Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology 9780520930629

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
List of music examples
CD playlist
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. “Cello-and-Bow Thinking”
Chapter 2. “As My Works Show Me to Be”
Chapter 3. Gestures and Tableaux
Chapter 4. Virtuosity, Virtuality, Virtue
Chapter 5. A Melancholy Anatomy
Chapter 6. “It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece”
Chapter 7. The Perfect Listener
Appendix: Chronological Table of String Quartets
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Boccherini’s Body

Boccherini’s Body An Essay in Carnal Musicology

Elisabeth Le Guin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley 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 2006 780'.92—dc22 2005023224 Manufactured in the United States of America 13 10

12 11 10 9 8 7 6

09 08 07 5 4 3 2

06 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, my lines without character and without life, these lines that I have just 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 sans caractères et sans vie, ces lignes que je viens de tracer les unes au-dessus des autres? Rien, mais rien du tout; il faut voir la chose. denis diderot, “Vernet,” Salon of 1767

carnal Latin carnalis, fleshly; med. Latin, blood-relationship 1. Of or pertaining to the flesh; fleshly, bodily, corporeal 2. Related by blood 3. a. Pertaining to the body as the seat of passions or appetites; fleshly, sensual b. Sexual 4. Not spiritual, in a negative sense: material, temporal, secular 5. Not spiritual, in a privative sense: unregenerate 6. Carnivorous, bloody, murderous Oxford English Dictionary

contents

l i s t o f f i g u r e s xi l i s t o f m u s i c e x a m p l e s xiii c d p l a y l i s t xv a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s xxi

Introduction

1

The origins of this project—Boccherini’s generally acknowledged merits—some less generally acknowledged qualities—“carnal musicology” as based in the performer’s viewpoint—brief digests of each chapter to come—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 E b 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 movement in question— thumb-position—pleasure in repetition—cellistic bel canto—the predominance of reflective and pathetic affects— communicability and reciprocality—Rousseau on the role of the performer—subjectivity as a necessity—the second half of the movement—relationships between musical form and carnal experience—Boccherini’s “celestial” topos—carnality and compositional process—the importance of the visual—in conclusion: the necessary ambivalence of 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 firsthand biographical evidence—the divergence of his performer and composer identities—period anxieties over those identities—early years in Lucca—familial emphasis on dance—travels to Vienna, 1757–63— possibilities of further touring—possible Viennese influences on Boccherini—Paris, 1768: the musical and cultural climate—Parisian virtuoso cellists—circumstantial evidence of meetings between Boccherini and Jean-Pierre Duport—Boccherini’s especial success with Parisian publishers—Spain, 1769—Boccherini’s first court post, 1770—the Spanish musical and cultural climate—Boccherini’s adeptness at finding a place within it

3. Gestures and Tableaux

65

The importance of visuality to period reception—its subsequent decline—the effect of this decline on Boccherini’s posthumous reputation—Spohr: “This does not deserve to be called music!”—a passage that might have provoked such a reaction—Boccherinian stasis and repetitiousness—Boccherinian sensibilité—the paintings of Luis Paret—the predominance of soft dynamics—hyper-precision in performance directions—the lacuna as sensible strategy—Boccherinian abandonment of melody in favor of texture—the influence of acoustics— tableaux in period theater and painting—their relations to sensibilité—absorption—suppressed eroticism—tragedy and the tableau— the reform body: Angiolini’s classifications of motion styles—Spanish dance and gesture—seguidillas, boleros, and fandangos—Boccherini’s complex relations to Spanish style—“Instrumentalist, what do you 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 and movements—unconscious recycling of subsidiary passages—the influence of tactile experience on this level of composition—etymologies of the word idiom—the sonatas within Boccherini’s oeuvre—virtuosi— philosophical problems posed by virtuosity—virtuosity contra sensibilité—the grotesque—actorly virtuosity—the automatic and mechanical—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 melancholy—Edward Young’s Night Thoughts—a melancholic reading of the String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, Allegro—melancholic labyrinths—from Galen to Descartes—sympathetic vibration as a cause of or cure for melancholy—various consumptions—life and art: some animadversions—satiric melancholy—the performance direction con smorfia—other consumptions—Enlightenment anxieties about 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 penchant for texture over melody—recycling the idea of recycling—the problem of “repetition” in ensemble contexts—sublimated caresses—the rococo—address to a sforzando—two analyses of the String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179—peculiarities of the work—the first analysis (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 comparison of the two composers—using carnal musicology on composers other than Boccherini—the Perfect Listener: re-creating “listener performance practice”—the Perfect Listener attends a performance of Haydn’s G-major keyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39—cadential remarks appendix: chronological table o f s t r i n g q u a r t e t s 271 n o t e s 273 b i b l i o g r a p h y 331 i n d e x 345

list of figures

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Lyra Howell, Left Hand in Thumb-Position 20 Italian school, eighteenth century, Portrait of Luigi Boccherini 40 Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Luigi Boccherini 41 Eighteenth-century map of Castilla y León 56 Francisco de Goya, Baile a orillas del rio Manzanares 63 Luis Paret y Alcázar, Ensayo de una comedia 72 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La Mère bien-aimée 84 Francisco de Goya, El entierro de la sardina 140 Francisco de Goya, “Incómoda elegancia” 142 Anon., Night the Third: Narcissa 164

xi

list of music examples

Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), first half of movement 15 2. Cello Sonata in E b 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 (Largo cantabile), bars 13–20 54 4b. Jean-Pierre Duport, Étude in D Major, opening bars 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), bars 1–13 98 1.

xiii

xiv

list of music examples

11. 12. 13. 14. 15a. 15b. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23a. 23b. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Cello Sonata in C Major, G.17, i (Moderato) 106 Cello Sonata in C Major, G.17, ii (Adagio) 113 Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 5–8 to words from Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata 115 Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, iii (Rondò) 118 Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, i (Allegro militare), bars 50–51 130 Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, ii (Largo), opening 130 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 2 144 Chord formations from Brunetti 151 String Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5, G. 275, iii (Minuetto), opening 158 String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i (Allegro) 166 String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio 177 String Quartet in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, i (Allegro assai), bars 32–35 191 String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no 4, G. 168, ii (Grave) 197 String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, ii (Allegro), bars 85–96 213 String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), bars 8–14 214 String Quartet in E b Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i (Adagio), bars 13–18 216 String Quartet in E b Major, op. 8, no. 3, G. 167, i (Largo [soto (sic) voce]), bars 22–25 218 String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino) 225 String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii (Prestissimo) 231

cd playlist

All selections are by Luigi Boccherini. The Artaria String Quartet is made up of Elizabeth Blumenstock, Katherine Kyme, and Anthony Martin, violin/viola; and Elisabeth Le Guin, cello. 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro). Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 6:46. Examples 1 and 2. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 5–7. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:11. Example 1. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 8–11. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:12. Example 1. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 18–22. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:16. Example 1. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 26–29. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:15. Example 1. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 11–18. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:32. Example 1. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), xv

xvi

cd playlist

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

bars 36–38. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:12. Example 2. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 45–51. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:32. Example 2. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 59–62. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:16. Example 2. 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. String Quartet in D Minor, op. 9, no. 2, G. 172, ii (Larghetto), bars 13–23. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:35. No example. String Quartet in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, ii (Adagio), opening. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:36. No example. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, ii (Larghetto), opening. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 1:26. No example. 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. String Quartet in E b Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i (Adagio), bars 1–38. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 2:11. No example. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bars 28–34. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:57. Example 22. String Quartet in D Minor, op. 9, no. 2, G. 172, i (Grave), opening. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:37. No example. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato). Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 7:12. Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bar 5. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:05. Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bar 27.

