “Indem ein Musickus nicht anders rühren kann, er sey dann selbstgerührt; so muss er nothwendig sich selbst in alle Affekten setzen können welche erbey seinen Zuhörern erregen will; er giebt ihnen seine Empfindungen zu verstehenund bewegt sie solchergestallt am besten zur Mit-Empfindung.” Carl Philipp EmanuelBach, “Vom Vortrage,” in Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen (1753; fac-simile reprint, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994), 1:122, trans. William J. Mitchell, Essay onthe True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York: Norton, 1949), 122. (This ismy reworking of Mitchell’s translation.)1. “Boccherini n’est connu maintenant qu’en France. L’Allemagne dédaigne sa sim-

plicité naïve et l’opinion qu’en ont les artistes de ce pays se résume dans un motprononcé par Spohr à Paris, dans une réunion musicale, où l’on venait d’exé-cuter quelques-uns des quintetti du maître italien. On demandait au célèbre vio-loniste et compositeur allemand ce qu’il en pensait: je pense, répondit-il, que celane mérite pas le nom de musique!” François-Joseph Fétis, “Boccherini (Louis),”in Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873; facsimile reprint, Brussels:Culture et Civilisation, 1972).


2. The stakes here have only partly to do with Boccherini, and quite a lot to do withnationalism. Fétis’s estimation sets a noticeably defensive tone. Fétis, a Walloon(that is, a French-speaking native of the Low Countries), offers Boccherini as anexample of values that are in danger of being lost to the musical world, that dan-ger being personified by Spohr, a German. In Boccherini’s first full-length biog-raphy, written in 1851, Louis Picquot, a Frenchman, takes flight from the Spohranecdote for several outraged pages, railing against the decadence of a modernmusic dominated by ignorance and “effects, always effects, nothing but effects”;he admonishes Beethoven for having strayed too far in his last quartets from “lapoétique musicale” and passionately damns Spohr (without going so far as to namehim—Spohr was still alive), while commending Boccherini in the following terms:“If music is no longer made to please and to touch us, if imagination and senti-ment are to be banished from it, if melody is an intruder and grace an orphan; ifthe divine breath which animates all this is itself but a digression, a superfluity, oh!then you are right, the music of Boccherini is not music, for it has nothing in com-mon with your laborious and indigestible pedantries!” (“Si la musique n’est plusfaite pour plaire et pour toucher, si l’imagination et le sentiment doivent en êtrebannis, si la mélodie est une intruse, la grâce une fille de peu; si le souffle divinqui anime tout cela est lui-même un hors-d’oeuvre, une superfluité, oh! alors vousavez raison, la musique de Boccherini n’est pas de la musique, car elle n’a rien decommun avec vos pénibles et indigestes élucubrations!”) Louis Picquot, Notice surla vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini, suivie du catalogue raisonné de toutes ses oeuvres(1851), 2nd ed., enlarged by Georges de Saint-Foix as Boccherini: notes et documents(Paris: Legouix, 1930), 102. Earlier writers’ delight in Boccherini’s tender, inward,and songful qualities has here taken on a rather polemical tone. Some of Picquot’sfervor carries over into the work of both Georges de Saint-Foix and Germaine deRothschild, writing well into this century. As a position of implicit resistance tocanonicity, it could well be said to inform the work of most of the Boccherini schol-ars working in their wake, including myself.

3. “Charles prend son archet: il tenait toujours la partie de premier violon; or, danscette partie figurait un trait d’une extrême longueur et d’une complète mono-tonie. Ut si, ut si: ces deux notes rapidement coulées, se répétaient au point decouvrir la moitié d’une page. Le roi les attaque bravement, continue, poursuit cediscours; mais il est tellement absorbé par l’attention donnée à sa partie, qu’iln’entend pas les dessins, les accords ingénieux, introduits au-dessus comme au-dessous de cette pédale intérieure. Il s’impatiente, sa mauvaise humeur vacrescendo, sa voix se joint à son archet pour articuler ridiculement le trait mono-tone; abandonnant enfin le travail que le fatiguait, il se lève et dit avec accent dela colère:

—C’est misérable, un écolier en ferait autant: ut si, ut si!—Sire, que Votre Majesté veuille bien prêter l’oreille aux jeux que le second

violon et la viole exécutent, au pizzicato que le violoncelle fait entendre en mêmetemps que je retiens le premier violon sur un trait uniforme. Ce trait perd sa mo-notonie dès que les autres instruments sont entrés et se mêlent à la conversation.

—Ut si, ut si, et cela pendant d’une demi-heure! Ut si, ut si, plaisante conver-sation! Musique d’écolier, et de mauvais écolier.” Henri Castil-Blaze, “AlexandreBoucher, célèbre virtuose,” Revue de Paris, May 1845, 10. Quoted in Picquot, No-


tice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini, 2nd ed., as Boccherini: notes et docu-ments, 64–65.

4. Gérard has suggested that the piece in question was the Quintet in A Major, op.28, no. 2, G. 308 (1779), on the grounds that “the second violin and viola partsof the Larghetto consist of the note A repeated without variation throughout themovement.” Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Worksof Luigi Boccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969),346. In Castil-Blaze’s story, however, the monotonous figure consists of two notesrather than one and is played by the first violin. The most likely candidate I havebeen able to find is the second movement of the Quintet in A Major, op. 13, no.5, G. 281 (1772), where the first violin plays eleven bars of F # and E, though thesepitches are of course a tone apart rather than the half-step implied by “do si.”The question arises as to whether the piece was in fact a quartet rather than aquintet, since the Boccherini of the story mentions only four instruments. Thereis a passage in the last movement of the Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171,where the first violin repeats A–Bb eight times in rapid succession (bars 40–48).But this is scarcely “half a page,” and the cello is not pizzicato.

5. “Dem Hörer wird sozusagen eine akustische Lupe gereicht, um den Übergangvon der einen zur anderen Stufe verfolgen zu können.” Christian Speck, Boc-cherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen Stel-lung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), 39.

6. “Le monde où nous vivons est la lieu de la scène; le fond de son drame est vrai;ses personnages ont toute la réalité possible; ses caractères sont pris du milieude la société; ses incidents sont dans les moeurs de toutes les nations policées;les passions qu’il peint sont telles que je les éprouve en moi.” Denis Diderot,“Éloge de Richardson” (1761), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris:Bordas, 1988), 30.

7. Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), chap.12, “Trouble in Paradise.”

8. “De una estructura práctica aparentemente convencional, surgen, sin embargo,evanescencias, fulgores y raptos de gran lirismo, de las más delicadas entonaciones,sorprendiendo la instantaneidad del modelo. Encontramos un ambiente de evo-caciones espectrales, como el resíduo palpitante de una realidad onírica. Y en to-dos ellos hay mucha distinción, una tensión impregnada de melancolía.” José LuisMorales y Marín, Luis Paret: vida y obra (Zaragoza: Aneto Publicaciones, 1997), 97.

9. I am not the first to have noticed this. “Boccherini seems to have been very muchconcerned with gradations of piano dynamics.” Ellen Iris Amsterdam, “TheString Quintets of Luigi Boccherini” (Ph.D. diss., University of California atBerkeley, 1968), 59.

10. “Cette disposition compagne de la faiblesse des organes, suite de la mobilité dudiaphragme, de la vivacité de l’imagination, de la délicatesse des nerfs, qui in-cline à compatir, à frissonner, à admirer, à craindre, à se troubler, à pleurer, às’évanouir.” Denis Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (c. 1770), in Oeuvres esthé-tiques, 343.

11. “Un’attenzione così puntuale per tutto quello che in teatro si può comunicaretramite immagini, movimenti e gesti, non meraviglia affatto in un librettista cheera anche un ballerino operante a Vienna negli anni del trionfo del ballo pan-


tomimo.” Gabriella Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni: Boccherini, Angiolini,la Toscana e Vienna,” in La figura e l’opera di Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, ed. FedericoMarri (Florence: Olschki, 1989), 50.

12. As a direct analogy to the requirement of visual legibility, theorists from Batteuxto Rousseau insisted on a clear line as the sine qua non of musical art, indeedof art in general. Rousseau went so far as to proffer a somewhat hare-brained(but very influential) idea of the “Unity of Melody,” in an attempt to create sonicparity with the three Aristotelian dramatic unities (time, place, action): “Theunity of melody requires that we never hear two melodies at a time, but not thatthe melody should never pass from one part to another. . . . There is even har-mony ingenious, and well managed, wherein the melody, without being in anypart, results only from the effect of the whole.” (“L’Unité de Mélodie exige bienqu’on n’entende jamais deux Mélodies à la fois, mais non pas que la Mélodiene passe jamais d’une Partie à l’autre: au contraire. . . . Il y a même des Har-monies savantes & bien ménagées, où la mélodie, sans être dans aucune Partie,résulte seulement de l’effet du tout.”) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Unité de mélodie,”in Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: veuve Duchesne, 1768), trans. William Waring,“Unity of Melody,” in A Dictionary of Music (London: J. French, 1779).

13. He calls it “rhythmischen Ausprägung,” rhythmic impression or stamp. See Speck,Boccherinis Streichquartette, 176.

14. “Brownian movement: the irregular oscillatory movement observed in micro-scopic particles or ‘molecules’ of all kinds suspended in a limpid fluid.” The OxfordEnglish Dictionary Online, s.v. “Brownian movement,” http://dictionary.oed.com.

15. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), 109.

16. “Les esquisses ont communément un feu que le tableau n’a pas. . . . La plumedu poète, le crayon du dessinateur habile, ont l’air de courir et de se jouer. Lapensée rapide caractérise d’un trait; or, plus l’expression des arts est vague, plusl’imagination est à l’aise.” Denis Diderot, “La Mère bien-aimée (esquisse),” Sa-lon of 1765, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 542–43. Later in the same essay, however, onefinds a cautionary apostrophe to Hubert Robert, also famous for his sketches:“A word on Robert. If this artist continues to sketch he will lose the ability tofinish; his head and his hand will become libertines.” (“Un mot sur Robert. Sicet artiste continue à esquisser, il perdra l’habitude de finir; sa tête et sa maindeviendront libertines.”) Ibid., 652.


18. “Il faut entendre dans la musique vocale ce qu’elle exprime. Je fais dire à unesymphonie bien faite presque ce qu’il me plaît; et comme je sais mieux que per-sonne la manière de m’affecter, par l’expérience que j’ai de mon propre coeur,il est rare que l’expression que je donne aux sons, analogue à ma situationactuelle, sérieuse, tendre, ou gaie, ne me touche plus qu’une autre qui seraitmoins à mon choix. Il en est à peu près de même de l’esquisse et du tableau. Jevois dans le tableau une chose prononcée: combien dans l’esquisse y suppose-je de choses qui y sont à peine annoncées!” Diderot, “La Mère bien-aimée (es-quisse),” 544.


19. There are many examples; among my favorites are the slow movement of theConcerto in C Major, G. 477, where the first entry of the solo cello is virtuallyindistinguishable from the violin parts that surround it (bars 14–20); and muchof the first movement of the Concerto in G Major, G. 480, in which the cellosolo and the first violin play in lockstep thirds (the cello above the violin).

20. Alpers and Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, 82.21. Ibid., 92–93.22. A 1709 Stradivari cello was identified as Boccherini’s by the Spanish virtuoso cel-

list Gaspar Cassadó, who died in 1966. It has since been used as such by the Ger-man cellist Julius Berger for his recording of Boccherini’s cello concerti (Boc-cherini: concerti per violoncello, Qualiton Imports, 1988 [?], 6055–57 EBS). Whilethere is certainly no reason to assume that Boccherini did not own this instru-ment at some point in his life, the documentation is vague; Cassadó’s account,as reprinted in Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, facing il-lustration 12, seems to be based upon inference. The instrument has some al-terations, “probably carried out in Paris towards the end of the 18th century,”which leads Cassadó to speculate that “Boccherini was obliged by his straitenedcircumstances in the last years of his life to sell his Stradivarius. Unfortunatelythe name of the purchaser is unknown and we have no trace of the ’cello againuntil the middle of the 19th century, when it reappears in the important collec-tion of old instruments belonging to the Infante Don Sebastian de Bourbon [sic].”

More recently, the composer’s descendant José Antonio Boccherini Sánchezhas discovered earlier versions of Boccherini’s will in which he names his in-struments: an “Estayner” (Stainer), and a “violonchelo chico”—a small, possi-bly five-stringed instrument (personal communication, June 2003). See also JoséAntonio Boccherini Sánchez, “Los testamentos de Boccherini,” Revista de musi-cología 22, no. 2 (1999): 93.

It is worth mentioning that in the eighteenth century Stradivari instrumentsdid not have the enormous prestige they have now; the top-flight instrument ofchoice for a virtuoso was in fact more likely to have been a Stainer than a Strad.

23. Daniel Heartz, “The Theâtre Italien from Watteau to Fragonard,” in Music in theClassic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook, ed. Alan W. Atlas (New York: Pen-dragon, 1985), 72. I draw all the correspondences that follow from Heartz’s en-tertaining and thought-provoking essay.

24. Lucien Rimels, “Quadro vivente,” in Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, ed. Silvio D’Amico,9 vols. (Rome: Le Maschere, 1961).

25. “Exécutez la Sonate 5e de l’Oeuvre V de Boccherini, vous y sentirez tous les mou-vemens d’une femme qui demande & qui emploie tour à tour la douceur & lereproche. On a presque envie d’y mettre des paroles; cent fois exécutée, elle offretoujours le même sens & la même image.” Claude-Philibert Coquéau, “Entretienssur l’état actuel de l’Opéra de Paris,” in Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes, ed.François Lesure (Geneva: Minkoff, 1984), 2:476–77. This is the Violin Sonata inG Minor, G. 29, dedicated to Madame Brillon de Jouy in 1768 (see chapter 2);the six sonatas op. 5, G. 25–30, had been published in Paris by Vénier in 1769.A fine recording of op. 5 may be heard on Jacques Ogg and Emilio Moreno, Boc-cherini: Six Sonatas for Harpsichord and Violin, Glossa, GCD 920306, 2001.


26. “Nous ne voulons pas tout savoir à la fois. Les femmes ne l’ignorent pas; elles ac-cordent et refusent; elles exposent et dérobent. Nous aimons que la plaisir dure;il y faut donc quelque progrès.” Diderot, “La Mère bien-aimée (esquisse),” 615.

27. “Harmonie pleine et auguste qui invite au recueillement, qui jette l’imagina-tion dans une douce rêverie, ou qui la fixe sur des tableaux enchanteurs; c’estla grâce de l’Albane, c’est la naïve sensibilité de Gessner.” Pierre-Marie-Françoisde Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, and Charles-Nicolas Bau-diot, “Sur les Tableaux,”Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement (c. 1804;facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 3. The passage in which this de-scription occurs is remarkable throughout for its poetic fervor; Baillot wrote veryevocatively. See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini for the entirepassage.

28. See Catherine R. Puglisi, Francesco Albani (New Haven: Yale University Press,1999), 62–63.

29. Ibid., 67.30. “Stille Nacht! wie lieblich überfällst du mich hier! hier am bemosten Stein. Ich

sah noch den Phöbus, wie er hinter den Stuffen jener Berge sich verlohr; erlachte das letzte Mal zürück durch den leichten Nebel, der, wie ein göldner Flor,entfernte Weinberge, Haine und Fluren glänzend umschlich; die ganze Naturfeyerte im sanften Wiederschein des Purpurs, der auf streifichten Wolkenflammte, seinen Abzug; die Vögel sangen ihm das letzte Lied, und suchtengepaart die sichern Nester; der Hirt, vom längern Schatten begleitet, blies, nachseiner Hütte gehend, sein Abendlied, als ich hier sanft entschlief.

“Hast du, Philomele! durch dein zärtliches Lied; hat ein lauschender Walt-gott mich geweckt, oder eine Nymphe, die schüchtern durchs Gebüsche rauscht?

“O! wie schön ist alles in der sänfteren Schönheit! Wie still schlummert dieGegend um mich! Welche Entzücken! Welch sanfter Taumel fließt durch meinwallendes Herz!” Salomon Gessner, “Die Nacht,” in Schriften (Vienna: JohannThomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1765), 2:130. See also http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini. Diderot was reminded of Gessner by what is nowGreuze’s most famous painting, the Jeune Fille qui pleure son oiseau mort: “The prettyelegy! The charming poem! The lovely idyll which Gessner might have written!It is the sketch of a piece by that poet.” (“La jolie élégie! Le charmant poème!La belle idylle que Gessner en ferait! C’est la vignette d’un morceau de ce poète.”)Denis Diderot, “Greuze,” Salon of 1765, 533.

31. “L’oeil est partout arrêté, récréé, satisfait. . . . Ah! Mon ami, que la nature est belledans ce petit canton! Arrêtons-nous-y; la chaleur du jour commence à se fairesentir, couchons-nous le long de ces animaux. Tandis que nous admirerons l’ou-vrage du Créateur, la conversation de ce pâtre et de cette paysanne nous amusera;nos oreilles ne dédaigneront pas les sons rustiques de ce bouvier, qui charme lesilence de cette solitude et trompe les ennuis de sa condition en jouant de la flûte.Reposons-nous; vous serez à côté de moi, je serai à vos pieds tranquille et en sûreté,comme ce chien, compagnon assidu de la vie de son maître et garde fidèle deson troupeau; et lorsque le poids du jour sera tombé nous continuerons notreroute, et dans un temps plus éloigné, nous nous rappellerons encore cet endroitenchanté et l’heure délicieuse que nous y avons passée.” Denis Diderot, “Louther-bourg: paysage avec figures et animaux,” Salon of 1763, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 610.


32. Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini, foreword by Emilio Maggini (Lucca: Maria PaciniFazzi, 1988) 49, mentions a letter of recommendation from an English musicalamateur, written in Nice on 5 October 1767, which suggests that by that timeBoccherini and Manfredi were on their way to Paris; Coli asserts that they hadcertainly arrived in Paris by the end of that month. Thus the window of oppor-tunity for Boccherini to visit the Salon would certainly have been small.

33. “L’impression successive du discours, qui frappe à coups redoublés, vous donnebien une autre émotion que la présence de l’objet même, où d’un coup d’oeilvous avez tout vu.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (1754–63;reprint, Paris: L’École, 1987), chap. 1, “De divers moyens de communiquer nospensées,” 76.

34. “Qu’on n’est affecté, dans les premiers instants de la vision, que d’une multi-tude de sensations confuses qui ne se débrouillent qu’avec le temps et par laréflexion habituelle sur ce qui se passe en nous.” Denis Diderot, “Lettre sur lesaveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui voient” (1751), in Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, re-vues sur les éditions originales, ed. Jules Assézat (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 1:320.

35. “O Richardson! on prend, malgré qu’on en ait, un rôle dans tes ouvrages, on semêle à la conversation, on approuve, on blâme, on admire, on s’irrite, ons’indigne.” Diderot, “Éloge de Richardson,” 30.