cd playlist

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:05. Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bars 33–34. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:11. Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bars 35–38. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:23. Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, i (Moderato), bars 45–46. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:17. Example 11. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio). Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 3:13. Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 5–8. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:30. Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 9–11. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:17. Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 13–16. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:35. Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 18–23. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:26. Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, ii (Adagio), bars 23–25. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:18. Example 12. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, iii (Rondò). Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 4:13. Example 14. Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, iii (Rondò), bars 112–51. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:45. Example 14. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, ii (Largo assai). Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 5:58. No example. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, iii (Allegretto

xvii

xviii

cd playlist

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

assai), opening. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:28. No example. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), bars 45–51. Elisabeth Le Guin (vcl), Charles Sherman (hps). Length: 0:32. Example 2. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii (Tempo di minuetto), minuet. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 2:03. No example. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 1:20. No example. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 46–50. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:09. No example. String Quartet in F Major, op. 9, no. 3, G. 173, iii (Tempo di minuetto), minuet D.C. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 1:05. No example. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i (Allegro). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 5:48. Example 19. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i (Allegro), bars 32–38. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:24. Example 19. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i (Allegro), bars 38–41. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:13. Example 19. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i (Allegro), bars 44–47. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:14. Example 19. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 37–44. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:24. Example 20. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 45–52. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:25. Example 20. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 53–60. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:26. Example 20. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii

cd playlist

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

(Tempo di minuetto), trio, bars 61–94. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:50. Example 20. 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. String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, i (Allegro), bars 58–60. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:13. Example 19. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 5:05. Example 22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bar 2. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:09. Example 22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bars 4–5. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:13. Example 22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bars 6–10. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:32. Example 22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bars 13–14. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:15. Example 22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bars 38–42. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:42. Example 22. String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, ii (Grave), bars 15–21. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:50. Example 22. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, ii (Allegro), bars 85–96. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:21. Example 23a. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), bars 7–15. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:15. Example 23b. String Quartet in E b Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i (Adagio), bars 13–19. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:24. Example 24. String Quartet in E b Major, op. 8, no. 3, G. 167, i

xix

xx

cd playlist

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

(Largo [soto (sic) voce]), bars 22–24. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:23. Example 25. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii (Prestissimo), bars 23–50. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:23. Example 27. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 6:55. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 43–54. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:25. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 54–60. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:15. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii (Prestissimo). Artaria String Quartet. Length: 2:21. Example 27. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, ii (Prestissimo), bars 63–73. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:09. Example 27. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 14–19. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:12. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 23–28. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:13. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 86–92. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:17. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 29–36. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:16. Example 26. String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, i (Andantino), bars 94–98. Artaria String Quartet. Length: 0:10. Example 26.

acknowledgments

Surely, the true importance of a project like this lies in the wonderful human 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 fellowship assistance, without which the book would never have been written. To Wendy Allanbrook, whose work and mentoring profoundly and forever changed how I hear and understand eighteenth-century music. To the American Musicological Society Subvention Fund, which made possible the editing and mastering of the CD bound into this book. To the anonymous readers for UC Press, for their meticulous and perspicacious reading of drafts early and late; and to one particular anonymous reader of a later, “final” draft, whose strenuous objections to the manuscript (and eventual recusal from the project) triggered major revisions; this is a much better book as a result. To my fellow members of the Artaria String Quartet, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Katherine Kyme, and Anthony Martin, for their beautiful playing in the recorded examples of quartet music and their willingness to be paraphrased and fictionalized in chapter 6; and for cheerfully putting up with years of alternate pontificating and woolgathering on my part. To the Junta of the Asociación Luigi Boccherini, Madrid, for welcoming me into the Asociación’s formative process, and for providing much conversational food for thought: Josep Bassal, José Antonio Boccherini, José Carlos Gosálvez, Germán Labrador, Emilio Moreno, Sergio Pagán, Victor Pagán, Bianca Hernández, and Jaime Tortella. To Joseph Auner, former editor of JAMS, and his redoubtable assistant Catherine 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

xxii

acknowledgments

Does Not Weep’: Sensible, Grotesque, and Mechanical Embodiments in Boccherini’s Chamber Music.” To Umberto Belfiore, for recording the two sonatas included on the book’s CD, and for the final editing and mastering of all of the music examples. To José Antonio Boccherini Sánchez and Christina Slot Wiefkers, for graciously 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; since I claim so strenuously to have a living relationship with him, I would be remiss indeed not to thank him for it here. To Bruce Brown, who read early drafts of several chapters, and who was always generous about answering questions that no one else on the planet could have answered. To Marisol Castillo, for the conversation lessons without which the Spanish wing of this project could never have flown. To Gerhard Christmann, for allowing me to reproduce the Liotard portrait of Boccherini, which he owns, and for the gift of an exquisite porcelain bust of the composer. To Laura Davey and Edith Gladstone, who copyedited a difficult mess of a manuscript with grace and precision. To Denis Diderot, my other non-living companion for so much of this project, whose weaving together of intellect and sentiment remains my ideal both as writer and as human being. To my editors at UC Press, Mary Francis and Dore Brown, for their clearsighted, 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, but how to think about playing it. To Daniel Heartz, who deftly advised the dissertation from which this book emerged, and whose spacious and gracious understanding of the eighteenth century, 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 to demonstrate patience; and for her fine drawing of my left hand, which appears as figure 1. To Mary Hunter, for scholarship that I very much admire, and for her warm support and encouragement. To Mariano Lambea, editor of Revista de musicología. Portions of chapters 1, 3, and 5 appear (in Spanish) in vol. 1 (2004) in an article entitled “Luigi Boccherini 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

acknowledgments

xxiii

15 in 1995 and 1996; and to Victor and Marina Ledin, for their invaluable help in negotiating my 2002 purchase of the subsequently mothballed recordings from Naxos International. To Emilio Moreno, for an ever-ready generosity, and in particular for providing 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 the two 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 always surprising conversations. To Jaime Tortella, for really extraordinary generosity and collegiality, warm friendship, and vigilant, Feijóvian skepticism in the face of my enthusiasms 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 importance 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-modeling Rob 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 about Tom Beghin, for his own embodiments of and reflections upon eighteenth-century music; for challenging my every impulse to be reductive; and for his friendship Tamara Levitz, for generously reading and commenting on an early draft of the introduction Mitchell Morris, Raymond Knapp, Robert Fink, Elizabeth Upton: all conversationalists of a positively eighteenth-century virtuosity, whose influence 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 Finale Sara Gross, for sharing with me her unpublished work on Scarlatti Caroline O’Meara, for assistance with the bibliography

xxiv

acknowledgments

Jacqueline Warwick, for her handsome translations of Diderot, and tactful advice about my own efforts at translation Jonathan Greenberg, Olivia Mather, Cecilia Sun, Maria Cizmic, and the staff of Echo: A Music-centered Journal, for crucial and always amiable assistance in a variety of small matters. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in vol. 1, no. 1 (1999) Marcie Ray, for vital and impressively efficient assistance in the copyediting phase. To the UC President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, for generous fellowship assistance, without which the book would never have been finished. To Mary Ann Vorasky, for her patience and support; she is formative at every level of this project by virtue of her fierce insistence that no academic work is worth doing that cannot speak to those outside the Academy.

Introduction The composer achieves nothing without executants: these must be well-disposed toward the author, then they must feel in their hearts all that he has notated; they must come together, rehearse, investigate, finally study the mind of the author, then execute his works. In this way they almost succeed in stealing the applause from the composer, or at least in sharing the glory with him, for while it is pleasing to hear people say, “ What a beautiful work this is!” it seems to me even more so to hear them add, “Oh, how angelically they have executed 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 less than a year. Studying him as a musicologist, I should say: as a cellist, I had known his work for years before musicology entered the picture, having learned one or two of the sonatas, as student cellists still routinely do.1 That cursory, circumstantial familiarity had made me frankly reluctant to undertake anything musicological on Boccherini’s behalf. He did not seem terribly interesting—a Kleinmeister, a music-historical also-ran, living in the provinces and writing virtuoso (which to me meant second-rate) music; and then there was the tiresome inevitability, the unimaginativeness, as I saw it, of myself, a cellist, using musicology, with all its grand critical and philosophical potential, merely to study music by another cellist. Thus when Daniel Heartz first steered me toward Boccherini in a proseminar at UC Berkeley, I chose to study the symphonies, on the theory that if Boccherini were a serious composer, he would prove it in this genre. My investigation of these works had not gone far before I found that my initial reluctance had evaporated. Boccherini was indeed “serious,” but the terms of his seriousness were not at all what I had expected them to be. This gave me some of the zeal of the reclaimer and rehabilitator; to varying degrees a similar energy, sometimes crossing the line into passionate partisanship, can be found in the work of most Boccherini scholars. I, and they, have considerable reason. Boccherini was prolific, highly regarded in his own day, and 1

2

introduction

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 psychological subtleties of inter-movement cyclic construction, and his idiosyncratic harmonic language anticipates the substitutions and evasions of the tonic-dominant relationship generally attributed to later generations. Moving 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 the 1760s are among the very first compositions in these genres to explore the independent, highly characterized part-writing that was to become the hallmark of classic chamber music; and that he confirmed the string quintet as a genre with expressive potential to rival (some would say, exceed) that of the quartet. There is more, documented in a modest but continuing burgeoning of Boccherini scholarship. The bicentenary of Boccherini’s death, in 2005, has produced an interesting crop of commemorations scholarly and artistic. By great good fortune, during the period of my initial interest in Boccherini’s music a period-instrument group in which I played, the Artaria String Quartet, 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 peerlessly intimate sense of what it meant to perform Boccherini. That intimacy and 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 the recordings, included in a CD of sound examples, are proof of the conceptual pudding, as it were. I emphasize that this CD is not incidental to my project. As well as “backing up” many of the score examples, in order to make my work more accessible to those who do not read music, it contains numerous sound-illustrations of crucial points for which there are no score examples. I have chosen to do this in order to assert the centrality of performance. Diderot put it neatly: “A piece is created less to be read than to be performed.”2 My ideal reader, as I envision her, will listen with this book in one 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 qualities in Boccherini’s music that intrigued me far more than his acknowledged innovations in style, form, and genre, qualities that made it unlike any other eighteenth-century music I had ever known, and about which no scholar had written in any coherent way. Among these qualities were an astonishing repetitiveness, an affection for extended passages with fascinating textures but virtually no melodic line, an obsession with soft dynamics, a unique ear for sonority, and an unusually rich palette of introverted and mournful affects. They gave Boccherini an unmistakable profile both to the ear and under the hand. Did they add up to something more? Did they reflect some forgotten aspect of eighteenth-century musical esthetics? In pursuit of the answers to these questions, I followed two paths, paths

introduction

3

which roughly paralleled the identities of musicologist and musician. On the one hand, I began reading the works of those of his contemporaries who wrote directly about Boccherini’s music, or about matters related to it. On the other, I began paying very close attention indeed—note-taking, rehearsalinterrupting attention—to the sensations and experiences of playing it. I offer some fruits of this latter approach—the “carnal musicology” of this book’s title—in my first chapter. According to late eighteenth-century theorists 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 short movement, and I use it to make a radical assertion, which is that “carnal musicology” bears witness to a genuinely reciprocal relationship between performer and composer—even where the latter is no longer living. (The intention here, again as in sonata composition, is to generate interest in the explications 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 recent efforts: it is a partial corrective, for as of this writing there is no fulllength, 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 Joseph Haydn attempted unsuccessfully to send a letter to Boccherini, who at the time was living in Arenas de San Pedro, west of Madrid. Haydn complained to their mutual publisher Artaria, “No one here can tell me where this place Arenas is.” A Vienna-centered view was natural enough to the Viennese, of course, but one side effect of its nineteenth-century crystallization into a dominating music-critical position has been a remarkable dismissiveness about the Spanish period (and the arguably Spanish nature) of Boccherini’s life and works. Until quite recently, no one had written anything of much use or insight about this at all: no small omission. Accordingly I have given special attention to considerations of Spanish musical culture in chapter 2 (and in sundry other places in the book) on the assumption that this culture will almost certainly be less familiar to the English-speaking reader than those of the other places where Boccherini lived, Lucca, Vienna, and Paris. Specific correctives—that is to say, work on Boccherini as a specifically Spanish composer—are recent, and virtually all of them are in Spanish. A full-length Boccherini biography in Spanish by the historian Jaime Tortella was published in 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 give my biographical essay a very particular slant, which is its third purpose. I am concerned less with comprehensiveness than with those events and circumstances that best illuminate the history of embodiment and its perfor-

4

introduction

mances, in theaters, in ballrooms and drawing rooms, on the streets of cities. How did these performances distinguish themselves? What truck might Boccherini have had with them?—or, in Michael Baxandall’s formulation, what troc, cultural intercourse, [web of] approval, intellectual nurture and, later, reassurance, provocation and irritation of stimulating kinds, the articulation of ideas, vernacular visual [and in this case aural] skills, friendship and—very important indeed—a history of one’s activity and a heredity, as well as sometimes money acting both as a token of some of these and a means to continuing performance. . . . Troc is intended not as an explanatory model but as an unassertive facility for the inferential criticism of particulars.5

A precise documentation of any life is at best problematic, and there are some heartbreaking holes in the documentation of Boccherini’s. By focusing on the fabric around those holes, I choose the suggestive over the demonstrative, hoping thereby to do as astronomers do, and find better visual acuity 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 is interesting, complex, and far-flung. I have assembled and translated it on a Web site in the hope that its availability will encourage further interpretive work on Boccherini.7 As usually happens when one uses historical sources to address latter-day questions, these writings confirmed some of my own perceptions—the melancholy, the softness—and utterly failed to confirm others—the repetitiveness, the eschewal of melody. However, they also brought to my attention another Boccherinian quality that I had not noticed on my own: they praised his music repeatedly for a visual clarity of character or expressive intent, a tableau-like quality. In the end it was this quality that suggested how many of the other Boccherinian peculiarities might indeed “add up,” for it pointed to the profound visuality of the eighteenthcentury relationship to music. I discuss these discourses of visuality in some detail in chapter 3. Visuality in instrumental music meant, first and foremost, reference to the theater; but theater itself was conflated with painting by means of the tableau vivant, popular all over Europe but nowhere more than in Paris. Well-known paintings were enacted by living bodies carefully disposed upon the stage, while painters regularly strove to convey the snapshotlike immediacy of key moments in drama. Tableaux vivants were most deeply characteristic of tragedy—or so Denis Diderot, theorist par excellence of this complex synesthetic culture, asserts—and indeed, time and again in contemporary criticism of Boccherini’s music we find references to tragedy. In chapter 3, I rely on Diderot’s works, and on Gasparo Angiolini’s descriptions of pantomime dance, as my main period tools for uncovering the pictures in Boccherini’s music. More speculatively, I pursue pictures suggested by