36. “Le voilà qui s’empare des cahiers, qui se retire dans un coin et qui lit. Je l’exa-minais: d’abord je vois couler des pleurs, il s’interrompt, il sanglote; tout à coupil se lève, il marche sans savoir où il va, il pousse des cris comme un homme dé-solé, et il adresse les reproches les plus amers à toute la famille des Harlove.”Ibid., 44.

37. “Pareceme á mí, que los que de la consideracion de las facciones quieren inferirel conocimiento de las almas, invierten el orden de la naturaleza, porque fianá los ojos un oficio, que toca principalmente á los oídos. Hizo la naturaleza losojos para registrar los cuerpos; los oídos para examinar las almas. A quien quisiereconocer el interior del otro, lo que mas importa no es verle, sino oírle.” BenitoJerónimo de Feijóo, “Physionomía,” in Theatro crítico universal (Madrid: J. Ibarra,1765–73), 5:33.

38. The classic analysis of this phenomenon is in Michael Fried, Absorption and The-atricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1988).

39. Stefano Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, Absorption, and Sen-timent in the 1780s,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1996): 97.

40. Arnould (1740–1802), who premièred the role of Iphigénie in Gluck’s Parisianoperas on that theme, was memorialized by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdonin white marble, a sash across her front emblazoned with a star and moon, eyescast heavenward, and hair swept up: the very figure of womanly nobility—withone breast bared.

41. This was the norm for chamber music published by the Parisian houses withwhom Boccherini chiefly dealt (Vénier, La Chevardière, Boyer, Pleyel). In ad-dition, we can infer from some of Boccherini’s correspondence with Pleyel thathe was being urged to keep his music accessible to an amateur public—and wasirritated by the request; see, for example, the first of the two letters cited at thebeginning of chapter 2.


42. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1748), edited andabridged by John Angus Burrell (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 372–73.

43. “Cette bouche entr’ouverte, ces yeux nageants, cette attitude renversée, ce cougonflé, ce mélange voluptueux de peine et de plaisir, font baisser les yeux etrougir toutes les honnêtes femmes dans cet endroit.” Diderot, “La Mère bien-aimée (esquisse),” 544–45.

44. “Il y a au front, et du front sur les joues, et des joues vers la gorge, des passagesde tons incroyables; cela vous apprend à voir la nature, et vous la rappelle. Ilfaut voir les détails de ce cou gonflé, et n’en pas parler. Cela est tout à fait beau,vrai et savant.” Ibid.

45. “Die Zuhörer müssen, gleichsam in Todesstille versunken, von den Spielendenentfernt sitzen, um sie nicht der Zerstreuung und Störung auszusetzen; dieseaber, wenn sie ihre Instrumente gestimmt haben, müssen sich des, jedemempfindlichen Ohre, so unange-nehmen Präludirens enthalten, um die schöneund große Wirkung nicht zu schwächen, welche Stille und Überraschung so wun-derbar hervorzubringen wissen.” Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmackin der Musik (Carlsruhe, 1809). Fétis tells us that Schaul was “a musician at theroyal court in Wurtemberg, who died on 23 August 1822, [who] was at the sametime a professor of the Italian language” (“musicien du cour du roi de Wurtem-berg, mort à Stuttgard le 23 août 1822, était en même temps professeur de lalangue italienne”). Fétis, “Schaul ( Jean-Baptiste),” in Biographie universelle. TheBriefe was Schaul’s only published work on music.

46. Thomas Twining, letter of 5–6 July 1783, in The Letters of Charles Burney, ed. Al-varo Ribeiro (1751–84; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 376–400.

47. “Den Anfang machte ein Quintett von Bocherini, eine Perrücke, aber mit einemganz liebenswürdigen, alten Herrn darunter; dann forderten die Leute eineSonata von Bach.” Felix Mendelssohn, describing a soirée at Baillot’s in a letterto his sister Rebecka, 20 December 1831, in Reisebriefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis1832, ed. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Hermann Mendels-sohn, 1862), 292. This translation is by Jonathan Greenberg.

48. Susan Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 116.

49. Denis Diderot, “Lettre sur les sourds et muets” (1751), in Oeuvres complètes,1:354–56.

50. “Un jeune homme venoit d’exécuter pour la première fois le trait suivant, l’undes moins connus et des moins cités de ses Quintetti. [music example] L’archetlui tombe des mains, et il s’écrie: Voilà le premier accent de la douleur d’Ari-adne, au moment où elle fut délaissée dans l’île de Naxos! Fontenelle aurait dit:Sonate, que me veux-tu? Haydn et Boccherini répondent: Nous voulons une âmeet tu n’as que de l’esprit: fais des epigrammes et des calculs.” Anonymous review(signed “P.”) of Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique, by André-Modeste Grétry, Jour-nal des savans, 30 ventôse an VI (1797), 171. See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

51. The treble clef should be read down an octave. The reviewer’s memory, perhapsinfluenced by melodic contour and timbral association, has played an interest-ing trick on him. I have reproduced the line as the reviewer has given it, withthe tempo as “Poco adagio sostenuto” and in common time. Boccherini’s orig-


inal, however, is marked “Allegro moderato,” and while also in common time,moves in note values half as large, i.e., in quarters and eighths—rather a jauntyfeel for the tragic scenario proposed.

Haydn’s 1789 Arianna (Hob. XXVIb:2) makes an interesting contrast withthis Ariadne. The “first accents of her grief” in the aria “Ah che morir vorrei”are in the major mode and do not feature Boccherini’s Seufzer; but there is amarked similarity in the wide range of each melody (about an octave and a half),and in the exploration of that range through wide-arching arpeggios.

52. Giuseppe Maria Cambini, Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (c.1803; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 19–22. For a translation of theentire passage upon which I draw here, see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

53. Arbace: E pur t’ingannai—

Mandane: All’ora,Perfido, m’ingannaiche fedel mi sembrasti, e ch’io t’amai.

A: Dunque adesso—

M: T’abborro!

A: E sei—

M: La tua nemica!

A: E vuoi—

M: La morte tua!

A: Quel primo affetto—

M: Tutto è cangiato in sdegno.

A: E non mi credi?

M: E non ti credo, indegno!Pietro Metastasio, Artaserse (1730), in Opere,

ed. Franco Mollia (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), Act 1, Scene 14

Artaserse was the most popular of all Metastasio’s libretti; it was set to music overninety times, the last in the 1840s.

54. Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina,” 102 and 104.55. Ibid., 103.56. “Persuis avait monté à Vienne son charmant ballet de Nina. On sait que les au-

teurs de ces sortes d’ouvrages mettaient volontiers à contribution les pluscélèbres compositeurs et puisaient dans leurs oeuvres les morceaux qu’ilsjugeaient les mieux appropriés à la situation qu’ils avaient à rendre. Or, la scèneoù Nina, apprenant la mort de son amant, s’abandonne au sombre désespoir,précurseur de sa folie, cette scène était exprimée par l’orchestre avec une pathé-tique, une énergie, un désordre qui peignaient admirablement l’état de l’in-fortunée Nina. Un transport unanime accueillit cette belle conception; etcomme les connaisseurs les plus distingués en félicitaient à l’envi de l’auteur duballet, Le morceau qui excite si justement votre enthousiasme, leur répondit Persuis,est pourtant l’oeuvre d’un musicien que vous n’estimez guère; il est tiré tout entier d’un


quintetto de Boccherini. En effet, c’était la finale du quintetto en ut mineur del’oeuvre 17 ci-dessus qui avait procuré ce triomphe à l’auteur de Nina.” Picquot,Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini, 2nd ed., as Boccherini: notes et doc-uments, 119–20.

Fétis remarks that “if Persuis lacked dramatic effect in his operas, he was morefortunate in his ballets, for he has written charming music for some of them”(“si Persuis manqua d’effet dramatique dans ses opéras, il fut plus heureux dansses ballets, car il a fait de la musique charmante pour quelques-uns”). Fétis, “Per-suis (Louis-Luc),” in Biographie universelle.

57. Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina,” 97.58. Bryson, Word and Image, 46.59. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 11.60. “Un Compositeur de Musique devroit savoir la Danse, on du moins connoître

les temps & la possibilité des mouvements qui sont propres à chaque genre, àchaque caractere & à chaque passion.” Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets,163. Translated as Works of Monsieur Noverre, 1:151.

61. “L’oeil du peuple se conforme à l’oeil du grand artiste, et . . . l’exagération laissepour lui la resemblance entière. . . . Il agrandit, il exagère, il corrige les formes. . . .C’est la figure qu’il a peinte qui restera dans la mémoire des hommes à venir.”Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 507–8.

62. “Ces Baladins ne vont que par sauts & par bonds, & le plus souvent hors de ca-dence; il[s] la sacrifient même volontiers à leurs sauts périlleux. . . . Il ne peutexciter dans les Spectateurs qu’un étonnement mêlé de crainte, en voyant leurssemblables exposés à se tuer à chaque instant.” Gasparo Angiolini, Dissertationsur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme au ballet pantomimetragique de Sémiramis (1765; facsimile reprint, Milan: Civica Raccolta delle StampeAchille Bertarelli, 1956), n.p.

63. “Quant au Danseurs, ils se ne permettent pas les tours de force employés par lesGrotesques. . . . Ces Danseurs comiques, s’ils sont habiles, peuvent faire admirerla force jointe à la précision et la légèreté, & même faire rire quelquefois entournant artistement en grimaces les gestes de contraction qui leur sont indis-pensables pour leurs efforts.” Ibid.

64. “Autre chose est une attitude, autre chose une action. Les attitudes sont fausseset petites, les actions toutes belles et vraies.” Denis Diderot, “Essais sur la pein-ture” (1765), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 671.

65. “Elle exige de ceux qui l’exécutent, de la justesse, de la légèreté, l’équilibre, lemoelleux, les grâces. C’est ici, que les bras (qu’on me passe cette expression)commencent à entrer en danse; & on les demande souples & gracieux. Dans lesdeux premiers genres ils seroient comptés par rien.” Angiolini, Dissertation.

66. “Il faudroit donc si nous voulons rapprocher notre Art de la vérité, donner moinsd’attention aux jambes, & plus de soin aux bras.” Noverre, Lettres sur la danse etsur les ballets, 261. Translated as Works of Monsieur Noverre, 2:6.

67. “Mais la danse pantomime qui ose s’élever jusqu’à représenter les grands événe-ments tragiques est sans contredit la plus sublime. Tout ce que la belle danse exigedes Dupré, des Vestris, celle-ci le demande à ses Danseurs, & ce n’est pas tout:l’art du geste porté au suprême degré doit accompagner le majestueux, l’élé-gant, le délicat de la belle danse, & cela ne suffit pas encore: il faut, comme nous


avons dit, que le Danseur Pantomime puisse exprimer toutes les passions, &toutes les mouvemens de l’âme. Il faut qu’il soit fortement affecté de tout cequ’il veut représenter, qu’il éprouve enfin & qu’il fasse sentir aux Spectateursces frémissemens intérieurs, qui sont le langage avec quel l’horreur, la pitié, laterreur parlent au-dedans de nous, & nous secouent au point de pâlir, desoupirer, de tressaillir, & de verser des larmes.” Angiolini, Dissertation.

68. These extracts are from Diderot’s Salons, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 521, 539, and556 respectively.

une légère et molle inflexion dans toute sa figure et dans tous ses membres qui laremplit de grâce et de vérité . . .

vérité de chair, et un moelleux infini . . .c’est de la chair; c’est du sang sous cette peau; ce sont les demi-teintes les plus fines,

les transparences les plus vraies . . .

69. Rousseau’s works contain famous examples of backlash to this, perhaps most no-tably in the “Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur son article ‘Genève’” (1758), in Oeuvrescomplètes, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Dena Goodman has pointed out thatthe strenuousness of Rousseau’s protest may be read as indirect evidence of thepervasiveness of the trend. See her The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of theFrench Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 2.

70. “Ce n’est pas dans l’école qu’on apprend la conspiration générale des mouve-ments; conspiration qui se sent, qui se voit, qui s’étend et serpente de la têteaux pieds. Qu’une femme laisse tomber sa tête en devant, tous ses membresobéissent à ce poids; qu’elle la relève et la tienne droite, même obéissance dureste de la machine.” Diderot, “Essais sur la peinture,” 670.

71. “D’actions, de positions et de figures fausses, apprêtées, ridicules et froides.” Ibid.72. Gasparo Angiolini, Lettere di Gasparo Angiolini a Monsieur Noverre sopra i balli pan-

tomimi (Milan: G. B. Bianchi, 1773), 15–19. Quoted and translated in Bruce AlanBrown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),285.

73. “Per isvegliar terrore, o pur coraggio in vano adopransi i Flauti, i Violini, i Vio-loncelli. È lo strumento, e non la nota che produce l’effetto: La Melodia, la Modu-lazzione, ed i variati moti devon concorrervi, ma senza la giusta, e variata ap-plicazione degl’Instrumenti mai non si speri un particolar effetto.” GasparoAngiolini, pamphlet to accompany the pantomime ballet Citera assediata (1762).Quoted and translated in Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 327.

74. “Les Peintres & nous, nous ne pouvons que les faire reconnoître; & tout le mondesait l’indifférence des Spectateurs pour des Personnages inconnus.” Angiolini,Dissertation.

75. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 102.76. “Un Maître de Ballets sensé doit faire, dans cette circonstance, ce que font la plu-

part des Poëtes . . . & s’abandonnent entièrement à l’intelligence desComédiens. . . . Ils assistent, direz-vous, aux répétitions; j’en conviens, mais ils don-nent moins de préceptes que de conseils. Cette Scène me paroit rendue foiblement;vous ne mettez pas assez de débit dans telle autre, celle-ci n’est pas jouée avec assez de feu,& le Tableau qui résulte de telle situation me laisse quelque chose à desirer: Voilà le lan-gage du Poëte. Le Maître de Ballets, à son exemple, doit faire recommencer une


Scène en action, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin ceux qui l’exécutent, aient rencontré cet in-stant de naturel inné chez tous les hommes; instant précieux qui se montre tou-jours avec autant de force que de vérité, lorsqu’il est produit par le sentiment.”Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets 13. Translated as Works of Monsieur Noverre,1:16–17. The bracketed sentence does not appear in the published translation.

77. “Je veux . . . que la régularité se trouve dans l’irrégularité même.” Noverre, Let-tres sur la danse, 14; Works of Monsieur Noverre, 13.

78. “Los lineamentos del cuerpo, ú del rostro, no significan naturalmente las dis-posiciones del ánimo. . . . Esta representacion natural no puede consistir en otracosa, que en varios, sutiles, y delicados movimientos, que las varias disposicionesdel alma resultan al cuerpo, especialmente al rostro, y sobre todos á los ojos. . . .Estos movimientos sutiles . . . llamamos gesto.” Feijóo, “Nuevo arte physiogno-mico,” in Theatro crítico universal, 5:67.

79. For instance: “Probably other elements, disseminated through dances such asthe folía, the chaconne, the sarabande, and others of the seventeenth century,crystallize in the fandango.” (“Probablemente, otros elementes diseminados pordanzas como la folía, el canario, la chacona, la zarabanda y otras del siglo xvii,cristalizan en el fandango.”) Faustino Nuñez, “Fandango,” in Diccionario de lamúsica española e hispanoamericana, general editor Emilio Casares Rodicio, withJosé López-Calo and Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta ([Madrid?]: Sociedad Ge-neral de Autores y Editores, 1999–).

80. “The bolero has its own, peculiar costume, which has been, is, and will foreverbe that of the maja.”(“El bolero tiene su traje peculiar y propio, que ha sido, es,y será en todos tiempos el de maja.”) Rodríguez Calderón, Bolerología (Philadel-phia: Zachariah Poulsen, 1807), 44. Quoted in Javier Suárez-Pajares, “Bolero,”in Diccionario de la música española.

81. “En el bien-parado se reúne casi toda la ciencia del arte bolerológico. Sí, señor:el mejor bailarín que no sepa pararse a su tiempo, con gracia, despejo y com-pás, aunque ejecute primores, no merece el más pequeño aplauso.” Ibid.

82. “No todos tienen aquellos bienparados graciosos, en donde, quedándose inmo-viles, el cuerpo descubre con tranquilidad y descanso hasta las más pequeñasgesticulaciones del rostro. La serenidad en los pasos y mudanzas dificiles es laprimera cosa que se debe observar en este baile.” Antonio Cairon, Compendio delas principales reglas del baile (Madrid, 1820). Quoted in Suárez-Pajares, “Bolero.”

83. “Le fandango ne se danse qu’entre deux personnes, qui jamais ne se touchent,même de la main; mais en les voyant s’agacer, s’éloigner tour à tour et se rap-procher; en voyant comment la danseuse, au moment où sa langueur annonceune prochaine défaite, se ranime tout-à-coup pour échapper à son vainqueur;comment celui-ci la poursuit, est poursuivi à son tour; comment les différentesémotions qu’ils éprouvent sont exprimées par leurs regards, leur gestes, leursattitudes, on ne peut s’empêcher d’observer, en rougissant, que ces scènes sontaux véritables combats de Cythère, ce que sont nos évolutions militaires entemps de paix, au véritable déploiement de l’art de la guerre.” Jean-François,baron de Bourgoing, Tableau de l’Espagne moderne (Paris: Tourneisen fils, 1807),2:360–61. Translated as Modern State of Spain (London: J. Stockdale, 1808),2:300–301.


84. See Peter Manuel, “From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: Dual Tonicity in Spanishand Latin American Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 2(summer 2002): 311.

85. “Dans l’Opus 30: Quintettini, vous en trouverez un qui porte le titre: Musiquenocturne des rues de Madrid. Ce morceau est totalement inutile, et même ridiculehors d’Espagne. Les auditeurs n’arriveraient jamais à en comprendre la signifi-cation, pas plus que les exécutants ne seraient capables de le jouer comme il sedoit.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario(Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 261–62. Whatever reservations Boccherini might havehad, he ended up transcribing the piece twice, once for guitar quintet (G. 453)and once for piano quintet (G. 418), which bespeaks a pragmatic acceptance ofits level of general popularity.

86. This was Christine Somis, one of the preeminent tragic sopranos in Paris at thetime. See Georges Cucuel, La Pouplinière et la musique de chambre au xviiie siècle(Paris: Fischbacher, 1913), 110. I thank Daniel Heartz for tracking down the per-forming identity of Madame Van Loo for me.

87. The quotation is from Didone abbandonata, Act 1, Scene 17. I thank Bruce Brownfor identifying this for me.

88. “J’avais en une journée cent physionomies diverses, selon la chose dont j’étaisaffecté. J’étais serein, triste, rêveur, tendre, violent, passionné, enthousiaste. . . .Les impressions de mon âme se succédant très rapidement et se peignant toutessur mon visage, l’oeil du peintre ne me retrouvant pas le même d’un instant àl’autre, sa tâche devienne beaucoup plus difficile qu’il ne la croyait.” Diderot,“Van Loo,” Salon of 1767, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 510–11.