introduction

5

some of the music’s stylistic features, in particular its evocations of serious opera, of sensibilité, and, on occasion, of Madrilenian musical cultures. The visual bias of the eighteenth century is one reason why, in dealing with a composer whose great strength was his instrumental music, I focus extensively on theatrical music throughout this book. Another is simply a matter of historicity. In Boccherini’s day, in every country in which he lived and worked, music for the stage was the fashionable, the prestigious, the really interesting genre of composition; whether it was serious or comic, imported or vernacular, was secondary to the fact of its being staged. Instrumental music tended to be successful with listeners and buyers of printed editions to the extent that it referred, explicitly or implicitly, to theatrical practice. Nor did this necessarily mean medleys of questionable taste on the latest air, popular as these undoubtedly were. In his violin treatise of 1803 the violinist and composer Giuseppe Cambini, several of whose writings proudly inform us of his acquaintance with Boccherini, puts it well: he tells us that “the dramatic art has always inspired [the] great masters, even in works which 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 ingenious ways in which eighteenth-century instrumental composers acknowledged 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 were best explained, or even solely explicable, through the invisible embodied experiences of playing it. No music I have ever played seems so to invite and dwell upon the nuances of physical experience as does Boccherini’s: one can count on tiny variations of position, weight, pressure, friction, and muscular distribution having profound structural and affectual consequences. As a path of inquiry within this book, this appeared to lead toward a class of experience the very names of which are unwieldy and unfamiliar: kinesthesia, proprioception, tactility. In its intense subjectivity, the be-right-here-rightnow-ness of phenomenology, it seemed also to resist a historical approach. Ultimately, however, this sense of being torn between the two opposed methodologies 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 solo sonatas. Virtuosity would seem to be the epitome of unity between inner impulse and outer execution: performative perfection. Yet of course it was precisely his virtuosity that initially caused me to mistrust Boccherini as a composer worthy of study; and in this I was not anomalous but typical. Why is virtuosity so often and so roundly dismissed by critics both of Boccherini’s age and of ours? As Diderot so memorably articulated in his “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” the virtuoso’s visibility raises uneasy questions of where sincerity resides in performance—and ultimately this entails the larger ques-

6

introduction

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 the philosophical stakes here. In certain sonatas, he distances and ironizes the performer in specific regard to his virtuosity, thereby making a sophisticated contribution 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 a medical mode. In 1993, rising moisture in the burial vault at the Chiesa di San Francesco in Lucca necessitated the exhumation of Boccherini’s corpse. However, in a singular observation of the fact that 1993 was the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, a team of medical examiners at the University of Pisa performed a paleopathological autopsy on the body. The fascinatingly macabre reports of this work are my starting point for a discussion of tuberculosis (which the autopsy proved Boccherini to have had) and its complex cultural associations with melancholy (one of his signal qualities as a composer, both in my opinion and in that of his contemporaries). I spend some time in chapter 5 discussing period medical theories about both conditions. In the late Enlightenment, consumption and melancholy represented, by means respectively physical and psychic, the deadly moment where subjectivity begins to consume itself in solipsism; for that reason they raised the question of the mind-body relation with particular urgency. Instrumental music by its nature—forever partially invisible, the terms of its influence difficult to assess, yet resisting solipsism through the ancient metaphor of sympathetic vibration—had a lively relationship to such questions. In chapter 5 I use a number of quartet movements to demonstrate the delicacy and ingenuity with which Boccherini’s consumptive/melancholic music explores the “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 eighteenthcentury colleagues. But not all of them. An eighteenth-century sense of embodiment is a realm both familiar and unfamiliar to us now. Thus we might note certain basic commonalities of response—it’s a given, for instance, that people react to an unexpected pinprick today exactly as they did in Boccherini’s time, by reflexively jerking away—but we must equally note that the sensation itself is not describable in any objective way. We can only resort to analogies, images, associations, all of them historically and culturally bound. In the end what a bodily sensation is, as an experience, can only be approached through what it means within the culture that introduced that body to itself in the first place. Diderot acknowledged this relativity succinctly:

introduction

7

“Change the whole, and you necessarily change me. . . . Men are nothing but a communal effect.”9 As acculturated humans we have the capacity and every motivation to interpretively 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. Of course, the source of the pinprick will have something to do with this. We will tend to attach human significance to sensations that arise from causes outside of human agency (tuberculosis being a good example here) and as agents we will more or less deliberately pursue certain sensations as modes of relation. There are more still that we pursue on our own behalf, as modes of self-acculturation. A chief arena for this many-layered sensory engagement with identity, then and now, is the arts. Throughout this book I generally refer to the sense of embodiment with the term kinesthesia, which comes from the Greek, and seems to have been first used in a doctoral dissertation defended in 1794 in Halle. The author, Christian Friedrich Hübner, spelled it cenesthesia; a similar spelling persists in modern French (cénesthésie) and Spanish (cinestesia). Hübner defined the term as that faculty “by means of which the soul is informed of the state of its body, which occurs by means of the nerves generally distributed throughout the body.”10 His use of the word was new; but by 1794 the concept had been bruited about for some decades as a kind of “sixth sense”: roughly, the individual’s sense of himself as sensing. The Abbé Du Bos, in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture of 1719, posited a “sixth sense which is in us,” and he specified its physicality: “The heart is made, it is organized [to be affected by] . . . touching objects.”11 The Abbé Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80) expanded on this model in his Traité des sensations of 1754. This work proposes a statue made of marble, to which we, the experimenters, may vouchsafe one sense at a time, the more clearly to observe the operations and the consequences of each in the formation of a self. This thoughtexperiment is both lengthy and rigorous; Condillac’s scrupulous compartmentalization of the human sensorium, his insistence on tracing each sense from its origins through to its results, the economy of his language, are all earnestly scientistic. His statue provided me with a well-articulated historical model for my initial intuition that physical sensation was a key to Boccherini’s music. What Hübner and I call kinesthesia, Condillac called “fundamental feeling.” Our statue, deprived of smell, of hearing, of taste, of sight, and limited to the sense of touch, now exists through the feeling she has of the action of the parts of her body one upon the other—above all the movements of respiration: and this is the least degree of feeling to which one may reduce her. I will call it fundamental feeling, because it is with this play of the machine that the life of the animal begins; she depends on it alone. . . . This feeling and her I are consequently the same thing in origin.12

8

introduction

The idea of fundamental feeling seems to have run through the Parisian intellectual community like an electric current during the 1750s. D’Alembert, writing only a few years later, tells us, “This internal sense would seem above all to reside around the region of the stomach.”13 And after Condillac’s Traité, the “sixth sense” was given a rather less abstract articulation by AnneRobert-Jacques Turgot in the Encyclopédie. I make of these sensations a particular class, by the name of interior touch or sixth sense, and among them I count those pains which one feels sometimes in the interior of the flesh, in the extent of the intestines, even in the bones themselves; nausea, the malaise that precedes fainting, hunger, thirst, the outward motion (émotion) that accompanies all the passions; shivers, whether of grief or of voluptuousness; in fine, that multitude of confused sensations which never abandon us, which circumscribe our body in some way, which make it always present to us, and which for this reason some metaphysicians have called the sense of bodily coexistence.14

The “sixth sense” is the body aware of itself without external intervention of any kind, and the self located squarely in that body: the matrix of all Enlightened embodied experience. To this fundamental state Condillac methodically adds each of the qualities that in his view define embodiment: the five other senses; pleasure; pain; relation to an outside world; desire; selfconsciousness; selfhood; and finally language. All of these qualities come about through the succession of sensory impressions, and the interaction of memory with that succession. Selfhood is thus essentially temporalized in Condillac’s system, and this gives it a particularly interesting kinship with music. The absolute, atemporal experience of musical sound, however, is more like that of smell: “ When her ear is struck, she will become the sensation which she experiences. She will be like the echo of which Ovid says, sonus est qui vivit in illa; it is the sound which lives in her.”15 But allow the statue the experience of hearing first one sound, then another, of experiencing one as pleasant, another as less so, and of conceiving desire from her memory of the difference (this being a rough digest of Condillac’s progression), and “the desires of our statue will not be limited to 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 process of self-constitution. As soon as Condillac permits her bodily movement, things become more interesting still for the statue. No sooner does she move than she begins to encounter pleasure and pain and their entrained, entwined reactions. In Condillac’s system, pleasure is always in some way expansive, pain always contractive; this was in accord with current theories of nerve action. But at the very moment of granting his statue the ability to react to sensation with mo-

introduction

9

tion, Condillac pauses, holding her in abeyance, to note the following: “If [Nature] gives her an agreeable sensation, one imagines that the statue will be 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 her mobility, suggests that the motionless “fundamental feeling” might itself be pleasant, and so poses a crucial question. In a motionless state, the statue is comfortable. Why should she want to move?—the existential challenge posed by the slugabed in her tangle of warm blankets, supremely unwilling to get up. Though this state is the epitome of idleness, the question it poses is not idle at all. What is implied here is eudaemonism, the assumption that what feels good must be good. As a social theory, eudaemonism turns upon itself cannibalistically and in short order; but as a theory of music-making it provides a framework for some nice insights. In particular, and at long last, it provided me with a way of historicizing Boccherini’s repetitiveness and his tendency to write passages devoid of the narrativity of melodic impulse, passages that unmistakeably and deliciously recall the statue’s happy inertia. In chapter 3, I offer an alternative explanation of these passages as a sonic form of of the visual tableau; but kinesthetically, they are the closest a player can come to enacting eudaemonism (what John Locke called “indolency”) from within a necessarily moving and desiring body. Through them Boccherini implies what the slugabed and the statue know: the matrix of embodied experience is a comfortable place to be. Comfort is the ideal state. It does not expand or contract, nor seek to become 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 neutral or an indolent matter. But an older meaning of the word comes from the Latin root com + fortis: it once meant “Strengthening: encouragement, incitement, aid, succour, support, countenance . . . that which strengthens and supports,” a usage which died out in English in the very period in question here.18 This is an active and an interactive state. A persistent effect of Boccherini’s music in and upon the hands of a performer is delight in this sense of comfort; not only is the mute and helpless text upon the page given essential support through our living performance, but we, performing it, are ourselves strengthened, encouraged, incited, and not infrequently given aid in the course of grappling with the demands of performance. Both Condillac and Boccherini exemplify the hopefulness of their era by presenting the self ’s fundamental state as a pleasant one. Such a cheerful and trusting view of the world could perhaps only have come into its own during a period of general prosperity, such as was enjoyed in much of Europe during much of the eighteenth century. The period of Boccherini’s maturity was

10

introduction

also that of capitalism’s first flush, the sanguine belief that letting people pursue their natural bent toward pleasure (most especially, of course, in the form of free trade) would result in every good—refinement, peace, virtue, justice. The easy sensualism of galant music was this infectious, commercially fueled optimism quite literally making itself felt. Most of Boccherini’s chamber music was published for the swelling amateur market that had grown up with that capitalism. His fame was literally built upon it. Such music needed to exhibit a pretty clear relationship to comfort, or it simply would not sell. In this eighteenth-century culture of pleasure and the pleasant, pain tended to be ignored whenever possible: natural enough, given the neurologically unavoidable reaction, modeled for us by the statue, of shrinking from it. As Elaine Scarry puts it, “The first, the most essential aspect of pain is 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 function: pain is the limit, the edge, the defining moment of embodied experience. The location of that edge has changed significantly between the late eighteenth century and today: it is easy for us to forget the complete unavailability of anesthetics and the relative scarcity of what we now call painkillers in the eighteenth century. For the readers of this book, relief from even a very low level of pain is as near as the bathroom cabinet, in the form of readily available, safe medicines whose only purpose is palliation. By and large, physical pain does not, cannot loom as large in Western culture now as it did two hundred years ago.20 The very commonplaceness of pain in the eighteenth century must reframe our understanding of what all sensation meant, what potential it held, for those living at that time. It obliges us all over again to acknowledge the continuity between pain and abuse—that is, pain used punitively (a sense built into the very word, which derives from poena, punishment)—and its logical end in torture. In the France and Spain of Boccherini’s maturity, the authorities, whoever they might be at a particular time and place, regularly used torture both physical and psychological. Parisian public punishments, both before and during the Revolution, have been copiously documented.21 Public executions still took place in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor until 1790. In 1783, two years before Boccherini moved back to Madrid after years in the provinces, three counterfeiters were garroted there, while a fourth was made to watch; “directly they were pronounced dead, their bodies were burned to ashes. . . . The execution lasted [from ten thirty] until half past five in the afternoon.”22 These public displays of torture constantly and terrifyingly implied the many more that were conducted in the secrecy of Revolutionary or Inquisitional tribunals. And then there was war, a nearly constant reality in late eighteenth-century Europe. To name only those most likely encountered by Boccherini, the

introduction

11

Seven Years’ War (1756–63) between Prussia and Austria took place during the years in which he was visiting Vienna, while in Spain he could scarcely have avoided the many violent uprisings and counter-uprisings in reaction to the French Revolution. Their culmination in the heartbreaking popular resistance to Napoleon, conducted by underequipped, starving, ferocious commoners—the original guerrillas—took place on the streets of Madrid during the last period of Boccherini’s life. The dire extremities of agony would appear to be all but absent from the expressive world in which Boccherini’s music moves; certainly we look in vain for their direct representation. In galant music-making the definitional capacity 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 powerfully evoked through the exquisite sensitivity that it leaves in embodied memory. Agony, filtered through that memory, perpetually contains and calibrates sensibilité. Returning to the statue, we see that she models this for us. Her original experiential polarity of pleasure/pain interacts with her memory to shape a range of experiential and performative possibilities. Because she encounters in turn solidity and fluidity, hardness and softness, heat and cold, she gives her attention to these differences, she compares them, she judges 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 touch will acquire delicacy; and little by little she will be rendered capable of discerning the finest nuances in a single quality.23

So does sensation inform action; by this same basic process, reiterated and expanded over years, does the journeyman become a master musician, and that 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 these historically embedded processes that I think make Boccherini so utterly characteristic: the string quartets opp. 8, 9, and 15. I begin with a loose overview of those features of the quartets that first caught my attention and set me upon the path of writing this book, and then proceed to a pair of linked analyses—one more or less conventional and one experimental—of a short quartet in E major, op. 15, no. 3. The “conventional” approach attempts a blend of the visualistic ideas I develop earlier in the book with considerations of musical rhetoric, topoi, and a smattering of harmonic analysis: I mean it to show the kinds of insight that can result from combining various methods. The experimental approach originated in my desire to develop a kinesthetic analytical framework. It is based on a number of informal interviews