89. See Bryson, Word and Image, chap. 6, “Diderot and the Word.”90. “Autre chose est l’état de notre âme; autre chose, le compte que nous en ren-

dons, soit à nous-même, soit aux autres; autre chose, la sensation totale et instan-tanée de cet état; autre chose, l’attention successive et détaillée que noussommes forcés d’y donner pour l’analyser, la manifester et nous faire entendre.Notre âme est un tableau mouvant, d’après lequel nous peignons sans cesse: nousemployons bien du temps à le rendre avec fidélité: mais il existe en entier, ettout à la fois: l’esprit ne va pas à pas comptés comme l’expression. Le pinceaun’exécute qu’à la longue ce que l’oeil du peintre embrasse tout d’un coup.”Diderot, “Lettre sur les sourds et muets,” 369.

chapter 4. virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

Epigraph: “Ne prononcez-vous pas nettement que la sensibilité vraie et la sensibilitéjouée sont deux choses fort différentes?” Denis Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (c. 1770), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 357.

1. Metastasio’s Didone addresses Enea in Act 2, Scene 4, with the following words:

Ah! non lasciarmi, no,Bell’idol mio:Di chi mi fiderò,Se tu m’inganni?


Di vita manchereiNel dirti addio;Ché viver non potreiFra tanti affanni.

Pietro Metastasio, Didone abbandonata (1724), in Opere,ed. Franco Mollia (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), Act 2, Scene 4

We know that Boccherini was familiar with this text because he set it, in the scenaG. 544, which Gérard tells us was written “between 1786 and 1797.” Yves Gérard,Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, trans.Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 634.

Boccherini’s actual setting is in quite a different vein than the one I have pro-posed. He includes a sizable chunk of the preceding recitative, in which thequeen gives vent to irony, in order to maximize affectual contrast with the aria,which is set in an eminently sensible style: a melting Andante non tanto in Eb ma-jor and 0 meter, the melody’s anti-virtuosic “simplicity” marked by numerousappoggiature, gaps within words, and a great many falling or sighing gestures.See Boccherini: quindici arie accademiche per soprano e orchestra, ed. Aldo Pais, fasc. 1(Padua: Zanibon, 1988).

2. Vado . . . ma dove? Oh Dio!Resto . . . Ma poi . . . che fo?Dunque morir dovròSenza trovar pietà?E v’è tanta viltà nel petto mio?

Metastasio, Didone abbandonata,Act 3, Scena ultima

3. No, no, si mora; e l’infedele EneaAbbia nel mio destinoUn augurio funesto al suo cammino.

4. I should admit that it took me, learning to play this sonata, much longer thanthat. I initially “recognized” this passage by dint of a kinesthetic rather than sonicreminiscence: it occurred to me that I had played passages organized aroundthis same Eb -major bar-fifth in both the other movements, and that this was oddin a C-major sonata. Only when I played the passages side by side did the the-matic resemblances dawn on me.

5. For this passage, as for the piece as a whole, my source was the Duke of Hamil-ton MS rather than the Milan Conservatorio MS. In the latter, these directionsappear not in the solo part but in the basso, which for the duration of this episodemoves in triplet arpeggiations rather than in the duple motion of the Hamiltonversion. The result is quite different; it can be heard in several commercialrecordings of this piece, notably that by Richard Lester and David Watkin onHyperion CDA 66719.

Gérard lists the Milan Conservatorio MS, which contains nineteen sonatasand is the only source for some of them, as “Autograph (?),” and in his com-ments upon it explains his doubts as to its autograph status—although not asto its authorship—wisely refraining from any attempt to resolve them. SeeGérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 3. I have used this am-


biguous source situation as my license to play and discuss the version of the sonatathat I find the more interesting.

6. Christian Speck and Stanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The NewGrove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online (London: Macmillan, 2000–), www.grovemusic.com. See also Timothy P. Noonan, “Structural Anomalies in the Sym-phonies of Boccherini” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison,1996); and Miriam Tchernowitz-Neustadtl, “Aspects of the Cycle and Tonal Re-lationships in Luigi Boccherini’s String Trios,” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 157–69.

7. My recording of the sonata G. 569 may be heard on the Web site for this book,http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

8. Friedrich Lippmann, “Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhythmus,”Analecta musicologica 12 (1973): 363; 14 (1974): 324; and 15 (1975): 298.

The text of the aria G. 557 is from Metastasio’s Artaserse, Act 2, Scene 6. Man-dane, angry and confused, addresses her sister-in-law Semira, who has just causedher to doubt the nature of her passions. Mandane professes to hate Arbace; butSemira has reminded her that she once loved him.

Se d’un amor tirannoCredei di trionfar,Lasciami nell’inganno,Lasciami lusingarChe più non amo.

Se l’odio è il mio dovereBarbara, e tu lo sai,Perché avvedermi faiChe invan lo bramo?

If I believed I had triumphedOver a tyrannical love,Leave me deceived,Let me flatter myselfThat I love no more.

If hatred is my duty,Cruel one, and you know it,Why do you make me realizeThat I long for it in vain?

Pietro Metastasio, Artaserse (1730), in Opere di Pietro Metastasio (Florence: Per Gius. Formigli, 1832), 4:47

9. Gérard gives the order of movements in this sonata as Allegro, Largo, Minuetto,based on the possibly autograph Milan Conservatorio MS. However, many of thelater eighteenth-century editions of this sonata reverse the order of the first twomovements; it is interesting to note how this reversal changes one’s perceptionof the meaning and the importance of the self-quotation.


11. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “idiom,” http://dictionary.oed.com. See


also Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1726; facsimile reprint, published as Dic-cionario de autoridades, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963), s.v. “idioma”: “It is a Greekword that means ‘property’.” (“Es voz griega, que significa propriedad.”)

12. “La lengua vulgár, própria y particular de qualquier Nación.” Diccionario de lalengua castellana, s.v. “idioma.”

13. “Une façon de parler adaptée au génie propre d’une langue particulière.” M.de Beauzée, “Idiotisme,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, desarts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris:Briasson, 1751–65). Searchable online at the University of Chicago ARTFL Pro-ject, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc.

14. “En la Gramatica es la inflexión de qualquier verbo, construcción particular dealguna phrase o particula que tiene alguna irregularidad, y no es segun la reglageneral de la Nación; sino que está solo en uso en alguna Provincia ò parte deella.” Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “idiotismo.”

15. “Proprio, privativo, singulár. Viene del Griego Idiotetos, que significa propriedad,ò la naturaleza propria de cada cosa.” Ibid., s.v. “idioteo/a.” In 1726, however,this was evidently an uncommon form: “Es voz de poco uso” (ibid.).

16. “La universalided de los ignorantes, ò idiotas.” Ibid., s.v. “idiotismo.”17. The relation of the idea of genius to that of virtue is particularly evident in the

Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “genio”: “The natural inclination, taste, dis-position and interior affinity for something, such as science, art, or manufac-ture.” (“La naturál inclinacion, gusto, disposicion y proporcion interior para al-guna cosa: como de ciencia, arte, o manifactúra.”) The literary example givenfor this meaning is from Garcilaso: “Genius is a specific virtue or particular prop-erty of everyone who lives.” (“Genio es una virtúd especifica ò propriedad par-ticular de cada uno que vive.”)

In the Encyclopédie the two main entries for “Génie” are by the chevalier deJaucourt (1704–79), one of the encyclopedia’s principal editors. The second isa famous paean to sensibilité: “The man of genius is one in whom the expandedsoul, struck by the sensations of all beings, interested in all that there is in na-ture, does not receive one idea that does not awaken a sentiment; everythinganimates it, and everything is conserved there.” (“L’homme de génie est celuidont l’âme plus étendue, frappée par les sensations de tous les êtres, intéresséeà tout ce qui est dans la nature, ne reçoit pas une idée qu’elle n’éveille un sen-timent, tout l’anime & tout s’y conserve.”) “Génie (2),” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictio-nnaire raisonné.

18. “Eloignée des usages ordinaires, ou des lois générales du langage . . . incom-municable à tout autre idiome.” M. de Beauzée, “Idiotisme,” in ibid.

19. Thus Stanley Sadie: “His style became increasingly personal and even idiosyn-cratic over the 44 years in which he composed, to such an extent that in his latemusic he sometimes seems to be repeating himself (even if more subtly).” Speckand Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music andMusicians Online.

20. Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 671.21. Christian Speck, editorial preface to Sonata in A minor by Luigi Boccherini (Mainz:

B. Schotts Söhne, 1991).22. Boccherini to Pleyel, 27 December 1798: “Since 1760, the year in which I be-


gan to write, it has been my practice to keep a catalog of all my works, notingthe year in which I wrote them, and the person to whom I sold them.” (“Depuis1760, année où je commençai à écrire, j’ai eu l’habitude de tenir un cataloguede toutes mes oeuvres, avec l’année où je les écrivis, à qui je les vendis.”) SeeDella Croce, Epistolario, 267.

This catalog was transcribed and published by the composer’s grandson, Al-fredo Boccherini y Calonje; the loss of the original catalog during the Spanishcivil war, along with a number of Boccherini’s manuscripts and personal effects,is one of the most heartbreaking of the many accidents to befall the composer’slegacy. More recently, a segment of it, transcribed by the composer into a letterto Pleyel, has resurfaced in Madrid. See Alfredo Boccherini y Calonje, Luis Boc-cherini: apuntes biográficos y catálogo de las obras de este célebre maestro publicados porsu biznieto (Madrid: Imprenta y Litografía de A. Rodero, 1879); and Isabel LozanoMartínez, “Un manoscrito autógrafo de Boccherini en la Biblioteca Nacional(Madrid),” Revista de musicología 25, no. 1 (2002): 225.

23. Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 683.24. Chappell White, From Vivaldi to Viotti: A History of the Early Classical Violin Con-

certo (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 22.25. For a definitive treatment of the philosophical roots and ramifications of this

metamorphosis, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essayin the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

26. Martha Feldman, “Magic Mirrors and the ‘Seria’ Stage: Thoughts toward a Rit-ual View,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 3 (fall 1995): 470.

27. “Relación de los individuos del Cuarto que fue del Sermo. Sr. Infante Don Luis”(1770), quoted in Antonio Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, ed.Pablo López de Osaba (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985), 241–42.

28. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 6, chap. 3, 1140a, 5. These translations arefrom Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. William David Ross, 2nded. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

29. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 5, 1140b, 20.30. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 1, 1103a, 30 (my emphasis).31. The earlier date according to Jacques Derrida, in his treatment of the Essai in

Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1976), 194.

32. “Simple sounds emerge naturally from the throat, the mouth is naturally moreor less open; but the modifications of the tongue and palate, that create articu-lation, require attention and practice; one never does them unintentionally; allchildren must learn them, and many do not come by them easily.” (“Les simplessons sortent naturellement du gosier, la bouche est naturellement plus ou moinsouverte; mais les modifications de la langue et du palais, qui font articuler, exi-gent de l’attention, de l’exercice; on ne les fait point sans vouloir de faire; tousles enfants ont besoin de les apprendre, et plusieurs n’y parviennent pas aisé-ment.”) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (1754–63; reprint,Paris: L’École, 1987), chap. 4, “Des caractères distinctifs de la première langue,et des changements qu’elle dut éprouver,” 83.

33. To be fair to Rousseau, we should also distinguish it from his much more prac-tical descriptions of the difference between speech and song in the Dictionnaire


of 1768. See the articles “Opéra” and “Chant,” in Dictionnaire de musique (Paris:veuve Duchesne, 1768), trans. William Waring, “Opera,” “Song,” in A Dictionaryof Music (London: J. French, 1779).

34. I am much obliged to my colleague Mitchell Morris for clarifying these distinc-tions to me.

35. Throughout its history, whatever the country of its use, the word virtuoso remainsin Italian. As soon as it is translated—virtuous, vertueux, meisterlich—it shifts hope-lessly, and tellingly, in meaning. In Sebastien de Brossard’s Dictionnaire de musiqueof 1703 we read that

in Italian, virtu means not only that disposition of the soul which rendersus agreeable to God and makes us act according to the principles of soundreason: but also that superiority of genius, skill, or competence which makesus excel in either the theory or the practice of the fine arts beyond thosewho have applied themselves as much as we have. It is from this that theItalians have formed the adjectives virtuoso, or virtudioso, in the femininevirtuosa, which are often used as nouns for naming or praising those to whomProvidence has chosen to give this excellence or superiority. Thus accord-ing to them an excellent painter, a skillful architect, etc., is a virtuoso; butmore commonly and more particularly they give this fine epithet to excel-lent musicians.

virtu veut dire en Italien non seulement cette habitude de l’âme qui nous rendagréables à Dieu & nous fait agir selon les règles de la droite raison: mais aussi cetteSupériorité de génie, d’adresse ou d’habileté, qui nous fait exceller soit dans la Théorie,soit dans la Pratique des beaux Arts au-dessus de ceux qui s’y appliquent aussi bienque nous. C’est de-là que les Italiens ont formé les Adjectifs virtuoso, ou virtu-dioso, au feminin virtuosa, dont même ils sont souvent des Substantifs pour nom-mer, ou pour loüer ceux à qui la Providence a bien voulu donner cette excellence oucette supériorité. Ainsi selon eux un excellent Peintre, un habile Architecte, &c. estun Virtuoso; mais ils donnent plus communément & plus spécialement cette belleÉpithète aux excellens Musiciens.

Sebastien de Brossard, “Virtuoso,” in Dictionnaire de musique: contenant uneexplication des termes grecs, latins, italiens, 2nd ed. (Paris: C. Ballard, 1705)

In early eighteenth-century Spanish, although the word is spelled identically tothe Italian, its meaning did not carry any particular artistic or musical empha-sis: “One who operates according to it. It is also applied to the actions them-selves.” (“Él que exercita en la virtud, ù obra segun ella. Aplicase tambien à lasmismas acciones.”) Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “virtuoso.” As Frenchand Italian musical cultures established themselves ever more firmly in Spainduring the course of the century, the word presumably acquired the connota-tions described by Brossard.

36. “Le goût fuit toujours les difficultés, il ne se trouve jamais avec elles. . . . Je re-garde les difficultés multipliées de la Musique & de la Danse comme un jargonqui leur est absolument étranger; leurs voix doivent être touchantes, c’est tou-jours au coeur qu’elles doivent parler; le langage qui leur est propre est celui


du sentiment; il séduit généralement, parce qu’il est entendu généralement detoutes les Nations.

“Tel Violon est admirable, me dirai-t-on; cela se peut, mais il ne me fait au-cun plaisir, il ne me flatte point, & il ne me cause aucune sensation. . . .

“Un grand Violon d’Italie arrive-t-il à Paris, tout le monde le court & personnene l’entend; cependant on crie au miracle.

“Les oreilles n’ont point été flattées de son jeu, ses sons n’ont point touché,mais les yeux se sont amusés; il a démanché avec adresse, ses doigts ont parcourule manche avec légèreté; que dis-je? Il a été jusqu’au chevalet; il a accompa-gné ces difficultés de plusieurs contortions qui étoient autant d’invitations, &qui vouloient dire, Messieurs, regardez-moi, mais ne m’écoutez pas: ce passage est diabo-lique; il ne flattera pas votre oreille, quoiqu’il fasse grand bruit, mais il y a vingt ans queje l’étudie.

“L’applaudissement part; les bras & les doigts méritent des éloges, & on ac-corde à l’homme machine & sans tête, ce que l’on refusera constamment dedonner à un Violon François.” Jean-Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur lesballets (1760; facsimile reprint, New York: Broude Brothers, 1967), 270–74.Translated in Works of Monsieur Noverre, 12–16.

I have not been able to identify the violinist whom Noverre excoriates here.In Paris, the years immediately prior to the publication of Noverre’s Lettres in1760 were not rich in such visitors. Constant Pierre remarks of the period1755–62 that “foreign visitors suspended their visits, leaving the field open toFrench artists”(“les violonistes étrangers suspendirent leurs visites, laissant lechamp libre aux artistes français”). Histoire du Concert spirituel 1725–1790 (Paris:Société Française de Musicologie, 1975), 125. The most likely candidate forNoverre’s disdain would seem to be Domenico Ferrari, who (along with Pug-nani and a number of other Italians) had a triumphant season at the ConcertSpirituel in 1754. Ferrari was particularly esteemed for his use of showy “tricks”like harmonics and extremes of register. In May of that year the Mercure de Parisreferred to him as an “homme célèbre” and praised him rather fulsomely for“infinite graces, [with] a knowledge, a wisdom, and a taste above all praise” (“desgrâces infinies, un savoir, une sagesse, un goût au-dessus de tout éloge.” Quotedin Pierre, Histoire du Concert spirituel, 183.

37. It is only fair to Noverre to acknowledge that more generally he participated inhis generation’s enthusiasm for the mechanical. His letters 11 and 12 contain agood deal of precise and voluble information about the correct deployment ofjoints, tendons, muscles, weight, balance; he remarks, “Dancers must . . . followthe same regime as Athletes” (“Les Danseurs devroient . . . suivre le même régimeque les Athlètes”), and refers repeatedly and pragmatically to the body as a ma-chine. Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, 325.

38. “L’exécution . . . dépend surtout de deux choses: premièrement, d’une habitudeparfaite de la touche & du doigter de son Instrument; en second lieu, d’unegrande habitude de lire la Musique & de phraser en la regardant: car tant qu’onne voit que des Notes isolées, on hésite toujours à les prononcer: on n’acquiertla grande facilité de l’Exécution, qu’en les unissant par le sens commun qu’ellesdoivent former, & en mettant la chose à la place du signe.” Rousseau, “Exécu-tion,” in Dictionnaire de musique, trans. William Waring, “Execution,” in A Dictio-

notes to page 138 307

nary of Music (London: J. French, 1779). I have modified Waring’s translationslightly, replacing the word “from” with “on” in two places.

39. Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 48.40. For a sensitive exploration of Mozart’s relation to period concepts of mecha-

nism, see Annette Richards, “Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sub-lime,” Music and Letters 80, no. 3 (August 1999): 366–89.