12

introduction

with the members of the Artaria Quartet, in which, working within parameters loosely derived from Condillac, I asked them to describe the experience of executing the piece in terms of pleasure or unpleasantness, ease or difficulty, beautiful or ugly results, and connection or disconnection with other ensemble members.24 The results of the interviews were complicated and ambiguous; I had not expected that they would be otherwise. The polarities I used in the interview questions are susceptible of endless conflations and negotiations between supposedly opposite terms. In the end I opted to present the interview results in the semi-fictionalized dialogue form that Diderot used so marvelously when he wished to make a point while retaining a sense of its full complexity. Thus, like Condillac, I am scientistic, but scarcely scientific. How could I be scientific when one member of the group that I interviewed was none other than myself ? It seemed appropriate that my inquiries into Boccherini’s music should conclude with such a demonstration of the equivocalities that must arise in generalizing from individual embodied experience. Intellectual open-endedness 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 generalize further, and apply my ideas to music other than Boccherini’s? In chapter 7 I hypothesize a “Perfect Listener,” an eighteenth-century counterpart to myself and my reader, in order to address a single, real-time performance of a keyboard sonata by Haydn. Thus each of the final two chapters of this book contains an essay in historical fiction: in chapter 6, the results of an informal interview process are presented as a dialogue that in fact never happened, and in chapter 7 an experience that did happen (my hearing of a performance of Haydn) is presented as the experience of an invented, composite listener. While I have taken care to tie their every substantive assertion to historical sources by means of that ultimate anti-fictional device, the footnote, these chapters are nonetheless 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 to make points of my own. I might seem to be asserting here that scholarship is an act of fiction. And in a sense, that is what I mean to assert. In everyday speech, Fiction is often juxtaposed with Truth; and so, perhaps inevitably, we tend to think of fiction as another word for falsehood. Obviously this not the sense in which I am interested. Rather, in the sense in which I use it here, fiction is what happens after the assemblage of data is complete; it is the drawing of even the most cautious inferences, the root of any original idea at all. Etymologically, 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

introduction

13

make). The level of word-origins suggests a relation much subtler and more problematic 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, to the remark by Boccherini that opens this introduction. Coming to it the second time, I was struck by its quiet radicalism. This had passed me by completely the first time because the statement had seemed so obvious: of course the composer achieves nothing without executants!25 But in the period between my two encounters with the passage quoted, I had written an entire book based pretty exactly on the premise Boccherini states so neatly. In the process, I had gained a much more detailed sense of why what he says is, in fact, no longer obvious. To put the performer always first, front and center, inverts an established order of musicological thinking; and that order was established for some good reasons. Taking the performative point of view profoundly complicates the whole enterprise of talking coherently about music. Again and again during this project, I had found myself inventing a methodology—and sometimes dis-inventing one, throwing out days or weeks of labor because the results had proven untenable. Again and again I 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 unwieldiness and stridency that such explanations can impart. Thus I had also gained an intimate—I might even say, a raw—sense of how difficult it is to unite performance and musicology into one discourse. It is not news, this difficulty, being something to which any habitué of either a conservatory or a university music department can readily testify. But in rediscovering Boccherini’s dictum, I was gratified to find in it so genteel a confirmation of my enduring conviction that this unification is, nevertheless, vitally important; and of my some years’ labor on its and on his behalf.

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 attest to identifying with composers. The identification can be a haunting or an irritating experience, containing as it does the potential for possession or invasion; shot through with sorrow, since, in Western classical music, so often the composer is long dead; revelatory, voyeuristic; at its best and sweetest we might call it intimate, implying that it is somehow reciprocal. I will contend two things here: first, that the sense of reciprocity in this process of identification is not entirely wistful or metaphorical, but functions as real relationship; and second, that this relationship is not fantastic, incidental, or inessential to musicology. It can and should be a primary source of knowledge about the performed work of art. In making such a claim I can do no better than show the reader the scene of one of my own trysts with Signor Boccherini, the very sheets and the stains upon them, as it were. (See example 1; CD track 1.) Because the performer’s relationship to the work of art must have an extensively explored bodily element, a performing identification with a composer is based on a particular type of knowledge which could be called carnal. It is the rendering of this knowledge, which by its nature contains an extremely fine grain of detail, into concepts that are usefully transferable to other works, to other points of contact with the composer, and eventually to points of contact with other composers altogether that will concern me for the remainder of this book. In this chapter, however, I remain at the granular level of translation from sensation to concept. Confronted with the necessity of executing the first part of a sonata, the performer will engage in a brief preliminary assessment of what she is about to do. The necessity, or at least advisability, of such an assessment has been acknowledged for a long time: it corresponds to the intellectio of classical 14

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

vc.

basso

j œœ œœJjœœ œœ œœ J

œ b b c œœJ œJ œ œœ b & ? bb c ‰ ‰ b 3

b œ & b b œ œ œœ J

œ

œ

œ œ

j œœ œœ œœ œœ J

j œœ J ? bb ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b (√)

œ

? bb œ b

œ œ œ

‰ œJ

œ œ

œ . œ œ. œ œ . œ œ

œœ œœ œœ

b &bb ? bb

j œ

‰

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œjœ œ œ

Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ b & b b œ œ n œ œ b œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ w w Ÿ œŸ œ Ÿ Ÿ ? bb œ œœœ œœœ ˙ œœœœœœœœ b 12

œ

œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œjœ œ œ ˙

(√)

9

œ

√ r . ? œ. œœ œœ j ‰ & œœ . œœ œj œœ . œœ œœ œ.œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. . . œœœ . œ œ œ œ œ œœœ . . . . œ . œ œ œ œœ .œœ œœ œ. œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ. œ œ. œœ. œœ ‰ Jœ œ œ

r œ. . . . b œœœ œœ œœ œœ & b b œœ .. œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ.œœœ 6

j œœ œ . œœ œ . œ œœ . œœ œ œ J œ. œ . œ . œ œ . œ œ œ. œ œ

j œ . œ œ nœ œ œ nœ œ . œ œ œ œœ œ .œ œ ‰ œ. . œ œ ¯ œ œ. œ œœ œœ œœ a loco

j n œ œ œ œjœ œ œ œœ œ . œ œ. œ.nœ. œ. œj n œ œ œ œjœ œ b œ œ ‰ b œj [b œ] œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ nœ . bœ œ . bœ bœ J J J

œœ b œœ œœ

œ œ œ œ

œœ œœ œ œ œ .

j bœ œ .

j œ œ.

j œ

(continued)

15

Example 1. (continued)

r œ bb œ b œ n œ œ nœ bœ œ œ œ œ b œ œ b œ œ œ b œ n œ œ œ b œ œ œ b œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œœ œ œ œ b & œ 15

? bb

b nœ

Œ

œ ‰ J nœ

œ

n˙

‰ b œJ œ

b œœ œ w w & b b n œ œœ œœ ‰ B œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ j ? bb œ ‰ Ó œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ b œœ n˙ 18

‰ œJ b œ œ

œ œ wœ œ œ œ Œ

22

3

œœ œ œ 3

˙ ˙˙ ˙

25 ˙ B b bb ˙˙˙

œœ

œ œœ œ

n˙

œ n œ œ œ œ# œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ B b bb œJ ˙œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œœ ? b b œjœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b

œ nœ

˙ ˙˙ ˙

˙˙ ˙ ˙

3

œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ 3

˙ ˙˙ ˙

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œJ œ œœœ œœœ œœœJ œ œœœ œœœ œœ œ

? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b nœ nœ nœ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ 28 œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ Ÿœ B b bb œ

? bb œ b

Œ

œ

œ

nœ

œ

16

œ

œ. œ œ

j œ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ

“cello-and-bow thinking”

17

Example 1. (continued)

œ œ œ nœ 6 Ÿ B b b b œJ œœ œœœœ œœœœ œœœJ œœ œœœœ œœœœ œœ œœœœœ œœœœœ œœ œœ nœœœœ œœœœ œœœœœœ œ œ œ œ .. 30

? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b nœ œ œ œ œ œ

Œ

œ œ nœ œ œ

œ .œ œ

. œ œ œ œ .