41. “Le mercredi des Cendres . . . a lieu, à Madrid, une procession burlesque . . . Dèsle matin des bandes de gars grotesquement masqués et des filles aguichantesenvahissent les rues en gambadissant et folâtrant. Toute la journée ces troupesbruyantes et insolentes sont maîtresses de la ville. Le soir, un cortège se forme.En tête, trois personnages traditionnels: l’oncle Chispas, roulant sous sonmasque des yeux furibonds; la fille Chusca, endiablée et provocante; le Juanillo,embossé dans sa cape et à allure de bourreau des cours. Derrière, un gigantesquemannequin de paille, vêtu de haut en bas, le pelele, auquel est accrochée une pe-tite sardine. Derrière encore, gambadant, vociférant et prodiguant des lazzi, tousles compagnons d’artisans, courtauds de boutiques, portefaix, porteurs d’eau,valets en rupture de service, marchands de fruits et de légumes, harengères, com-mises et femmes légères de la capitale. Ils et elles sont affublés, qui de masquesgrimaçants, qui de cagoules de pénitents, qui encore de san benitos pointus. A lalueur des torches, dans un bruit de pétards, au sourd tam-tam de zambombas . . .tous ces pantins désarticulés, au-dessus desquels flottent des cerfs-volants, dé-valent en vociférant vers la porte de Tolède, la franchissent et, au-delà, en-fouissent solennellement la sardine en terre tandis que, sur une bûcher, le pelelebrûle haut.” Jacques Chastenet, La Vie quotidienne en Espagne au temps de Goya(Paris: Hachette, 1966), 137.

42. It is quite possible that Goya and Boccherini knew each other, since both wereemployed by Don Luis de Borbón during 1770–72, Boccherini as a permanentmember of the Infante’s household, Goya as a seasonal employee. Further evi-dence that the two men were acquainted is presented in Jaime Tortella, LuigiBoccherini: un músico italiano en la España ilustrada (Madrid: Sociedad españolade musicología, 2002), esp. chap. 6.

43. This appears in Richard Aldrich’s foreword to the 1902 Schirmer edition of Du-port’s Études. At a colloquium at UC Berkeley in 1995, Lewis Lockwood remarkedthat the anecdote, however delicious, remains “untraceable.”

44. This is wonderfully audible on a 1988 recording by Anner Bylsma and the Smith-sonian Chamber Players, Luigi Boccherini Quintets op. 11, 4–6, Deutsche HarmoniaMundi RD 77159.

45. “Die Dekoration von Quaglio war völlig im chinesischen Geschmack und trans-parent. Lackierer, Bildhauer und Vergolder hatten sie reichlich mit alledem, wasihre Kunst vermochte, ausgestattet. Aber was der dekoration den größten Glanzgab, waren prismatische gläserne Stäbe, die in böhmischen Glashütten geschlis-sen worden waren und, genau ineinander gepaßt, in die leergelassenen Fleckegesetzt wurden, die, sonst buntfarbig mit Öl getränkt werden. Es ist unbeschreib-lich, welchen prächtigen, höchst überraschenden Anblick diese von unzähligenLichtern erleuchteten Prismen, die schon im bloßen Licht- und Sonnenscheineine große Wirkung tun, auf das Auge hervorbrachten. Man stelle sich denSpiegelglanz der azurfarblackierten Felder, den Schimmer des vergoldeten Laub-


werks und endlich die regenbogenartigen Farben, die so viele hundert Prismatamannigfaltig, gleich Brillanten vom ersten Wasser, spielten, vor, und die stärk-ste Einbildungskraft wird hinter diesem Zauber zurückbleiben müssen. Und nundie göttliche Musik von einem Gluck!” Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Lebensbe-schreibung (1799), ed. Eugen Schmitz (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1940),81, trans. Arthur Duke Coleridge, The Autobiography of Karl von Dittersdorf (Lon-don: Bentley and Son, 1896), 70–71. Schmitz cites Anton Schmid’s biographyof Gluck to assert that these decorations were in fact not by Quaglio at all, butby Angelo Pompeati. Ditters’s description is of the première performance at thesummer residence of the Prince von Hildburghausen; he subsequently tells usthat the sets never quite achieved the same effect when they were transferred tothe Burgtheater.

46. A useful and concise account of the history of stage mechanisms and automataappears in Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting(Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses,1985), chap. 1.

47. For a fascinating exploration of automata in mid-century Paris, see Paul Metz-ner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during theAge of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

48. Antonio Martín Moreno tells us that it is not clear whether these particular au-tomata were ever constructed; but others were built for the Alba household inthe following generation. Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, 233–34.

49. Roach, Player’s Passion, 66.50. I explore the relationship of early modern animal training to Enlightenment

self-constitution in “Man and Horse in Harmony,” in Data Made Flesh: EmbodyingInformation, ed. Philip Thurtle (London: Routledge, 2003), and also in Kingdomsof the Horse: The Culture of the Horse in the Early Modern World, ed. Karen Raber (NewYork: Palgrave, 2004).

51. Giovanni Andrea Gallini, A Treatise on the Art of Dancing (London: Dodsley, Becket,and Nichol, 1762), 166. Quoted in Susan Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Bal-let’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 111.

52. “Osservi pure il Maestro se taluni sono deboli ne’ ginocchi , e nel collo de’ piedi,o in una di dette due parti. Usi per ciò un rimedio, e facci a quel tale fare unlungo esercizio al giorno di caminar per la stanza su la sola punta delli piedi,tenendo il ginocchio, ed il collo de’ piedi distesi senza piegatura alcuna, e cosìesercitandolo per qualche ora al giorno, verrà fortificato nelle parti deboli.” Gen-naro Magri, Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo (Naples: V. Orsino, 1779), 2:11.Quoted and translated in Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 111.

53. “Étudions l’intention de la nature dans la construction du corps humain, & noustrouverons la position & la contenance qu’elle prescrit clairement de donnerau soldat. . . . La tête doit être droite, dégagée hors des épaules, & assise per-pendiculairement au milieu d’elles. Elle doit n’être tournée ni à droite ni àgauche; parce que vu la correspondance qu’il y a entre les vertebres du col &l’omoplate auxquelles elles sont attachées, aucune d’elles ne peut agir circu-lairement sans entraîner légérement du même côté qu’elle agit, une desbranches de l’épaule, & qu’alors le corps n’étant plus placé quarrément, le sol-dat ne peut plus marcher droit devant lui, ni servir de point d’alignement.”


François-Apolline, comte de Guibert, Essai général de tactique: précédé d’un discourssur l’état actuel de la politique (London: Les Libraires Associés, 1773), 22–23.Quoted in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 154–55.

54. Guibert’s account, a sort of ergonomics avant la lettre, bears an eerie resemblanceto some recent discussions sponsored by the Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration about the precise relation of workplace conditions to musculo-skeletal injuries. See, for instance, the detailed testimonies and discussions pre-sented at an OSHA Forum at the University of Chicago, 20 July 2001, 618 ff.,www.osha.gov/ergonomics-standard/index.html.

55. Francisco [?] Brunetti, “Método de violoncello” (c. 1800), autograph [?] man-uscript, signature 1/7041 (10), Biblioteca del Conservatorio Superior de Música,Madrid. I am indebted to Emilio Moreno for bringing this treatise to my atten-tion and very kindly providing me with a copy.

Brunetti was born around 1770, the son of Boccherini’s contemporary Gae-tano Brunetti (1744–98), who was violinist and composer of chamber music tothe Spanish court. The elder Brunetti, a composer of no mean gifts, held thisextremely desirable professional position throughout his life—a position forwhich Boccherini would otherwise have been eligible. He has often been pre-sented by Boccherini biographers as a rival, and not a well-disposed one.

In 1785, Francisco Brunetti competed with Boccherini for a position in theCapilla Real, and won. In attempting to determine whether there is any truthin the oft-repeated stories of Gaetano Brunetti’s animus toward Boccherini,Tortella points out that “neither would it be strange to think that, once again,Gaetano had done the impossible in order to protect his son, faced with a can-didate of Boccherini’s importance” (“tampoco sería extraño pensar que, denuevo, Gaetano hiciera los imposibles por proteger a su hijo frente a un can-didato de la envergadura de Boccherini”). Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músicoitaliano, 44 and 246. Also see Germán Labrador, “Gaetano Brunetti: un músicoen la corte de Carlos IV,” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2003).

56. Despite the evidence of systematic askesis in works like Brunetti’s, or the im-portant 1756 treatise by the violinist José de Herrando (1720/21–63), and de-spite the utilitarian bent of the Borbón monarchy, the institutionalization of mu-sical efficiency in a conservatory system comparable to the Paris Conservatoiredid not evolve in Spain until much later. In 1810 the violinist Melchor Ronziproposed formation of a Spanish conservatory system “como los de París o Na-poles,” and mentioned the indigence of “los profesores de música de Madrid.” Butthis did not occur until 1836. Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, 302.

57. Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1989), 7.

58. Fétis gives these dates for Raoul, and informs us that he was an amateur cellistemployed as a legal counsel (avocat) to the king. He was evidently also a musicalantiquarian: “Around 1810, [he] conceived the project of reclaiming the bassviol from the oblivion into which it had fallen.” (“Vers 1810, Raoul conçut leprojet de tirer la basse de viole de l’oubli où elle était tombée.”) François-JosephFétis, “Raoul ( Jean-Marie),” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873;facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972).


59. “Le pouce n’est qu’un point d’appui et de direction pour toute la longueur dumanche.” Jean-Marie Raoul, Méthode de violoncelle (1797; facsimile reprint,Geneva: Minkoff, 1980), 5.

60. “Si l’on disoit que il y a autant de différentes expressions qu’il y a de joueurs, jerépondrois que cela est dans la nature, chacun devant avoir la sienne, mais pourle doigté qui est tout-à-fait mécanique, il me semble qu’il doit être un, c’est-à-dire, le même pour tous.” Jean-Louis Duport, “Avant-propos,” in Essai sur le doigtédu violoncelle et sur la conduite de l’archet, dedié aux professeurs de violoncelle (Paris:Imbault, 1820), 1.

61. “En conservant autant que possible l’archet sur la même place de la corde, il ap-prochera néanmoins et même malgré le joueur, un peu de chevalet quand onaugmentera le son, et s’en éloignera de même, quand on le diminuera.” Duport,Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle, 158 (the passage recurs on 163 for emphasis).

62. “Lorsqu’on a eu soin de placer le Violoncelle, la main et le bras gauche, l’ar-chet, la main et le bras droit de la manière prescrite par les articles précédens,il faut tenir la tête et le corps droits, et éviter dans son attitude tout ce qui pour-rait avoir l’air ou de la négligence ou de l’affectation. On ne saurait trop recom-mander aux élèves de chercher à prendre une attitude noble et aisée; il éxisteun rapport secret entre le sens de l’ouie et celui de la vue, si celui-ci est blessé,si l’on apperçoit dans la pose de l’exécutant quelque chose de contraint ou denegligé, qui semble contredire tout ce qu’il peut faire avec expression et avecgrace, il fait souffrir ceux qui l’écoutent en rendant d’autant plus choquant lecontraste qu’il présente à la fois entre son jeu et son attitude.

“Disons plus, il est extrêmement rare et presqu’impossible de voir en mêmetems un virtuose charmer les oreilles et blesser les yeux.” Pierre-Marie-Françoisde Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel and Charles-Nicolas Bau-diot, Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement (c. 1804; facsimile reprint,Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 8–9.

63. Sara Gross, “Scarlatti and the Spanish Body: On National Character in the Key-board Works of Domenico Scarlatti” (paper, winner of 2004 Ingolf Dahl Awardat joint meeting of the Northern California and Pacific Southwest chapters ofthe American Musicological Society, 2 May 2004, University of San Francisco).

64. I am grateful to Charles Sherman, whose vivid performance of some of thesesonatas in Los Angeles in April 2001 first presented the idea of a mechanistictopos to me.

65. “On est soi de nature; on est un autre d’imitation; le coeur qu’on se supposen’est pas le coeur qu’on a.” Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 358.

66. “The Paradoxe was best known through the early version that was privately dis-seminated in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire in 1770 and then popularlyreprinted in 1812–13.” Roach, Player’s Passion, 157. It was not printed in thelonger version upon which I have drawn until 1830.

67. “J’insiste donc, et je dis: C’est l’extrême sensibilité qui fait les acteurs médiocres;c’est la sensibilité médiocre qui fait la multitude des mauvais acteurs; et c’est lemanque absolu de sensibilité qui prépare les acteurs sublimes.” Diderot, “Para-doxe sur le comédien,” 313.

68. “Naturalistic,” telegraphic acting styles arose in part because of the sheer size ofthe newer playhouses; the 1791 rebuilt version of London’s Drury Lane seated


3,611 souls. See Roy Porter, “Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society,” in Plea-sure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Porter (Basing-stoke: Macmillan, 1996), 29.

69. “L’homme sensible est trop abandonné à la merci de son diaphragme pour êtreun grand roi[,] un grand politique, un grand magistrat, un homme juste, unprofond observateur, et conséquemment un sublime imitateur de la nature.”Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 362.

70. “Est-ce que son âme a pu éprouver toutes ces sensations et exécuter, de concertavec son visage, cette espèce de gamme? Je n’en crois rien, ni vous non plus.”Ibid., 328.

71. “Ce serait un singulier abus des mots que d’appeler sensibilité cette facilité derendre toutes natures, mêmes les natures féroces.” Ibid., 343.

72. “Ils ne sont propres à les jouer tous que parce qu’ils n’en ont point.” Ibid., 350.73. “Suspendus entre la nature et leur ébauche.” Ibid., 309. Compare Jaucourt, writ-

ing about genius in the Encyclopédie:

Sang-froid, that quality that is so necessary to those who govern, withoutwhich one would rarely make a just application of means to circumstances,without which one would be subject to imprudence, without which onewould lack presence of mind (la présence d’esprit); sang-froid, which submitsthe activity of the soul to reason, and which is preserved in all events, infear, in drunkenness, in haste, is it not a quality which could not exist inthose men whom imagination governs? This quality, is it not absolutely op-posed to genius?

Le sang froid, cette qualité si nécessaire à ceux qui gouvernent, sans lequel on feroitrarement une application juste des moyens aux circonstances, sans lequel on seroitsujet aux inconséquences, sans lequel on manqueroit de la présence d’esprit; le sangfroid qui soumet l’activité de l’âme à la raison, & qui préserve dans tous les évene-mens, de la crainte, de l’yvresse, de la précipitation, n’est-il pas une qualité qui nepeut exister dans les hommes que l’imagination maîtrise? cette qualité n’est-elle pasabsolument opposée au génie?

“Génie (2),” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné

74. “La caramba fue llamada por las autoridades, pero se defendió sabiamente di-ciendo que ella, pobrecita de ella, no hacía más que cantar las letras que le poníandelante, con la música que también le daban, y que bastante trabajo tenía enaprenderse una y otra, con los cambios continuos de piezas, para fijarse siguieraen qué es lo que decía, y que se algo decía, ella no entraba en ello, que lo suyoera cantar.” José Del Corral, La vida cotidiana en el Madrid del siglo xviii (Madrid:Ediciones La Librería, 2000), 154–56.

75. See Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, 407.76. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, “Medios para lograr la reforma,” in Espectáculos y

diversiones públicas en España (1790), ed. Camilo González Suárez-Llanos (Sala-manca: Ediciones Anaya, 1967), 113–15. Quoted in Charles Emil Kany, Life andManners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1932), 307.

77. “L’homme sensible obéit aux impulsions de la nature et ne rend précisément


que le cri de son coeur; au moment où il tempère ou force ce cri, ce n’est pluslui, c’est un comédien qui joue.” Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 335.

78. “On dit qu’on pleure, mais on ne pleure pas lorsqu’on poursuit une épithèteénergique qui se refuse; on dit qu’on pleure, mais on ne pleure pas lorsqu’ons’occupe à rendre son vers harmonieux: ou si les larmes coulent, la plume tombedes mains, on se livre à son sentiment et l’on cesse de composer.” Ibid., 333–34.

79. “Un grand comédien n’est ni un piano-forté, ni une harpe, ni un clavecin, niun violon, ni un violoncelle.” Ibid., 347.

80. “Il n’a point d’accord qui lui soit propre; mais il prend l’accord et le ton quiconviennent à sa partie, et il sait se prêter à toutes.” Ibid.

81. Roach, Player’s Passion, 145.

chapter 5. a melancholy anatomy

1. See Gino Fornaciari, Marielva Torino, and Francesco Mallegni, “Paleopathologyof an Eighteenth-Century Italian Musician: The Case of Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805),” Il Friuli Medico, Alpe Adria Journal of Medicine, 11 June 1996; and Lu-ciano Gallo, “Boccherini ucciso dalla tisi: l’esito degli esami della commissioneche ha riesumato la salma,” Il Tirreno, 14 April 1996. My transcriptions of the re-ports on this examination may be found at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

2. Dramatic as this statistic is, it does not mean that everyone infected died of thedisease: TB was most often present in a relatively quiescent or passive form. SeeDavid S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-CenturyFrance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 1.

3. Ibid.4. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978),

30.5. Ibid., 12.6. “It is also very difficult to know this malady well, and very common to see it con-

fused by doctors who judge with too much haste.” (“Il est aussi très-difficile debien connoître cette maladie, & il est très-ordinaire de la voir confondre pardes médecins qui jugent avec trop de précipitation.”) M. Malouin, “Tubercule,”in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. DenisDiderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris: Briasson, 1751–65). Searchableonline at the University of Chicago ARTFL Project, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc.

7. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, with All the Kinds, Causes,Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It (1621), new ed., with translations ofclassical texts by “Democritus Minor” (Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1854), pt. 2,sec. 2, mem. 4, “Exercise Rectified of Body and Mind,” 308.

Antonio Gallego writes of Carlos III: “Knowing by experience that his familywas prone to fall into melancholy, and fearing its harmful results, to which he hadseen his parents and brothers fall victim, he always took great care to avoid it, how-ever he could. He knew that the best means or, rather, the only means to achievethis was to flee from idleness and to be always employed and in the most violentaction possible.” (“Conociendo por experiencia que su familia era expuesta a caer


en la melancolía, y temiendo sus malas resultas, de que había visto sus padres yhermanos habían sido las víctimas, procuró siempre evitarla con gran cuidado,como lo consiguió. Sabía que el mejor medio o, por mejor decir, el único paraconseguirlo, era el huir la ociosidad y estar siempre empleado y en acción vio-lenta en lo posible.”) Antonio Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III: ensayo so-bre el pensamiento musical ilustrado (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988), 100.

8. Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Pe-riod (1776–89; reprint, New York: Dover, 1957), 2:815.

9. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 2, sec. 2, mem. 6, subsec. 3, “Music a Rem-edy,” 336.

10. “S’il fait parler à la fois les cinq instruments, c’est avec une harmonie pleine etauguste qui . . . prend une teinte sombre et mélancolique, il va droit au coeurpar des moyens si doux, que les larmes coulent sans qu’on s’en aperçoive.” Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, andCharles-Nicolas Baudiot, Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement (c. 1804;facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 3.

“Aber welch ein Unterschied zwischen einem Mozart und einem Boccherini!Jener führt uns zwischen schroffen Felsen in einem stachlichen Wald . . . dieserhingegen in lachende Gegenden, mit blumigen Auen, klaren, rieselndenBächen, dichten Haynen bedeckt, worinn sich der Geist mit Vergnügen dersüßen Schwermuth überläßt.” Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmackin der Musik (Carlsruhe, 1809), 7.

“Lo stile del maestro lucchese teneva alquanto dell’ecclesiastico e del fugato,nè spoglio era giammai, anche nei pezzi concitati, de quel colore di tenera melan-conia che è proprio degli uomini mansueti e dabbene.” Giuseppe Carpani, LeHaydine, ovvero Lettere sulla vita e le opere del celebre maestro Giuseppe Haydn (1808;Bologna: Forni Editore, 1969), 70.

“Ses pensées toujours gracieuses, souvent mélancoliques, ont une charmeinexprimable par leur naïveté.” François-Joseph Fétis, “Boccherini (Louis),” inBiographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873; facsimile reprint, Brussels: Cul-ture et Civilisation, 1972). All of these quotations may be found in context athttp://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

11. “Les Quatuors de Bocherini ont, je ne sais quoi, de sombre qui les ont fait com-parer aux Nuits d’Young.” Boyé, L’Expression musicale, mise au rang des chimères (Am-sterdam, 1779), 15. Claude-Philibert Coquéau, another Parisian pamphleteerwriting in 1779, located Boccherini’s somberness and gloominess in a specificpiece, the first movement of the Violin Sonata in Bb Major, op. 5, no. 3, G. 27;it “expresses most singularly the impact of a somber and profound grief” (“ex-prime singulièrement l’atteinte d’une douleur sombre & profonde”). Claude-Philibert Coquéau, Entretiens sur l’état actuel de l’Opéra de Paris, Amsterdam, 1779,111. Quoted in François Lesure, ed., Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes (Geneva,Minkoff, 1984), 2:477. Clear as Coquéau’s characterization is, however, I can-not find anything profoundly gloomy in the piece. The movement named is ina major key, characterized by a gently undulating cantabile. It is sweet, galant, andlacks all of the conventional signifiers of “une douleur sombre & profonde.”Moreover, he calls it a Largo, although it is marked “Moderato” in the score. Isuspect Coquéau was referring to a different piece.


12. Young had an important Spanish imitator in José Cadalso, whose Noches lúgubresof 1789, “imitando el estilo de las que escribió en inglés el Doctor Young,” wasvery popular among Spanish readers well into the nineteenth century. See theeditorial preface to Cadalso, Noches lúgubres (1789), ed. Joaquín Marco (Barce-lona: Planeta, 1985).

13. Edward Young, The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1741; reprint, Hartford: SilasAndrus, 1823). A longer extract from this first poem may be found at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

14. “B-Moll. Ein Sonderling, mehrenteils in das Gewand der Nacht gekleidet. Er istetwas mürrisch und nimmt höchst selten eine gefällige Miene an. Moqueriengegen Gott und die Welt; Mißvergnügen mit sich und allem; Vorbereitung zumSelbstmord hallen in diesem Tone.” Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideenzu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1784), ed. Paul Alfred Merbach (Leipzig: Wolken-wanderer, 1924), 262. Quoted and translated in Rita Steblin, A History of Key Char-acteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Rochester: Uni-versity of Rochester Press, 2002), 291 (appendix A).

15. “Bb. è un Tono tenero, molle, dolce, effeminato, atto ad esprimer trasportid’amore, vezzi, e grazie. Il suo minore poco si pratica per la troppa difficoltà.”Francesco Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (Rome: Pilucchi Cracas,1791–96), 2:249. Quoted and translated in Steblin, History of Key Characteristics,291.

16. “Bey allen diesen Vorrechten, die der Italiäner überhaupt haben kann, ist Boc-cherini doch wohl wahrhaftig nicht der Mann, dem ich so aus Herzens Wonnelange zuhören,—dessen Faden, (wenn er anders einen hat) ich unermüdetnachgehen;—dessen Produkt, (im Ganzen genommen) sinnliches Wohlge-fallen in mir erregen könnte;—wahrhaftig nicht mein Mann,—weil er mir zuschatticht, zu finster zu mürrisch ist.

“Seys nun Entschluß, labyrinthisch zu sein, um sich durch Neuheit zuempfehlen . . . seys zu viel bestimmende Neigung furs Lieblingsinstrument,—oderunwiederstehlicher Drang der Natur; wie oft opfert er da, alles der Kunst auf!

“Wahr ists Entwicklung ist für den forschenden Geist angenehm, und umdeswillen auch oft verworrener Gang, Fall ins finstere Moll; aber schürzen sollstdu doch nicht ohne Noth; Knoten soll nichts als Contrast seyn, und dieAuflösung desselben, allmähliger Übergang. Wenn der Setzer ohne Noth sichin Schwierigkeiten verwickelt, so quält er’s Ohr, ohne’s Herz zu befriedigen, undunterbricht den Fortgang der Empfindungsgeschichte. Der Kenner bestimmedie Vielheit dieser Fälle bey Boccherini.” Carl Ludwig Junker, Zwanzig Com-ponisten: eine Skizze (Bern, 1776), 17–18.

17. Elaine Sisman, “The Labyrinth of Melancholy” (paper). I am grateful to Dr. Sis-man for sharing her work with me. Interestingly, Johann Baptist Schaul uses ex-actly this metaphor to describe Mozart’s music as undesirably labyrinthine, inexplicit comparison to Boccherini’s: “I marvel at the ingenious art of this mu-sical Daedalus [i.e., Mozart], who has understood how to build such great, im-penetrable labyrinths; but I cannot find the Ariadne to show me the thread bywhich to find the entrance, much less the exit.” (“Ich bewundere die sinnreicheKunst jenes musikalischen Dedalus, der so große, undurchdringliche Labyrinthezu bauen gewußt hat; aber ich kann die Ariadne nicht finden, die mir den Faden


reicht, um den Eingang, noch weniger den Ausgang entdecken.”) Schaul, Briefeüber den Geschmack in der Musik, 10; for the complete extract, see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

18. Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: Uni-versity of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 38.

19. This style of medicine is concisely portrayed (and expertly skewered) in Molière’slast play, Le Malade imaginaire (1673).

20. “Je désire que vous considériez . . . que toutes les fonctions que j’ai attribuées àcette machine, comme la digestion des viandes, le battement du coeur et desartères, la nourriture et la croissance des membres, la respiration, la veille et lesommeil; la respiration de la lumière, des sons, des odeurs, des goûts, de la cha-leur, et de telles autres qualités dans les organes des sens extérieurs; l’impres-sion de leurs idées dans l’organe du sens commun et de l’imagination; la réten-tion ou l’impreinte de ces idées dans la mémoire; les mouvemens intérieurs desappétits et des passions; et, enfin, les mouvemens extérieurs de tous lesmembres. . . . Je désire, dis-je, que vous considériez que ces fonctions suiventtoutes naturellement en cette machine de la seule disposition de ses organes,ne plus ne moins que font les mouvemens d’une horloge, ou autre automate,de celle de ses contre-poids et de ses roues; en sorte qu’il ne faut point à leuroccasion conçevoir en elle aucune autre âme végétative ni sensitive, ni aucunautre principe de mouvemen et de vie, que son sang et ses esprits agités par lachaleur du feu qui brûle continuellement dans son coeur, et qui n’est pointd’autre nature que tous les feux qui sont dans les corps inanimés.” RenéDescartes,Traité de l’homme (1632), in Oeuvres de Descartes, publiées par Victor Cousin(Paris: La Chevardière Fils, 1824), 4:427–28. Quoted in Aram Vartanian, Diderotand Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1953), 213.

21. “Nerfs . . . sont comme de petits filets ou comme de petits tuyaux qui viennenttous du cerveau, et contiennent ainsi que lui un certain air ou vent trés subtilqu’on nomme les esprits animaux.” René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme (1646–50), in Les Classiques français, ed. Julien Benda (Mulhouse: Bader-Dufour, 1948),138.

22. “Ce sont des corps très petits et qui se meuvent très vite.” Descartes, Les Passionsde l’âme, 140.

23. Francis Glisson, De naturae substantia energetica (1672), discussed in SergioMoravia, “From Homme machine to Homme sensible: Changing Eighteenth-century Models of Man’s Image,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 48.

24. “Chaque partie organique du corps vivant a des nerfs qui ont une sensibilité,une espèce ou un degré particulier du sentiment.” Théophile Bordeu, Recherchessur les pouls, par rapport aux crises . . . (1756), quoted in Moravia, “From Hommemachine to Homme sensible,” 55.

25. “What I mean is this, said Simmias. You might say the same thing about tuningthe strings of a musical instrument, that the attunement is something invisibleand incorporeal and splendid and divine, and located in the tuned instrument,while the instrument itself and its strings are material and corporeal and com-posite and earthly and closely related to what is mortal. Now suppose that theinstrument is broken, or its strings cut or snapped. According to your theory


the attunement must still exist—it cannot have been destroyed, because it wouldbe inconceivable that when the strings are broken the instrument and the stringsthemselves, which have a mortal nature, should still exist, and the attunement,which shares the nature and characteristics of the divine and immortal, shouldexist no longer, having predeceased its mortal counterpart.” Plato, “Phaedo,”in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton andHuntington Cairns, trans. Lane Cooper et al. (New York: Pantheon Books,1966), 85–86.

26. For a thorough treatment of Cassiodorus’ theological interpretations of thestringed-instrument imagery in the Psalms, see Nancy van Deusen, The Harp andthe Soul: Essays in Medieval Music (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), esp chap.6, “The Cithara as Symbolum: Augustine vs. Cassiodorus on the Subject of Musi-cal Instruments.” To the chorus of ancients on this topic we might also add Ci-cero: “For nature has assigned to every emotion a particular look and tone ofvoice and bearing of its own; and the whole of a person’s frame and every lookon his face and every utterance of his voice are like the strings of a harp, andsound according as they are struck by each successive emotion” (De Oratore, Book3, with De Fato, Paradoxa Storicorum, De Partitione Oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, 2vols. [London: Heinemann, 1942], 2:172).

27. “Quella dolce lira . . . che la destra del cielo allenta e tira.” Dante Alighieri, Ladivina commedia, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Milan: Mursia, 1971), 413. Paradiso, canto15, lines 4 and 6.

28. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739), ed. with an introduction byErnest Mossner (London: Penguin Books, 1984). Bk. 2, “Of the Passions,” pt. 3,“Of the Will and Direct Passions,” sec. 9, “Of the Direct Passions,” 487.

29. See Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998).

30. “On peut considérer l’unisson et même l’octave comme l’expression la plus justede la sympathie, expression supérieure en quelque sorte à l’harmonie même,pusiqu’elle est le résultat d’une concordance parfaite; or, la musique ne sauraitinspirer trop souvent cette sympathie: il faut donc ne rien négliger pour en fairesentir tout le charme.” Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot, L’Art du violon(Paris: Dépôt Central de la Musique, 1835), 207. Translated by Louise Goldbergas “Effect and Means of Effect,” in The Art of the Violin (Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1991), 381.

31. John Hill’s account of Spranger Barry as Othello in The Actor, or A Treatise onthe Art of Playing (London: R. Griffiths, 1755), 10. Quoted in Roach, Player’s Pas-sion, 102.

32. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768), ed. Graham Petrie (London: Pen-guin Classics, 1986), 140–41. I am indebted to Professor James Turner for bring-ing this passage to my attention.

33. “Melancolía negra causada por adustión y encendimiento de cólera [la cual]causa grande enfermedades como son locuras, melancolías extrañas, depravadasimaginaciones, y varios furores y pensamientos maniacos.” Alonso de Freylas, Silos melancólicos pueden saber lo que está por venir (1605), fol. i–v. Quoted in RogerBartra, Cultura y melancolía: los enfermedades del alma en la España del Siglo de Oro(Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2001), 60. Bartra tells us that “Se trata de un


texto, con foliación propia pero añadido al final del libro de Freylas, Conocimiento,curación, y preservación de la peste.” (“This is a text, with its own foliation, addedto the end of Freylas’ Knowledge of, cure of, and protection from the plague.”)

34. Quoted in Bartra, Cultura y melancolía, 65.35. This and the following quotation appear in John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociabil-

ity: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1988), 209 and 211.

36. “Sans fièvre, sans toux, ni difficulté de respirer qui soit considérable, avec perted’appétit, indigestion & grande foiblesse, les chairs étant fondues & consumées.”Anonymous, “Phtisie nerveuse,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné.

37. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1, sec. 1, mem. 2, subsec. 2, “Division of theBody, Humours, Spirits,” 95.

38. “Passion de l’âme, qui influe beaucoup sur le corps. L’affliction produit ordi-nairement les maladies chroniques. La phtisie est souvent la suite d’une grandeaffliction.” Denis Diderot, “Affliction,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné.

39. “La cause la plus commune des tubercules est une disposition héréditaire quiaffecte également les tumeurs & le tissu des poumons; il peut se faire aussi queles rheumes négligés, les catarrhes, les autres affections de poitrine, les virusvénériens & scrophuleux, leur donnent naissance.” M. Malouin, “Tubercule,” inEncyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné.

40. Sir Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of Consumptions and Other Distempers Belongingto the Breast and Lungs (London: John Pemberton, 1724), 45.

41. Denis Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (c. 1770), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed.Paul Vernière (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 343; see chapter 3, note 10, above.

42. “Chaque vie personnelle peut être décomposée en facteurs communs, ho-mogènes et compatibles entre eux, et substituables d’un individu à l’autre.”Georges Gusdorf, Naissance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières (Paris:Payot, 1976), 285–86.

43. “Le triomphe de cette géométrie plane n’est possible que grâce à une neutral-isation de toutes les dissidences personelles.” Ibid.

44. “Pour répondre d’une manière complète à ce que vous me demandez, je doisvous dire que l’état de ma santé et l’obligation où je me trouve d’écrire toujourspour le roi de Prusse que j’ai l’honneur de servir, ne me permettent en aucunemanière de m’adonner à des spéculations commerciales quelles qu’elles soient.”“Adieu, cher Pleyel, je ne puis m’étendre davantage car ma santé n’est pas bonneet mes nerfs me font beaucoup souffrir.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, Il divinoBoccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 245 and 259–60.

45. Demonstrating this prudent aspect of Boccherini’s character is the more or lessexplicit concern of both Jaime Tortella, in Luigi Boccherini y el Banco de San Car-los: un aspecto inédito (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1998); and José Antonio Boc-cherini Sánchez, in “Los testamentos de Boccherini,” Revista de musicología 22,no. 2 (1999): 93–121.

46. Boccherini wrote very little during the years 1777, 1783–84, 1791, and 1800;during every other year of his working life as a composer—that is, from 1768to 1805—he never wrote fewer than six pieces annually, and he not infrequentlyproduced as many as fifteen. Jaime Tortella has examined the patterns of Boc-cherini’s creativity, and the biographical reasons for them, in “Boccherini, su


tercera crisis de creación y el Conde de Aranda: una hipótesis explicativa,” Nas-sarre (Revista aragonesa de musicología) 14, no. 2 (1998): 179–94.

47. Roy Porter, “Enlightenment and Pleasure,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century,ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Porter (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 11.

48. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “The Author’s Abstract of Melancholy, Diakoco�,”xiv.

49. A useful discussion of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as a work of literature canbe found in Teresa Scott Soufas, Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish GoldenAge Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 110–13.

50. Baillot, the only writer on music I know of to use this term beside Boccherinihimself, includes it as an indication of simplicity or naivety—and uses Bocche-rini’s music to exemplify it. See Baillot, Art of the Violin, esp. chap. 23, “MusicalCharacter and the Accent That Determines It.”

51. I draw here upon Soufas’s Melancholy and the Secular Mind, esp. chap. 3, “LoveMelancholy (Lope, Calderón),” and chap. 4, “The Melancholy Malcontent (ThePicaresque).”

52. “La phtisie dorsale est la suite familière & la juste punition des débauches out-rées.” Anon., “Phtisie,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné.

The Spanish attitude to this condition seems to have been a good deal morestraightforward than the French or English. The entry “ptísico/a” in the Diccio-nario de la lengua castellana describes a consumption that may be either pulmonaryor syphilitic, but it engages in no associative flights of fancy: “Illness caused byhaving some lesion in the lungs or genitals, originating in an acrid and corrosivehumor which has arisen in those organs, and causing in the patient a cough ac-companied by slow heat which attenuates and consumes him little by little.” (“En-fermedad causada por tener alguna llaga en los pulmónes ò livianos, originadade humor acre y corrosivo, que ha caído a ellos, y causa el paciente tos accom-pañada de calentúra lenta, que le va atenuando y consumiendo poco à poco.”)Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1726; facsimile reprint, published as Diccionariode autoridades, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963), s.v. “ptísico/a.”

53. “Après ces éjaculations qui interrompent son sommeil, le malade est plongé dansune espèce d’anéantissement, ses yeux s’obscurcissent, une langueur extrèmes’empare de tous ses sens, il lui semble n’exister qu’à-demi; cette terrible idéequi lui retrace sans cesse sa foiblesse & son néant, qui souvent entraîne avec ellel’image d’une mort prochaine, qui la lui représente le bras levé, la faux déployéeprête à moissonner ses jours, le plonge dans une tristesse accablante, & jette peu-à-peu les fondemens d’une affreuse mélancolie; le sommeil vient—il ferme denouveau sa paupière, le dérobe à lui-même, met fin à ses cruelles réflexions, cen’est que pour lui en procurer une nouvelle matière; à-peine est-il endormi, queles songes les plus voluptueux présentent à son imagination échauffée des objetslascifs, la machine suit sa pente naturelle, des foibles désirs naissent aussi-tôt, maisplus promptement encore les parties qui doivent les satisfaire obeissent à ces im-pressions, & plus encore à la disposition maladive dont elles sont attaquées; lenouveau feu qui s’allume ne tarde pas à procurer l’évacuation qui en est le sceau& la fin; le malade se réveille par le plaisir ou par la douleur, & retombe avec plusde force dans l’anéantissement horrible qu’il avoit deja éprouvé. Dans quelques-uns, un nouveau sommeil prépare encore de nouvelles éjaculations & de nou-


veaux tourmens encore plus terribles. Après avoir passé de pareilles nuits, quelledoit être la situation des malades pendant le jour? on les voit pâles, mornes, abat-tus, ayant de la peine à se soutenir, les yeux enfoncés, sans force & sans éclat, leurvûe s’affoiblit, une maigreur épouvantable les défigure, leur appétit se perd, lesdigestions sont dérangées, presque toutes les fonctions s’alterent, la mémoire n’aplus sa vivacité . . . bien-tôt des douleurs vagues se répandent dans différentes par-ties du corps, un feu intérieur les dévore . . . la fièvre lente survient, & enfin laphtisie dorsale, suite funeste des excès dans l’évacuation de la semence.” M. Ma-louin, “Pollution nocturne,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné.

54. The phrase is Elaine Scarry’s, from The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmakingof the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28.