rhetoric, a mulling-over and consideration of the topic at hand. When the performance 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 the organist has first looked over the concerto which is to be sung, because in understanding the nature of that music, he will always play a better accompaniment.”1 “The nature of that music” can mean quite a few things. There may be some kind of who-what-when, a rough and ready musicology: the composer, Luigi Boccherini, lived in the second half of the eighteenth century; what we have before us is the first half of a first movement of a sonata for cello and “basso,” the latter in this case being an unfigured bass line. Further context may arrive with this information. For instance, Boccherini is generally remembered today as having been a great virtuoso cellist. He is also generally 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 degree of showiness. For a prospective performer, “the nature of that music” is also inescapably physical. On this level, perusal of the score becomes an anticipatory kinesthesia, a sub-verbal, sub-intellectual assessment of questions such as, What do I need to do in order to play this? Where will I put my hands, and how will I move them? The most basic physical terms within which this question operates—the framing of a cellist-body—are fairly easy to articulate. Many, in fact most, physical possibilities are excluded, such as standing up, leg motion of any kind, waving the arms in the air, vocalization, and so on. A certain basic position is mandated: seated on a chair, with the instrument between the legs, its neck to the left of the face, and the bow held in the right hand. It is in the act of playing the instrument, the engagement of that cellistbody in movement and doing, that the enterprise becomes fraught with complexity. Suddenly we are involved with implications such as the following: fixity vs. mobility (arms, fingers) competing muscle groups (hands, arms, back)

18

“cello-and-bow thinking”

muscular extension and contraction joint extension, contraction, and rotation motion of limbs or digits toward or away from the center of the body friction and the release of friction (left-hand fingers on string; bow hair on string; between muscle groups) use of or resistance to weight, gravity These matters, detailed as they are, are still general. What of the piece at hand, and its specific demands? How will the cellist’s body configure itself according to the solo line of this sonata? And—an integral part of my project—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 page of music may well come with a little lurch of alarm: the piece begins “out there,” technically speaking, not in the cello’s more ordinary bass or tenor register, but in the soprano range, unfamiliar enough that most cellists will have to find and secure the position for the left hand before beginning to play. (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 down an octave.) From this somewhat precarious starting point comes a measured, steady descent for two bars, and then two more an octave lower. Topically speaking, such descending lines connote withdrawal, while the dotted rhythms of bars 2 and 4 connote something of the martial. From this topical mixture one might construct a scenario of a rapidly subsiding bravado, being resisted with brief shows of rigidity. But then add to this the physical experience of playing this passage, which is a kind of drawing-in toward a center: from its initial extension, the left arm moves steadily in toward the chest, and, psychologically, toward home, the familiar pastures of the tenor and bass ranges. Simultaneously, the right hand holding the bow must move minutely inward as well. In order to play with a clear sound in a high register, the bow hair is positioned on the strings rather close to the bridge, where there 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 is an experience of increasing ease and relaxation, and probably relief. Thus the retreat from the screwed-up courage of the opening is, physically speaking, pleasant, welcoming, grateful. If we combine the physical experience of the passage with its topical/

“cello-and-bow thinking”

19

gestural significations, we get a complicated little picture: retreat and subsiding manifest as desirable. Gratification is associated with a withdrawing motion. Meanwhile the persistent dotted rhythms, which become increasingly gruff in sound with the descent in pitch, militate against this esthetic of introversion. (Yet they are subtly comforting as well: the execution of dotted rhythms such as these involves minute rooting-inward motions of the right hand on each thirty-second note followed by slightly longer releases into the air after each sixteenth, allowing the right hand to repeatedly confirm its position, short-long, short-long, with each thirty-second–dotted-sixteenth pair.) At this point, having made the piece’s first full statement, the performer must 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 memory prove less than perfect, and the two-and-a-half-octave jump to the soprano register go awry, Boccherini immediately offers two opportunities to regroup and correct the intonation. The minor third G–B b, on which the new phrase begins, is most sensibly played by the left thumb and second finger,2 the upper-neighbor third, A b –C, by first and third fingers. Each upper-neighbor third provides a brief moment in which to lift and adjust the position of the thumb. Unless there has been a really gross initial miscalculation, this should permit everything to be all set, by the third beat of bar 5, for the passagework that follows. This starts out brilliant, if formulaic, with its cascading triplets, 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 dominant drone, which murmurs itself away into a cadence. Much of this passagework—the figuration of bars 5 and 6, and bars 83–10 being examples—is written so that one can just twiddle around within a position, oriented around the fixed and immobile left thumb. Since thumb-position is a technique used only by cellists and virtuoso contrabassists, and since it is central to Boccherini’s idiom, a brief reversion to the level of framing the basic cellist-body may be in order here. Thumb-position involves placing the right side of the left thumb across two strings, usually the top two, as a “bar,” or artificial nut (see figure 1).3 The pitches produced by a pair of thumb-stopped strings will always be a perfect fifth apart, since the strings themselves are tuned in fifths. Thumb-stopped notes will also have a tone quality somewhat different from those stopped by the other fingers, since it is the side of the thumb that makes contact with the string; joints are considerably less flexible under sideways pressure, and there is less flesh on the side of a digit. Vibrato becomes more difficult. Thumb tone could be described as rather hard and bald. This sonata is rather unusual for Boccherini in the amount of thumb movement 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.

“cello-and-bow thinking”

21

the fact that this movement is always downward in pitch. Boccherinian technique more typically involves “planting” the thumb in a convenient location for part or all of an extended passage, thus fixing register for that passage’s duration. With the thumb planted, the remaining fingers can fill in the pitches of a diatonic or chromatic scale around and within the thumb’s barfifth, and can, in the upper registers, extend to a tenth or even further above the bottom note of the bar. Typically, Boccherini will signal both the beginning and the end of a fixed-thumb-position passage with a clef change, and he often uses a different clef to signal the placement of the thumb.4 The elegance of this system of implying (without ever dictating) the most convenient 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 with its own voice, is lost in every modern edition I have encountered, since all avoid the rich variety of clefs an eighteenth-century cellist was assumed to be able to read. In addition to bass and “old tenor clef ” (treble-clef-downan-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, it also lends itself to the addition of a drone or pedal point, an addition Boccherini often exploits, as in bars 83–10 here. Double-stopping and drones are written-out resonators, ways of increasing the harmonious vibrations coming out of the instrument (and disguising the bald tone of the thumb-stopped notes!) but they will function in this way only if the performer is very conscious and deft with the balance of friction and release in the right hand. In terms of sensation, playing two strings at once will offer increased resistance to the right hand and arm; further resistance takes place between muscle groups: the deltoid and biceps, which are responsible for the pronation (inward rotation) that sinks the arm weight into the strings, war subtly with the trapezius and back muscles that are responsible for the lateral motion across them. If the performer gets this balance of resistances right, it will result in a warm, bright, carrying sound, one which is definitely pleasant to work at. In the sonata movement at hand, Boccherini invites an exploration of the pleasure of making resonant sound through the amount of repetition he provides; this gives the performer plenty of time in which to find the requisite muscular balance. This appears at many levels: from the micro-repetitions of bars 5–6 (CD track 2), to the pastoral musette music of bars 83–10 (CD track 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). The repetitions in the pastoral mode are introverted and calm; they invite a sound that seeks resonance without seeking much projection. This plays out as physical calmness, since making such a sound involves a greater submission to gravity, less effort by the arm and shoulder muscles. The repetitions toward