55. “L’amour démesuré ne s’annonce cependant pas toûjours par des signes évi-dens, il se tient quelquefois caché dans le coeur; le feu dont il le brûle, dévorela substance de celui qui est affecté de cette passion, & le fait tomber dans unevraie consomption: il est difficile de connoître la cause de tous les mauvais ef-fets qu’elle produit en silence.” Anon., “Érotique mélancolie,” in Encyclopédie, ouDictionnaire raisonné.

56. Although Rousseau allows for the representation of “silence” through musicalsound, it is through a kind of representational sleight of hand; he surely is notreferring to the kind of absolute pall that Young describes: “Though all Naturemay sleep, he who contemplates it sleeps not, and the art of the musician con-sists in substituting for the inaudible image of the object that of the movementswhich its presence excites in the heart of the contemplator.” (“Que tout la na-ture soit endormie, celui qui la contemple ne dort pas, et l’art du musicien con-siste à substituer à l’image insensible de l’objet celle des mouvements que saprésence excite dans le coeur du contemplateur.”) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essaisur l’origine des langues (1754–63; reprint, Paris: L’École, 1987), chap. 16, “Fausseanalogie entre les couleurs et les sons,” 130.

57. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 3, sec. 2, mem. 5, subsec. 2, “Cure of Love-Melancholy,” 532.

58. “All their senses are troubled, they think they see, hear, smell, and touch thatwhich they do not.” Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1, sec. 3, mem. 1, subsec.1, “Symptoms, or Signs of Melancholy in the Body,” 232.

chapter 6. “it is all cloth of the same piece”Epigraph:

Bordeu: Chaque molécule sensible avait son moi . . . mais comment l’a-t-elleperdu, et comment de toutes ces pertes en est-il résulté la conscienced’un tout?

Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse: Il me semble que le contact suffit.Denis Diderot, “Le Rêve de d’Alembert” (1769), in Oeuvres,

ed. André Billy (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951), 897

1. “Drey grosse Meister—Manfredi, der vorzüglichste Violinist in ganz Italien, inAbsicht auf Orchester- und Quartettspiel, Nardini, der als Virtuos durch die Vol-


lendung seines Spiels so berühmt geworden, und Boccherini, dessen Verdienstebekannt genug sind, erzeigten mir die Ehre, mich als Bratschisten unter sichaufzunehmen. Wir studirten auf die angegebne Weise Quartetten von Haydn(die, welche jetzt in der Suite Op. 9, 17 und 21 ausmachen), und von Bocche-rini, die dieser damals eben schrieb und man noch immer so gern hört.”Giuseppe Maria Cambini, “Ausführung der Instrumentalquartetten,” Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung, 22 August 1804.

2. Cambini also mentions this group in his violin treatise of 1803: “Alas! that thosewho regard instrumental music as no more than a meaningless noise did nothear, as I did, quartets by Boccherini, Haydn, and other celebrated masters playedby Manfredi, Boccherini, Nardini, and myself, only too happy to play the viola!”(“Hélas! que ceux qui ne regardent pas la musique instrumentale que commeun vain bruit n’ont-ils, comme moi, entendu exécuter les quatuors de Bocche-rini, de Haydn, et de quelques autres maîtres célèbres, par Manfredi, Bocche-rini, Nardini, et moi, qui étois trop heureux de faire l’alto!”) Giuseppe MariaCambini, Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (Paris: Naderman,c. 1803; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 22. For the full text and trans-lation, see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

The “autres maîtres célèbres,” as direct influences and models for the youngBoccherini’s string quartets, probably included Giovanni Battista Sammartini(1700/1701–75), Milan’s doyen composer, who by 1765 had produced at leasttwenty-one works in a variety of quartet configurations (three violins and bass;flute, two violins, and bass; and the “standard” string quartet). On the assump-tion that works were often available in manuscript well before their appearancein print, we might add to this name that of the Mannheimer Franz Xaver Richter(1709–89), whose six quartets op. 5 were published in 1768 (though they mayhave been written as early as 1757). Closer to Boccherini’s own generation wasthe Viennese Joseph Starzer (1728–87), whose twenty-six works for string quar-tet are, unfortunately, impossible to date. Through Boccherini’s documentedtravels to Vienna, and his possible travels to Munich and Mannheim, there wouldhave been opportunities for him to meet all these quartet-writing gentlemen inperson. Further opportunities would have existed for him to play and acquirecopies of their works.

3. “It seems there are no precedents in the quartet genre for these classificationsinto large and small works.” (“Für diese Klassifizierung in opere “grandi” und“piccole” scheint es im Streichquartett keinen Vorläufer zu geben.”) ChristianSpeck, Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungs-geschichtlichen Stellung, vol. 7 of Studien zur Musik, ed. Rudolf Bockholdt (Munich:Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), 16.

4. Another peculiar usage emerges here: Boccherini’s use of the Italian opera tomean a single work (where most use the Latin opus), and its plural opere to indi-cate more than one work (where most use the Latin opera). There is obviouslyexcellent potential for confusion here; I propose to bypass it through the use ofthe standard abbreviations: op. X can stand for either the Latin or the Italianterm, as can its plural opp.

5. “Distinguo le opere in piccole, e grandi, perché le grandi constano di quattro


pezzi cada quintetto, e le piccole di due, e non più. Fra queste potranno sceglierea loro piacere postoché tutto è panno dell’istessa pezza.” Quoted in Luigi DellaCroce, Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 243–44.Della Croce points out that this isolated early letter, evidently sent from Arenas,contains numerous puzzling inaccuracies of language and fact, most atypical forthe composer.

6. “In the ‘opera grande’ slow tempi (and thus a certain songfulness) get the up-per hand.” (“Nell’ ‘opera grande’ s’impone il valore dei tempi lenti [e quindidi una certa volontà di canto].”) Guido Salvetti, “Luigi Boccherini nell’ambitodel quartetto italiano del secondo settecento,” Analecta musicologica 12 (1973):227–52.

7. See Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette, chap. 3, “Entwicklung in Boccherinis Quar-tettschaffen.”

8. “Ses idées sont tout individuelles, et ses ourages sont si remarquables sous cerapport, qu’on serait tenté de croire qu’il ne connaissait point d’autre musiqueque la sienne.” François-Joseph Fétis, “Boccherini (Louis),” in Biographie universelledes musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873; facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation,1972).

9. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1994), 7. The “he” in this passage is once againthe painter Giambattista Tiepolo.

10. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1987), 35.

11. We can postulate commercial as well as artistic reasons for this demotion of thecello from the spotlight: by 1769, the year he composed op. 8, Boccherini hadonly just established his publishing “pipeline” from Spain to Paris, and for thenext few years probably had technical accessibility (an important component ofsaleability to his amateur market) in mind. By 1775, when op. 22 appeared, Boc-cherini had presumably established enough confidence in his marketability tobegin reinserting virtuosity into the equation. A judicious number of cello so-los appear in each quartet opus from that year forward.

12. See Guido Salvetti, “Camerismo sinfonico e sinfonismo cameristico: alla ricercadi un approccio analitico pertinente,” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 337–53.

13. “Non seulement la conscience nous donne connoissance de nos perceptions,mais encore, si elles se répètent, elle nous avertit souvent que nous les avon déjàeues, et nous les fait connoître comme étant à nous, ou comme affectant, mal-gré leur variété et leur succession, un être qui est constamment le même nous. . . .Sans elles, chaque moment de la vie nous paroîtroit le premier de notre exis-tence, et notre connoissance ne s’étendroit jamais au-delà d’une première per-ception: je la nommerai réminiscence.” Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’o-rigine des connoissances humaines: ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce quiconcerne l’entendement humain (1746; présentation de Aliénor Bertrand, Paris: Li-brairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2002), 25. Translated by Thomas Nugent as AnEssay on the Origin of Human Knowledge; Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay onthe Human Understanding, with an introduction by Robert G. Weyant (1756; re-print, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971), sec. 2, chap. 1,sec. 15, 36.


14. Ellen Amsterdam has noted Boccherini’s marked affinity for third-related har-monies in the quintets. See Ellen Iris Amsterdam, “The String Quintets of LuigiBoccherini” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1968), 54.

15. “The derivation of the term (rocaille, ‘shellwork’) is post facto and pejorative,like most critical descriptions of the style. The term seems to have originatedaround 1796–7 as artists’ jargon in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, where(as Sheriff noted) it was used ‘to denigrate the painting produced during thereign of Louis XV, when Mme de Pompadour was an arbiter of taste’. (Con-demnation of the more ‘feminized’ features of the Rococo style was routine un-til recent times.)” Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown, “Rococo,” in The NewGrove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online (London: Macmillan, 2000–),www.grovemusic.com.

16. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), 92.

17. Ibid., 121.18. “One refers in a quite similar sense to the timbre of a bell, for its resonance; the

timbre of the voice; the timbre of a musical instrument, of bronze or metal.”(“On dit en un sens assez voisin, le timbre d’une cloche, pour sa résonance; letimbre de la voix; le timbre d’un instrument musical, d’airain ou de métal.”)Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, “Timbre (2),” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonnédes sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert(Paris: Briasson, 1751–65). Searchable online at the University of ChicagoARTFL Project, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc.

19. “Toutes les richesses du coloris s’étalent à la fois sur la face de la terre; du pre-mier coup de l’oeil tout est vu. Mais plus on regarde et plus on est enchanté; ilne faut plus qu’admirer et contempler sans cesse.

“Il n’en est pas ainsi du son; la nature ne l’analyse point et n’en sépare pointles harmoniques: elle est cachée, au contraire, sous l’apparence de l’unisson. . . .Elle inspire des chants et non des accords, elle dicte de la mélodie et non de l’har-monie. Les couleurs sont la parure des êtres inanimés; toute matière est colorée;mais les sons annoncent le mouvement; la voix annonce un être sensible.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (1754–63; reprint, Paris: L’École,1987), chap. 16, “Fausse analogie entre les couleurs et les sons,” 127–28.

20. “Jeder auch auf das stärkeste ergriffene Ton hat eine kleine obwohl kaum merk-liche Schwäche vor sich: sonst würde es kein Ton, sondern nur ein unange-nehmer und unverständlicher Laut seyn. Eben diese Schwäche ist an dem Endeiedes Tones zu hören.” Leopold Mozart, Gründliche Violinschule (1787; facsimilereprint, Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1966), chap. 5, sec. 3, 103.

21. Other writers have discussed a similar deceptiveness in the title “Divertimento.”See James Webster, “Towards a History of Viennese Chamber Music in the EarlyClassical Period,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 27, no. 2 (summer1974): 212.

22. Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette, 53–54, calls this technique “erweiterter Zweis-timmigkeit.” Writing of the quintets, Amsterdam refers to Boccherini’s “com-mon reinforcement of harmonic textures through octave doubling and the em-ployment of parallel thirds and sixths.” Amsterdam, “The String Quintets of LuigiBoccherini,” 32.


23. I distinguish open-closed relationships from antecedent-consequent ones as fol-lows: in the former, the harmony remains the same in both blocks (as betweenbars 3–4 and 7–8, both V–I in root position), the distinction between phrasesbeing made melodically (an upward-turning tune in bar 4, a descent to the tonicin bar 8).

24. “Il s’est mis à crier: ‘Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse! mademoiselle de L’Espinasse!—Que voulez-vous?—Avez-vous vu quelquefois un essaim d’abeilles s’échapper deleur ruche? . . . Le Monde, ou la masse générale de la matière, est la ruche. . . .Les avez-vous vues s’en aller former à l’extrémité de la branche d’un arbre unelongue grappe de petits animaux ailés, tous accrochés les uns aux autres par lespattes? . . . Cette grappe est un être, un individu, un animal quelconque. . . . Sil’une de ces abeilles s’avise de pincer d’une façon quelconque abeille à laque-lle elle s’est accrochée, que croyez-vous qu’il en arrive? Dites donc.—Je n’ensais rien. . . .

—Celle-ci pincera la suivante; [il] s’excitera dans toute la grappe autant dessensations qu’il y a de petits animaux. . . . Le tout s’agitera, se remuera, changerade situation et de forme; [il] s’élèvera de bruit, de petits cris. . . . Celui qui n’au-rait jamais vu une pareille grappe s’arranger, serait tenté de la prendre pour unanimal à cinq ou six cents têtes et à mille ou douze cents ailes.’” Diderot, “LeRêve de d’Alembert,” 889.

25. Alpers and Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, 45. The authors are dis-cussing the curious perspectival and affective disjointures among the figures inTiepolo’s The Finding of Moses (late 1730s).

chapter 7. the perfect listener

1. “Febbraio 1781.Spero mi faranno un favore, che io stimerò moltissimo ed è che se alcuno di

lor Signori (come e probabile) conoscesse il Signor Giuseppe Haidn, scrittore,da me e da tutti apprezzato al maggior segno, gli offra i miei rispetti, dicendoliche sono uno de i suoi più appassionati stimatori e ammiratori insieme del suoGenio, e Musicali componimenti de quali qui si fà tutto quel apprezzo, che inrigor di Giustizia si meritano.” Carl Ferdinand Pohl, Joseph Haydn (Leipzig: Breit-kopf und Härtel, 1878), 2:180–81n6. This letter is not included in the Episto-lario of Luigi Della Croce’s Il divino Boccherini (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), but ap-pears in Germaine de Rothschild’s Luigi Boccherini: sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Plon,1962), 52, with a reference to Pohl. Boccherini’s original letter presumably be-longs to Artaria and Co.

2. “Übersende zugleich den Brief von Herrn Boccherini, bitte mein gehorsamb-stes Gegencompliment an denselben. Niemand bey uns weiß mir zu sagen: wodieser Orth Arenas ligt. Es muß doch unweit Madrid seyn; bitte demnach mirdiese zu wissen zu machen, indem ich selbst dem Herrn Boccherini schreibenwerde.” Joseph Haydn, Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, unter Benützung derQuellensammlung, ed. Dénes Bartha and H. C. Robbins Landon (Kassel: Bären-reiter, 1965), 97.

3. “Übersende demnach beide briefe, bedaure nur, daß ich dermahlen an Herrn


Boccherini nicht eigenhändig schreiben kann, wollen Sie bey gelegener zeit meinErgebensten Respect an Hochdemselben übermachen, werden Sie mich verbin-den.” Ibid., 115.

4. “Gegen die Gewohnheit seiner Landsleute ging er mit der Zeit und der Ausbildungder Tonkunst auch in Deutschland fort, und nahm von den Fortschritten dersel-ben, besonders in wiefern sie von seinem alten Freunde, Joseph Haydn, bewirktoder veranlasst wurden, in sein Wesen auf, so viel ohne Verleugnung seiner Indi-vidualität geschehen konnte.” (“Contrary to the custom of his countrymen, he pro-gressed with the times and with the development of composition in Germany, inparticular those developments inspired or invented by his old friend Joseph Haydn;but very much in his own style, without denying his own individuality.”) Anonymousobituary, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 21 August 1805, 756–58. For the full textof this article, see the Web site, http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

5. Christian Speck, “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik in europäischeMusikzentren des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993):119–20. Speck tells us that he derives this information from Wilfried Scheib, “DieEntwicklung der Musikberrichterstattung im Wienerischen Diarium von 1703–1780” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Vienna, 1950).

6. Speck, “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik,” 120.7. London printings of Boccherini’s music issued by 1795, the time of Haydn’s sec-

ond visit, include the following:

six cello sonatas, G. 13, 6, 5, 10, 1, and 4 (editions by Bremner,Campbell, Forster)

the sonatas for violin and keyboard (editions by Clementi, Joseph Dale,Forster, Longman and Broderip, Longman-Lukey, and Welcker)

the first three opere of string trios; the first three opere of string quartets;the first three opere of string quintets (editions by Bremner,Preston/Preston and Son; some also by Longman-Lukey, Welcker, andWilliam Napier)

six string quartets op. 32 ( John Bland; no known extant copy)

six string quartets op. 33 ( John Kerpen)

six assorted string quintets as “op. 37” (Hamilton)

a “Periodical Overture no. 55” (=Sinfonia G. 494; Bremner)

two symphonies, G. 504 and 506 (Longman and Broderip)

I derive this list from the “Index of Publishers of Boccherini’s Works” in YvesGérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Bocche-rini, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 696.

8. See Nicolás Solar-Quintes, “Las relaciones de Haydn con la casa de Benavente,”Anuario musical 2 (1947): 81–104; and Robert Stevenson, “Haydn’s Iberian WorldConnections,” Inter-American Music Review 4, no. 2 (spring–summer 1982): 3.

9. “Wenn den Boccherinischen Quartetts auch im Ganzen das Große in der Anlageund Reich und Frappante der liberalen Durchführung eines Kühnern Genies


abgeht, das man an den mehresten Haydn’ und Mozart’schen.” Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung, 1 June 1799, 586.

The complete text and translation of this review, and of the sources cited inthe following six notes, may be found at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini.

10. “Ich leugne nicht, daß Haydns Quartette unter allen neuen Compositionendieser Art nur das meiste Vergnügen gewähren; es ist ein Vergnügen des Ver-stands, willkührliche Auslegung. Boccherinis Werke hingegen haben immer einherrschende, bestimmte Grundidee, die gleichartige, interessante Bilder darstellt;man wird dadurch erschüttert, gerührt, in unruhige Bewegung versetzt; das Herzwird hingerissen, und fühlt noch lange nachher die tiefen Eindrücke seiner Zau-bertöne.” Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmack in der Musik (Carlsruhe,1809), 10.

11. “Deutschland scheint, in seiner jetzigen Vorliebe für das Schwierigere, Kün-stlichere, Gelehrtere, ihn noch zu wenig zu kennen: wo man ihn aber kennetund besonders den melodischen Theil seiner Werke zu geniessen und zu würdi-gen verstehet, hat man in lieb und hält ihn in Ehren.” Allgemeine musikalischeZeitung, 21 August 1805.

12. “Le compositeur pénétré de son sujet étend ou resserre ses idées dans un cer-cle plus ou moins grand; comme Mozart, il s’élève jusqu’aux cieux pour implorerun dieu elément [clément?] en faveur des morts au jour de jugement dernier:comme Haydn, il embrasse d’un coup d’oeil la création entière, il peint le géniede l’homme émané de la divinité, ou ramené vers la terre, il présente, commeGluck, le tableau des passions qui nous agitent sur la scène du monde, ou bienenfin, choisissant un moins vaste théâtre et se repliant sur lui même, commeBoccherini, il cherche à nous rappeller à notre primitive innocence.” Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, andCharles-Nicolas Baudiot, Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement (c. 1804;facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 6.

13. “Il est plus enivrant qu’Haydn.” The journal of Charles-Julien Lioult de Chêne-dollé, entry for 4 February 1808. Quoted in Rothschild, Boccherini: sa vie et sonoeuvre, 99–100.

14. “M. J. B. Cartier a dit d’une manière très-originale: Si Dieu voulait parler aux hommes,il se servirait de la musique d’Haydn; et, s’il voulait entendre de la musique, il se ferait jouercelle de Boccherini. M. Puppo les a très-bien appréciés aussi, en disant: Boccherini estla femme d’Haydn.” Alexandre Choron and François Joseph Marie Fayolle, “Boc-cherini (Luigi),” in Dictionnaire historique des musiciens (Paris: Valade, 1810).

15. “Haydn dichtete seine Werke immer vor dem Klavier. ‘Ich setzte mich hin, fingan zu fantasieren, je nachdem mein Gemüth traurig oder fröhlich, ernst odertändelnd gestimmt war. Hatte ich eine Idee erhascht, so ging mein ganzes Be-streben dahin, sie den regeln der Kunst gemäß auszuführen und zu souteniren.So suchte ich mir zu helfen, und das ist es, was so vielen unserer neuen Kom-ponisten fehlt; sie reihen ein Stückchen an das andere, sie brechen ab, wennsie kaum angefangen haben: aber es bleibt auch nichts im Herzen sitzen, wennman es angehört hat.’

“Er tadelte es auch, daß jetzt so viele Tonmeister komponiren, die nie singengelernt hätten; ‘das Singen sey beynahe unter die verlorenen Künste zu rech-


nen, und anstatt des Gesanges lasse man die Instrumente dominiren.’” GeorgAugust Griesinger, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn (1810; facsimile reprint,Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981), 114–15.

16. To date, keyboards have been the subject of a greater amount of kinesthetic de-scription and theorizing than any other instrumental medium. See, for exam-ple, Suzanne Cusick, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Prob-lem (Towards a Feminist Music Theory),” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1(1994): 8–27, who speaks evocatively about meanings to be found in the act ofplaying Bach on the organ; Charles Fisk, “Performance, Analysis, and MusicalImagining,” College Music Symposium 36 (1996): 59–72, and 37 (1997): 95–109,who devotes a thoughtful and extended discussion to the ways in which playingSchumann informed his analyses, and vice versa; Charles Rosen, “On Playingthe Piano,” New York Times Review of Books, 21 October 1999, who focuses on thepeculiarly exigent task of playing Beethoven, and the storehouse of meaningsthe exigencies entail; and David Code, “Parting the Veil of Debussy’s Voiles” (un-published paper delivered at the meeting of the International Musicological So-ciety, Leuven, Belgium, August 2002).

As a non-keyboardist, I am not the writer to bring Haydn’s keyboard musicinto this fold. That honor should go to Tom Beghin, who to date has producedtwo fascinating exegeses of the mutual influences among Haydn and his execu-tants historical and living: “A Composer, His Dedicatee, Her Instrument: Thoughtson Performing Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas,” in Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed.Caryl Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); and also “De-livery, Delivery, Delivery! Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydn’s KeyboardSonatas,” in Engaging Rhetoric: Essays on Haydn and Performance, ed. Tom Beghin,Sander Goldberg, and Elisabeth Le Guin (publication under review).

17. “Its style and special effects give ample opportunity for the soloist to display vir-tuosity, tone and expressiveness, suggesting a high degree of collaboration be-tween Kraft and Haydn.” Othmar Wessely and Suzanne Wijsman, “Kraft, Anton”in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online (London: Macmillan,2000–), www.grovemusic.com.

18. Avis Important au Lecteur. . . J’avertis donc qu’il est très-important de se mettre exactement à la place de la statueque nous allons observer. Il faut commencer d’exister avec elle, n’avoir qu’un seul sens,quand elle n’en a qu’un; n’acquerir que les idées qu’elle acquiert, ne contracter que leshabitudes qu’elle contracte: en un mot, il faut n’être que ce qu’elle est. Elle ne jugera deschoses comme nous, que quand elle aura tous nos sens et tout notre expérience; et nousne jugerons comme elle, que quand nous nous supposerons privés de tout ce qui luimanque. Je crois que les lecteurs, qui se mettront exactement à sa place, n’auront pasde peine à entendre cette ouvrage; les autres m’opposeront des difficultés sans nombre.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations(1754; reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1984), 9

19. See my remarks about the physical framing of the performer in chapter 1.20. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8–9.21. Ibid.22. Ramón de la Cruz, El pueblo quejoso (1770), in Cinco sainetes inéditos de Don Ramón


de la Cruz, con otro a él atribuido, ed. Charles Emil Kany (New York and Paris, 1924).Quoted and translated in Charles Emil Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1932), 296–97.

23. Ibid.24. Barbara Hanning, “Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth-

century Parisian Salon,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 4 (1989): 512–28.25. Ramón de la Cruz, Los payos críticos (1770). Quoted and translated in Kany, Life

and Manners in Madrid, 336.26. Martha Feldman, “Magic Mirrors and the ‘Seria’ Stage: Thoughts toward a Rit-

ual View,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 3 (fall 1995): 423–85.27. Gasparo Angiolini, Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de

programme au ballet pantomime tragique de Sémiramis (1765; facsimile reprint, Mi-lan: Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, 1956), n.p.

28. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: A. Millar, 1752), 1:185. Quotedin John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the EighteenthCentury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99. Plainly not every middle-class woman subscribed to the sensible style.

29. “La voix, le ton, le geste, l’action, voilà ce qui appartient à l’acteur; et c’est ce quinous frappe. . . . C’est l’acteur qui donne au discours tout ce qu’il a d’énergie.C’est lui qui porte aux oreilles la force et la vérité de l’accent.” Denis Diderot,“Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel’” (1757), in Oeuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris: Édi-tions Gallimard, 1951), 1:220.

30. “Lorsque son oreille sera frappée, elle deviendra la sensation qu’elle éprouvera.Elle sera comme l’echo dont Ovide dit: sonus est qui vivit in illa; c’est le son qui viten elle. . . . L’ouïe ne lui donne l’idée d’aucun objet situé à une certaine distance.”Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 1, chap. 8, “D’un homme borné au sens del’ouïe,” sec. 1, “La statue bornée au sense de l’ouïe est tout ce qu’elle entend,” 59.

31. For grace of style (and for deliberate conflation of voices), I will often paraphrasemy eighteenth-century sources in what follows. In each case, a note will presentthe original text.

32. I take this idea from the program notes to a performance of the complete cycleby Tom Beghin at UCLA’s Clark Library in June 2000.

33. “Pénétrez vous, d’abord, du sentiment naïf et tendre, qu’une jolie villageoise,encore vierge, éprouve, en reprochant à son amoureux l’infidélité qu’elle méri-toit si peu. Supposez-lui un caractère encore plus naïf que celui de Colette dansle Devin du Village: elle ne connoit pas le dépit, elle n’écoute que sa tendresse,elle ne dit que les paroles suivantes.

Quoi! tu peux m’être infidèle!Qui t’aimera plus que moi!Si je te parois moins belle,Mon coeur n’est il rien pour toi!

—Ou quelque chose de semblable.”

Giuseppe Maria Cambini, Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violonParis: Naderman, c. 1803; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972, 21


This is a response to a not dissimilar phrase of Haydn, the first opening vio-lin line of the Andante of his Symphony no. 53, Hob. I:53.

34. You subsequently reminded me that it is this very tune to which Haydn refersin the “Avertissement” published with this group of sonatas, as follows: “Amongthese six sonatas there are two single movements in which the same idea occursthrough several bars: the author has done this intentionally, to show differentmethods of execution.” The other piece that uses this tune is the second move-ment of the second sonata in the set, in C# minor, Hob. XVI:37. It would seemfrom this that Haydn was consciously playing with the tune’s cast of familiarity.(I do not think that I myself was reacting to a memory of the other piece, whichI had not heard for well over a year).

35. “Cependant plus la mémoire aura occasion de s’exercer, plus elle agira avecfacilité. C’est par là que la statue se fera une habitude de se rappeler sans effortles changemens par où elle a passé, et de partager son attention entre ce qu’elleest et ce qu’elle a été. Car une habitude n’est que la facilité s’acquiert par la réitéra-tion des actes.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 1, chap. 2, “Des opérations del’entendement . . . ,” sec. 13, “La mémoire devient en elle une habitude,” 21.

36. “C’était la saison où la terre est couverte des biens qu’elle accorde au travail età la sueur des hommes.” Diderot, “Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel,’” 1:220.

37. “Alle Gemählde von stiller Ruhe und sanftem ungestöhrtem Glücke müßenLeuten von edler Denkart gefallen.” Salomon Gessner, “Idyllen: an den Leser,”in Schriften (Vienna: Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1765), 3:6.

38. “Il aime, selon l’attrait de son coeur, à mêler ses pleurs au cristal d’une fontaine;à fouler d’un pied léger l’herbe tendre de la prairie; à traverser, à pas lents, descampagnes fertiles . . . à fuir au fond des forêts.” Diderot, “Entretiens sur ‘Le Filsnaturel,’” 1:222. This is a description of Diderot’s character Dorval, as imaginedby Diderot.

39. “Il s’était abandonné au spectacle de la nature. Il avait la poitrine élevée. Il res-pirait avec force. . . . Je m’écriai, presque sans le vouloir: ‘Il est sous le charme.’”Ibid.

40. “Hast du, Philomele! durch dein zärtliches Lied; hat ein lauschender Waltgottmich geweckt, oder eine Nymphe, die schüchtern durchs Gebüsche rauscht?”Salomon Gessner, “Die Nacht,” in Schriften, 2:130.

41. I am inspired to use this Ovidian imagery by Wye Allanbrook, who has pioneeredits use as an exegetical tool. See “Theorizing the Comic Surface,” in Music in theMirror : Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the Twenty-firstCentury, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen. (Lincoln : University ofNebraska Press, 2002), and “Haydn and the Rhetoric of Comic Metamorpho-sis” (paper delivered at the national meeting of the American Musicological So-ciety, Atlanta, Georgia, 2001).

42. “Si cependant elle n’a point encore été blessée par les corps sur lesquels elle aporté la main, elle continuera d’étendre les bras sans défiance: mais, à la pre-mière piqûre, cette confiance l’abandonnera, et elle demeurera immobile.”Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 2, chap. 7, “Des idées que peut acquérir unhomme borné au sens de toucher,” sec. 5, “La douleur suspend le désir qu’ellea de se mouvoir,” 116.


43. “[Le mal qu’on reproche au théatre n’est pas précisement d’inspirer des pas-sions criminelles, mais] de disposer l’âme à des sentimens trop tendres, qu’onsatisfait ensuite aux dépens de la vertu.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Lettre à M.d’Alembert sur son article ‘Genève’” (1758), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Galli-mard, 1995), 5:42.

44. “Je n’accuse pas [le comédien] d’être précisément un trompeur, mais de cul-tiver pour tout métier le talent de tromper les hommes, et de s’exercer à deshabitudes qui ne pouvant être innocentes qu’au théâtre, ne servent par toutailleurs qu’à mal faire. Ces hommes si bien parés, si bien exercés au ton de lagalanterie et aux accens de la passion, n’abuseront-ils jamais de cet art pour sé-duire de [ jeunes] personnes?” Ibid., 73.

45. “Et lorsque le poids du jour sera tombé nous continuerons notre route, et dansun temps plus éloigné, nous nous rappellerons encore cet endroit enchanté etl’heure délicieuse que nous y avons passée.” Denis Diderot, “Loutherbourg:paysage avec figures et animaux,” Salon of 1763, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. PaulVernière (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 610.

appendix

I am indebted to Christian Speck’s Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Komposi-tionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen Stellung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987) forthe basic idea and structure of this table; his version, which also compares the com-position and publication dates of Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets with those of Boc-cherini’s, appears on 205.1. Boccherini’s opp. 39 and 41 are “mixed” opere, containing quintets, symphonies,

and other works in addition to quartets.2. Pleyel’s op. 39 comprises first editions of the quartets from Boccherini’s opp.

39, 41, and 52, and reprints some of his op. 32. See Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bib-liographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, trans. AndreasMayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 259.


bibliography

For ease of reference, this bibliography is divided into five sections:

A. Sources used for the musical examples and for the performancesrecorded on the CD

B. Primary sources (to 1900) referring directly to Boccherini. The relevant passages of many of these sources appear inhttp://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini

C. Contextual primary sources (to 1900)

D. Secondary sources referring directly to Boccherini

E. Contextual secondary sources

a. sources used for the musical examples andfor the performances recorded on the cd

Cello Concertos

Concerto in C Major, G. 573. Boccherini: concerto n. 11 in do maggiore, G. 573. Editedby Aldo Pais. Padua: Zanibon, 1995.

Cello Sonatas

Sonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo. MS, Milan, Conservatorio G. Verdi. DiscoveredA. Z. Laterza, 1982. (Autograph?)

Sonata in G Major, G. 5. London: R. Bremner, 1770–75.

331

Sonata in C Major, G. 17. MS, Lennoxlove, Scotland, collection of the Duke of Hamil-ton. (Gérard: “MS Copies: [score]”.)

String Quartets

Quartets op. 2, G. 159–64. Paris: Vénier, April 1767 (as op. 1).Quartets op. 8, G. 165–70. Paris: Vénier, December 1769 (as op. 6).Quartets op. 9, G. 171–76. Paris: Boyer, c. 1790 (as op. 10). (NB: Boyer reused the

original Vénier plates from 1772.)Quartets op. 15, G. 177–82. Paris: Vénier, April 1773 (as op. 11).

String Quintets

Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5, G. 275 (1771). Collection des quintetti de Boccherini.16 vols. Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1818.

Quintet in D Major, op. 11, no. 6, “L’uccelliera,” G. 276 (1771). Collection des quintettide Boccherini. 16 vols. Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1818.

Quintet in C Minor, op. 18, no. 1, G. 283 (1774). Collection des quintetti de Boccherini.16 vols. Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1818.

Quintet in A Minor, op. 20, no. 6, G. 294 (1775). Collection des quintetti de Boccherini.16 vols. Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1818.

Quintet in C Major, op. 50, no. 5, G. 374 (1795). Collection des quintetti de Boccherini.16 vols. Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1818.

Works by Composers Other Than Boccherini

Brunetti, (Francisco?). “Método de violoncello” (c. 1800). MS, signature 1/7041 (10),Madrid, Biblioteca del Conservatorio Superior de Música. (Autograph?)

Duport, Jean-Louis. Étude no. 8. Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle et sur la conduite del’archet, dedié aux professeurs de violoncelle. Paris: Imbault, 1820.

b. primary sources referring directly to boccherini

“Anecdotes sur Viotti.” Le Décade philosophique 6, 3e trimestre (1798): 525.Baillot, Pierre-Marie-François de Sales. L’Art du violon. Paris: Dépôt Central de la

Musique, 1835. Translated by Louise Goldberg as The Art of the Violin (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1991).

Baillot, Pierre-Marie-François de Sales, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, andCharles-Nicolas Baudiot. Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement. c. 1804.Facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1974.

Beckford, William. Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal. Vol. 2. London: R. Bent-ley, 1834.

332 bibliography

Boccherini y Calonje, Alfredo. Luis Boccherini: apuntes biográficos y catálogo de las obrasde este célebre maestro publicados por su biznieto. Madrid: Imprenta y Litografía de A.Rodero, 1879.

Boyé. L’Expression musicale, mise au rang des chimères. 1779. Facsimile reprint, Geneva:Minkoff, 1973.

Burney, Charles. The Letters of Charles Burney. Edited by Alvaro Ribeiro. Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1991.

Cambini, Giuseppe Maria. “Ausführung der Instrumentalquartetten.” Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung, 22 August 1804.

———. Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon. Paris: Naderman, c. 1803.Facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972.

Carpani, Giuseppe. Le Haydine, ovvero Lettere sulla vita e le opere del celebre maestro GiuseppeHaydn. 1808. Bologna: Forni Editore, 1969.

Choron, Al[exandre], and François Joseph Marie Fayolle. Dictionnaire historique desmusiciens. 2 vols. Paris: Valade, 1810.

Fétis, François-Joseph. “Boccherini, Louis.” In Biographie universelle des musiciens. 2nded. 8 vols. 1873. Facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972.

Jones, William. A Treatise on the Art of Music, in Which the Elements of Harmony and AirAre Practically Considered. Colchester: W. Keymer, 1784.

Junker, Carl Ludwig. Zwanzig Componisten: eine Skizze. Bern, 1776.Mattei, Saverio. Memorie per servire alla vita del Metastasio ed elogio di N. 1785. Reprint,

Sala Bolognese: Forni, 1987.Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix. Reisebriefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832. Edited by Paul

Mendelssohn Bartholdy. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1862.Obituary (Luigi Boccherini). Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 21 August 1805.Review of Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Journal

des savans, 30 ventôse an VI (1797), 171.Reviews of Boccherini’s works. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, June 1799.Schaul, Johann Baptist. Briefe über den Geschmack in der Musik. Carlsruhe, 1809.Tablettes de renommée des musiciens, auteurs, compositeurs, virtuoses . . . pour servir à

L’Almanach-Dauphin. Paris: Cailleau, Duchesne, et al., 1785.

c. contextual primary sourcesAngiolini, Gasparo. Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de pro-

gramme au ballet pantomime tragique de Sémiramis. 1765. Facsimile reprint, Milan:Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, 1956.

———. Lettere di Gasparo Angiolini a Monsieur Noverre sopra i balli pantomimi. Milan:G. B. Bianchi, 1773.

Aristotle. Introduction to Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. Translated by WilliamDavid Ross. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Armona y Murga, José Antonio. Memorias cronológicas sobre el teatro en España. 1785.Vol. 1 of Alaveses en la historia, edited by Emilio Palacio Fernández, JoaquínAlvárez Barrientos, and María Del Carmen Sánchez García. Vitoria: Diputación,1988.

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cal Period.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 27, no. 2 (summer 1974):212–47.

White, Chappell. From Vivaldi to Viotti: A History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto.Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992.

Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.Zaslaw, Neal, ed. The Classical Era: From the 1740s to the End of the Eighteenth Century.

Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989.

344 bibliography

index

345

acoustics, 222; influence of, 76–77acting. See under Diderotafrancesismo, 61, 63–64, 97, 255Albani, Francesco, 78Alborea, Francesco. See FrancischelloAlpers, Svetlana, 76, 244Amsterdam, Ellen Iris, 224analysis through performance, 234–53Andreoli, Carlo, 208Angiolini, Gasparo, 46–48, 91–96, 138–39,

263; Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre, 47,94; Sémiramis, 93

Aristotle, on making and doing, 135–36Artaria (publisher), 255Artaria Quartet, 12automata, 147–48

Bach, C.P.E., 65; Abschied von meinem Silber-mannischen Claviere, 181, 195

Bachaumont, Louis Petit de, 39Bagge, Baron de, 52Bailleux (publisher), 55Baillot, Pierre, 78, 153, 163, 184, 256,

319n50ballet, 88. See also pantomime balletBarnes, David, 160Batoni, Pompeo, 39Baxandall, Michael, 4, 76, 244Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, 77Beethoven, Ludwig van, on composition,

277–78n15

bel canto, cellistic, 23Biagi-Ravenni, Gabriella, 71–72bien-parado, 97, 100Blackmore, Richard, 187Boccherini, Anna Matilda, 43Boccherini, Giovanni Gastone, 43–45,

71–72Boccherini, Leopoldo, 43–44, 48Boccherini, Luigi: abandonment of melodic

line, 72–73, 75–76, 210, 223–24; ac-counts of his cello playing, 39; anecdotesabout, 68–69; autograph catalog, omis-sion of virtuoso works, 133; autopsy of,160, 187–88; “celestial” topos, 32, 130;cello possibly owned by, 293n22; compo-sitional process, 33–36; contemporarycomparison with Haydn, 255–57; con-temporary writings on, 4; and Haydn,254; health, 160, 187–88; hedonisticquality in his music, 219; influence ofdance music on, 48; influence of Vien-nese style on, 46–48; interdependenceof composer and performer identities,42; in Lucca, 42–44; and melancholy,162–82, 204–6; his music associatedwith painting, 78–79; in Paris, 49–55;partiality to soft dynamics, 71; on per-formers, 1; portraits of, 39–42, 134;posthumous reputation, 66, 68, 163,255–56; publications, 55, 61, 255,325n7; relations with Pleyel, 38; self-

Boccherini, Luigi (continued)presentation in letters, 38; sonatas in hisoeuvre, 132–33; in Spain, 3, 55–64, 134;string quartets, chronology of, 208–9,271; string quartets, early, 207–53; styleperiodization, 208–210; tours of north-ern Italy, 48; tragedy in his music, 85–90, 94–95; use of instrumental tessitura,95; in Vienna, 44–55; virtuosity, 5–6;wife (first), 57–58, 187; his works as areflection of his character, 38–39; worksin Spanish style, 100–102; works omittedfrom his catalog, 133

Boccherini, Luigi, works: aria “Se d’un amortiranno” in Bb Major, G. 557, 58, 129;Cello Concerto in Bb Major, 273n1; CelloConcerto in C Major, G. 573, 53; CelloSonata in C Major, G. 17, 105–29; CelloSonata in Eb Major, fuori catalogo, 14–37; Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, 130;La Clementina, G. 540, 100; Concerto inA Major, G. 475, 129; Concerto in CMajor, G. 477, 293n19; Concerto in GMajor, G. 480, 293n19; Quartet in AMajor, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, 67, 74, 215;Quartet in C Minor, op. 2, no. 1, G. 159,86, 88; Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1,G. 171, 165–76, 195, 291n4; Quartet inD Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, 70, 190–91;Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179,223–53; Quartet in Eb Major, op. 8, no.3, G. 167, 217–18; Quartet in Eb Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, 215–17; Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, 176–80,212–15; Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3,G. 173, 146–47; Quartet in F Major, op.15, no. 2, G. 178, 73; Quartet in G Minor,op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, 196–204, 215; Quar-tet op. 53, no. 1, G. 236, 71; Quartets op. 9, G. 171–76, 61; Quintet in A Major,op. 13, no. 5, G. 281, 291n4; Quintet inA Major, op. 28, no. 2, G. 308, 291n4;Quintet in A Minor, op. 20, no. 6, G.294, 85, 95; Quintet in C Major, op. 30,no. 6, G. 324 (La musica notturna dellestrade di Madrid), 100–101; Quintet in C Major, op. 50, no. 5, G. 374, 98–99;Quintet in C Minor, op. 18, no. 1, G. 283,88–90; Quintet in D Major, op. 11, no. 6,G. 276, 144; Quintet in E Major, op. 11,no. 5, G. 275, 157–59; scena, G. 544,

346 index

302n1; Sextet in C Major, G. 466, 129;Sinfonia in C Major, G. 491, 129; Sonatain A Major, G. 4, 129; Sonata in A Major,G. 13, 128; Sonata in Bb Major, G. 565,141; Sonata in C Major, G. 17, 129, 145, 152, 154, 215; Sonata in C Major,G. 569, 128; Sonata in Eb Major, G. 566,129, 215; Sonata in G Major, G. 5, 129;Trio in F Major, G. 95, 129; villancicos,G. 539, 100; Violin Sonata in Bb Major,op. 5, no. 3, G. 27, 314n11; ViolinSonata in G Minor, G. 29, 293n25

Boccherini, Maria Ester, 43–44, 46–47Boccherini, Riccarda, 43body: and dance, 47; of listeners, 258–63;

mechanization of, 117; and performance,235, 239, 245–46, 248; as performer,102–4; physiology according to Descartes, 183;training of toward perfection, 148–54.See also comfort: technical; discomfort,technical; embodiment, historical con-ceptions of; humors, bodily; inward move-ment; kinesthesia; nerves likened tostrings; pain; stringed instruments asso-ciated with body; tactile experience andcomposition; tension and release

body, performing: muscular resistance, 18,21; transfer of styles, 22–23

bolero, 97Bordeu, Théophile, 184, 207Boswell, James, 185Boucher, Alexandre, 69Boucher, François, 78, 219boulevard theaters, Paris, 50Bourgoing, Jean-François, 60Boyé, 163, 165Brillon de Jouy, Madame, 53Broschi, Carlo (Farinelli), 58, 162Brunetti, Francisco, 151–54Brunetti, Gaetano, 310n55Bryson, Norman, 103, 219Burgtheater (Vienna), 44–46, 147, 222Burney, Charles, 53, 133, 162, 255–56,

279n9, 284n68Burton, Robert, 162–63, 189–90, 195–96

Cadalso, José, 315n12Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 191Calzabigi, Raniero de, 44Cambini, Giuseppe, 5, 48, 86–87, 207, 211,

255–56, 276n25

cantor–musicus distinction, 134–35Capron, Nicolas, 52Carlos III, King of Spain, 58–59, 313n7Carlos IV, King of Spain, 68–69carnal musicology, 3, 26, 33Carpani, Giuseppe, 163Cartier, Jean-Baptiste, 256Casanova, Giacomo, 285n71Cassiodorus, 184Castelvecchi, Stefano, 87Castil-Blaze, Henri, 68–69cellists in Paris, 51–52cello: as virtuoso instrument, 43–44, 210–

11; methods, 151–54Chênedollé, Charles, 256Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 1Cheyne, George, 185–86Christmann, Gerhard, 39, 41chromaticism, pathetic connotations of, 23Cirri, Giambattista, 211Clairon, La (Claire -Joseph Léris), 154clefs, 32; as signals for thumb placement, 21Coltellini, Celeste, 87comfort, 9; technical, 19, 149, 236, 239,

241–42; in performance, 9–10, 26–27,30. See also discomfort, technical

Compañía de Ópera Italiana de los SitiosReales, 56, 58

compositional process and execution, 33–34concert behavior, 83–84Concerts Spirituels, 51–52Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 7–9, 11, 60,

211–12, 258con smorfia. See smorfioso“conspiration,” 94consumptions, 186, 192–93Conti, Prince de, 52, 139Coquéau, Claude-Philibert, 314n11Correspondance littéraire (Grimm), 154Creus, Francisco, 55, 285n71Cruz, Ramón de la, 60–61cyclicity: of movements, 128; of themes

between movements, 116, 127–28. Seealso recycling

Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie, 87; Nina, 90D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 8, 236dance, 149; and the body, 90–96; classifi-

cation of motions in, 92–93; French, inSpain, 64; influence on Boccherini, 43;personal styles, 95; rehearsals, 95–96;

index 347

Spanish, 96–102; Viennese reform of,46–47

Della Croce, Luigi, 32Descartes, René, 183descending tetrachord, 100Diderot, Denis, 59, 207; anti-sensible ideas,

154–55; on attitudes and actions, 92;beehive image, 236–37; on body andculture, 6–7; on “conspiration” of move-ments, 94; on expressive power of ges-ture, 85; on Greuze, 83; on a Louther-bourg paysage, 79; on le moelleux, 93; LeNeveu de Rameau, 145, 190; paradox ofthe actor, 154–57; on performance, 2, 5, 105, 154, 156–57, 222, 264–65; por-trait by Louis-Michel Van Loo, 102–3; on Richardson, 69–70; “Salons,” 80, 262;on sketches, 75; on tableaux, 4–5, 80–81; on understanding the soul, 104

discomfort, technical, 112, 127, 239–41,243–44, 248–49, 251–52. See alsocomfort, technical

Ditters, Karl, 45, 147Don Juan, 192double-stopping, 21, 30–31, 53, 151drone, 21Dugazon, Louise-Rosalie, 87Duport, Jean-Louis, 51–53, 143, 151–52Duport, Jean-Pierre, 51–54Durazzo, Giacomo, 49dynamics, 71, 145–46; physical production

of, 145

embodiment, historical conceptions of, 6–11.See also body

eroticism, 82–83, 100, 219Esteve, Pablo, 155–56eudaemonism, 9expectations, different between listener

and performer, 30–31expressive playing, 86

fact and fiction, 12–13fandango, 100Farinelli. See Broschi, CarloFarnese, Queen Isabella, 58Favart, Charles Simon, 49Favier, Mimi, 43Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo de,

59–60, 96, 182, 275–76n23Feldman, Martha, 262

Felipe V, King of Spain, 64, 162Fernando VI, King of Spain, 58, 148Ferrari, Domenico, 307n36Fétis, François-Joseph, 52, 209fingerings, 25, 105, 152Font, Francisco, 134, 136Foucault, Michel, 150Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 75Francischello (Francesco Alborea), 45, 276“fundamental feeling,” 7

Gabrielli, Caterina, 43, 45galanterie, as antidote to love-melancholy,

196; in Spain, 60galant style, 10Galen, 182–83Gallini, Giovanni Andrea, 149Galuppi, Baldassare, L’Artaserse, 43Garrick, David, 154–55Gassmann, Florian, 45genius and virtue, 132Gérard, Yves, 39, 129, 133Gessner, Salomon, 78–80Glisson, Francis, 183–84Gluck, Christoph von, 46–47, 94–95; Le

cinesi, 147; Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre,47, 94; Orfeo, 47; Sémiramis, 93

Goldoni, Carlo, 244Gossec, François-Joseph, 52Goya, Francisco de, 63, 140–42, 192Grangé (publisher), 55Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 69, 77, 81, 83–

84, 93Griesinger, Georg August, 256–57Grimm. See Correspondance littéraireGross, Sara, 153grotesque style, 138–47; in art, 139–41; in

dance, 139; in music, 141, 143–47Grützmacher, Friedrich, 273n1Guadagni, Gaetano, 43, 45Gumpenhuber, Philipp, 46, 281n29Gusdorf, Georges, 188

half-step descent, 215–18Hanning, Barbara, 261harmonics, cello, 143, 220Harvey, William, 182Haydn, Joseph, 3, 57, 61–62, 85, 207, 254–

57; Arianna, 297n51; compositionthrough execution, 256–57; G-majorkeyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39, perfor-

348 index

mance of, 263–70; on singing, 257;writing for strings, 257

Heartz, Daniel, 1, 45Hilverding, Franz, 46–47Hübner, Christian Friedrich, 7humors, bodily, 182

identification with composer, 24–25idiom, and creation, 131–32instrumentation, to convey emotion, 95inward movement, 18–19, 23, 31, 70,

215–16Iriarte, Tomás de, 62

Jansson, Jean-Baptiste, l’aîné, 51–52Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 156Junker, Carl, 176, 181

Kärtnertortheater (Vienna), 44, 46, 139kinesthesia, 7. See also embodimentKraft, Anton, 257

labyrinth, harmonic, 181La Chevardière (publisher), 52lacuna, as sensible strategy, 73, 75Lekain, Henri-Louis, 154Léris, Claire-Joseph. See Clairon, LaLeutgeb, Joseph, 45Liotard, Jean-Étienne, 39, 41Lippmann, Friedrich, 129listeners and listening, 84; eighteenth-

century, 260; familiarity, 27, 265, 268;inattention, 261–62; the perfect,258–63. See also concert behavior

Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de, 79Lucca, 42–44Luis de Borbón, Infante Don, 57, 71, 134,

223

Madrid, 60–62, 76, 139majismo, 63, 97, 141Majo, Gian Francesco, L’almería, 57–58Manfredi, Filippo, 39, 48–49, 55, 207Marescalchi, Luigi, 55, 57María Bárbara de Braganza, Queen, 58María Josefa, Condesa-Duquesa de

Benavente-Osuna, 61–62, 100, 141, 155Maria Theresa, Empress, 45–46masturbation, 192–94mechanism, 148–49, 249; in music, 153–54,

157

melancholy: equated with consumption, 186–87; from Galen to Descartes, 182–86;love-melancholy, 190–92, 195; and music,162–82; satiric, 189–92; sensible, 185–86

memory, and listening to music, 215, 265–66Mendelssohn, Felix, 85Metastasio, 43, 46; Artaserse, 58, 86–87,

303n8; Le cinesi, 147; Didone abbandonata,115–16

moelleux, le, 93, 187motion toward center. See inward movementmovement, personalization of, 149Mozart, Leopold, 22, 221Mozart, Wolfgang, 70, 139, 163, 315n17

Nardini, Pietro, 45, 48, 207narrative. See tableaux vivantsnerves likened to strings, 184Newtonianism, 148–49night, 165nightingale, 76, 206nocturnal emission, 192–93nocturnal music, 76novelty, desire for, 30Noverre, Jean-Georges, 65, 91, 93, 95–96;

on virtuosity, 137–38

Opéra (Paris), 49–50opéra-comique, 50oration, musical metaphor of, 75Orléans, Duc d’, 52

pain, 10–11Paisiello, Giovanni, 87; Nina, 90pantomime ballet, 46–47, 50, 93, 95, 139paradox of the actor. See under DiderotParet y Alcázar, Luis, 71–72Paris, 49–55Pelliccia, Clementina, 57–58Pelliccia, María Teresa, 285n71performance: assessment of stages in, 14,

17–18; audience behavior during, 258–63; body and, 17–18; effect on listener,266–70

performance directions. See ponticello tone;smorfioso

Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, La servapadrona, 58

periodicity, 48, 68Persuis, Louis-Luc, Nina, ou La Folle pour

amour, 88

index 349

phrasing, 69Picquot, Louis, 52, 55, 290n2Pitrot, Antoine, 43Plato, 184Pleyel, Ignaz, 38, 101, 188ponticello tone, 127Porter, Roy, 189pseudo-Aristotle, 185Puccini, Giacomo, 44Puppo, Giovanni, 256

quartet-playing, interaction in, 237–53quartettini, 208, 223

Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 50–51Raoul, Jean-Marie, 152readers and reading: relationship to CD ex-

amples, 2; relationships to analysis, 234recording and editing performance, 250–53recycling, 211–15; inter-generic, 128–30;

inter-movement, 129–30; of transitionalmaterial, 130–31. See also cyclicity

reminiscence, thematic, 212–15repetition, 66, 68, 72, 151, 165–66, 209,

230; as dialogue, 212; in ensembles, 212;pleasure in, 21–22. See also cyclicity

rhetorical metaphor in music, 229Richardson, Samuel, 53, 69, 81–83Richter, Franz Xaver, 321n2Roach, Joseph, 182Robert, Hubert, 292n16rococo, 219–21rondos, 117, 128Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59, 185; anti-

visuality, 138; Le Devin du village, 256; on language and emotions, 136–38; onperformance, 138; on the role of theperformer, 24–25; on synesthesia, 220;on tableaux, 80; on tragédie-lyrique,50–51; on unity of melody, 292n12

Sade, Marquis de, 194–95Sadie, Stanley, 128Salieri, Antonio, 45Salomone, Giuseppe, 43Sammartini, Giovanni Battista, 48, 321n2Sardini, Giovan Battista, 45Saunier, Vincent, 43Scarlatti, Domenico, 153, 162Schaul, Johann Baptist, 83–84, 163, 256Schenker, Heinrich, 260

seguidillas, 97, 100–101senses. See embodiment; sixth sensesensibilité, 53–54, 70, 161, 304n17; repre-

sented by sympathetic vibration, 184–85sensible style: in acting, 185; in art, 71, 75,

79; in dance, 93, 95; listening, 204–6; in literature, 81–82; in music, 70–72, 82,84, 87, 95, 105, 111–12, 115–16, 145

sentir/sentire and performance, 25sforzando, 221–23silences, 195, 229Sisman, Elaine, 181Sitios Reales, Madrid, 55sixth sense, 7–8sketches, esthetics of, 75slow movements and sensible style, 70Small, Christopher, 184smorfioso, 190Solomon, Maynard, 70, 139sonata form: expectations, 27, 30;

personification in, 27Sontag, Susan, 161sound, personal. See timbreSpain, 55–64, 134; Italian music in, 55–56,

58, 61Speck, Christian, 68–69, 73, 129, 132,

208–9, 224, 230spectacle, stage, 147Spohr, Louis, 66Starzer, Joseph, 46–47, 321n2stasis, 68Stegreif komödie, 46Sterne, Laurence, 185stringed instruments associated with body, 184string quartet: early history of ensemble, 48;

first professional, 207subjectivity as a necessity, 25–26Sudnow, David, 22sympathetic vibration, 184syphilis, 192–93

tableaux vivants, 4, 77–84; and sensible recep-tion, 80–84

tactile experience and composition, 131tension and release, 30, 66tessitura, 95, 112, 211; extreme, 141textile-like writing, 210–11Théâtre-Italien, 49–50theatricalized reading of instrumental

music, 112, 115–17

350 index

third-relations, 205, 217thumb-position, 19–22, 27, 30, 105, 111–12,

116–17, 152, 276n3Tiepolo, Giambattista, 37timbral ambiguity, 75timbre, 219–20; personal, 23tonadilla escénica, 62–63Tortella, Jaime, 3, 55torture, 10tragédie-lyrique, 50–51tragedy: in Boccherini’s music, 85–90, 94–

95; in instrumental music, 112; and thetableau, 85–90

tuberculosis, 160–61, 186–87; and melan-choly, 6; metaphorical associations, 161;and sensible reception, 80–84

Turchi, Francesco, 43Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 8Twining, Thomas, 85, 255–56

unusual keys, 166, 176, 181

Vallejo Fernández, María Antonia (LaCaramba), 155–56

Vallotti, Antonio, 45Valls, Francisco, 62Van Loo, Carle, 77Van Loo, Louis-Michel, 102–3Vaucanson, Jacques, 147–48Vénier, Jean Baptiste, 52–53, 55, 61, 223Viadana, Lodovico, 17vibrato, 22Vienna, 44–55, 139Viganò, Onorato, 43, 280n25virtue, 135–36virtuosi, 134–36, 157virtuosity contra sensibilité, 136–38visuality: and instrumental music, 4, 65–

66, 103, 153–54, 190, 262–63, 266–67;physical gestures of performer, 35–36

visualization of hearing, 219–20Voltaire, 143; Sémiramis, 93

Weigl, Joseph, 257wit in music, 128Wollheim, Richard, 210work and performance, inseparability of, 133work-concept, 133

Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 163–65, 195

bocherinis body

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