22

“cello-and-bow thinking”

the end of the movement are more urgent, implying a crescendo of sound and muscular activity. Both passages in their different ways incite and encourage the performer to explore different pathways toward a frictive physical pleasure. This is not friction toward a climax, however. Even the tumult of bars 263–27, and then again 293–30, issues only in a delicate, lazy descending line and a rather indolent cadence. There is in fact only one complete phrase on this page that is not written in thumb-position, and which is not based on layered repetitive gestures. This is in bars 113–182 (CD track 6). Here the left hand must move up and down the neck of the instrument to follow the line of the melody, a much more commonplace cellistic technique. The whole passage falls within the most grateful, “singing” register of the instrument, and its vocality is further emphasized by the fact that, without the thumb on the strings, it is much easier to use vibrato, producing a warmer, more “natural” tone. In his violin treatise 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 an appropriate 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-like beating (ondeggiamento) of the tone we have struck, and we call this shuddering aftersound tremolo or tremoleto.5

Shifting up and down the instrument’s neck, by progressively shortening and lengthening the strings, mimes the melodic “shapes” created by the invisible shortening and lengthening of vocal cords. This ability of our bodies to generalize such an activity from one situation or body part to another, our marvelous self-analogizing propensity, can be experienced by the string player nowhere so intimately as in the physical analogies of tone production for voice. To be launched upon a melody, airborne among the expressive and muscular demands of shaping it, seems only to be adequately described by reference to the experience of singing. David Sudnow remarks that a central process in learning an instrument is the acquisition of “a general style of bodily movement . . . of a complexity that in no way can be readily reduced to some existing equation” and which has the signal feature of generalizability to (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 floor of an organ, and the feet learn their ways and the pedal’s spaces faster than the feet of a body without a piano-knowing hand. Put the piano-knowing hand over a child’s-sized toy keyboard, and in a few moments the piano-knowing hand displays perfect familiarity in moving about. Put a pencil in the knowing hand and watch a scale get played, a melody picked out. That scale and its distances are thoroughly incorporated for the

“cello-and-bow thinking”

23

body, an inner acquisition of spaces somehow arrayed all over as an ever-present potential. And when fingers in particular learn piano spaces in particular, much more 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 have its own stamp; a mature string player develops a tone that is identifiably her own, as flexibly characteristic as the sounds that issue from her larynx. This is not wholly dependent upon the particular instrument being played, nor on 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 part of 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 descending chromatics (bar 14) and an augmented second (bar 15); and anxiety or unrest, conveyed by the syncopations (bars 16–17). The passage that begins at bar 133 uses plangent chromaticism to confirm the inward bent of the whole movement: in order to play this descending line—to make a G become a G b —the left hand must move, however minutely, toward the heart. Kinesthetically, this is a motion toward the center of balance; and gesturally it references the motion associated in classical oratory with heartfelt sincerity. Pathetic connotations to chromatic passages and descending lines are scarcely peculiar to Boccherini, of course; what is so characteristic is the way in which those associations are physically welded, as it were, to one of the most fundamental acts of playing the instrument at all. Such drawings-in are always toward a center, not only of sentiment, but of physical efficiency and balance. We can confirm this reading again and again in the course of exploring this sonata; and it is a notable feature in all its kindred works. It seems that for Boccherini as he manifests himself to us in the sonatas for cello and basso, the performer’s basic aplomb upon his instrument tended to be manifested in pathos or sentimental reflection, even in a major-mode Allegro. To recapitulate and summarize these combinations of physical experience with topos and affect, then: a daring beginning proves to be the beginning of a retreat; in bar 5, potential discomfort (the large leap upward) is mitigated 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 are invitations to explore pleasure in the sliding and resistance of muscle fibers, and in the instrumental resonances that go into developing tone; in the passage from bars 113 through 182, the minor-mode affects of pathos, melancholy, and anxiety are set apart and emphasized through their vocalistic ex-

24

“cello-and-bow thinking”

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

communicability and reciprocality In a live performance (and to some extent in a recorded one) not only will the performer feel things such as those I have described, but the listenerobserver will feel them too, or will at least feel that the performer feels them, through the subtle physical identification that comes with proximity and close attention to another human being. Such matters communicate themselves entirely without the benefit of a verbal exegesis, and are a proper, if always only contingent, part of the performed work of art. None of these kinesthetic associations can ever be really free, on account of Western culture’s powerfully normative, powerfully tacit understandings of embodiment; hence, much of the verifiability and transferability of this carnal approach to musicology must rest upon unpacking and discussing those norms. The first norm we encounter here is the one that says, in a very reasonable voice, you cannot have a physically reciprocal relationship with someone no longer living. Yet I do claim it as reciprocal. My role constitutes itself as follows: as living performer 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 cannot be 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 maintaining my own person as some kind of unitary thing, the necessary daily fiction of establishing and keeping a hold on identity. The act is different perhaps in urgency and accuracy, but not, I think, in kind. As this composer’s agent in performance, I do in this wise become him, in much the same manner as I become myself. And my experience of becoming him is grounded in and expressed through the medium of the tactile. As for Boccherini’s role in this endeavor, I turn to Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de 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 performer of vocal music in terms that mandate a radical identification with the composer. Begin then by a complete knowledge of the character of the air which you are going to render, of its connection with the sense of the words, the distinction of its phrases, the accent which it has peculiar to itself, that which is supposed in the voice of the executant, the energy which the composer has given to the poet, and those [energies] which in turn you also can give the composer. Then relax your organs to all the fire which their considerations may have inspired you with; do the same as you would, were you at the same time poet, composer, actor and singer.7

“cello-and-bow thinking”

25

The recommended trajectory of attention is from an educated listening inward, through a grasp of conventions, and toward a level of experience neither conventional nor well understood, here introduced by that extraordinary phrase: “that which is supposed in the voice of the executant.” What can this mean but the composer’s reliance on knowledge of, or assumptions about, the performer?—who can only make the acquaintance of this ghostly version of themselves “supposed” in the work through a careful evaluation of what it is like to execute it. This is, I would suggest, not primarily an auditory matter. Rather, it resembles the process I have been describing in this chapter: initially abstract, then visual, increasingly kinesthetic, evolving in detail and precision through the course of learning to play a piece. In Rousseau’s native French, the primary meaning of sentir, to feel, was “to receive some impression by means of the senses . . . It is never used for simple perceptions of sight and hearing.”8 In the Italian that he championed as the ideal, the musical, the most fully human language, sentire had a crucially different usage: “A generic term with which one commonly expresses the suffering or receiving of . . . impressions . . . It is used for some senses in particular, and first and most frequently for hearing.” 9 Rousseau explicitly invokes sentire in performance. Through this, then, I come to know what the composer supposed me to be. This is a vivid experience, full of poignance.10 As I practice sentire in Boccherini’s music, I become aware of a poignance of presence, the unmistakable sensation of someone here—and not only here, but inhabiting my body. It is a commonplace in any kind of physical education that intensive involvement with certain bodily configurations will change one’s habits, change one’s choices, change the very way things feel. Here, as I educate myself physically about the highly characterized work of this composer, these changes occur in the image, or rather the feel, of someone else. They delineate him with an uncanny and entirely un-visual clarity, and it is this vivid experience of being pierced and pervaded by Boccherini, I maintain, that constitutes the reciprocity of our relationship. And what of its subjectivity? Despite my carefully generic locutions about the experiences of “the performer,” plainly that performer is myself; the detailed assessments of possible physical experience in playing this page of music derive directly from what I felt (both sentir and sentire ) as I learned to play it. It may appear that I have chosen only fingerings and bowings that reinforce my interpretive points; that every such point I have made is thoroughly arguable as to its generalizability, its usefulness; and that what appears above is not musicology, not history, but an exercise in narcissistic free association by a particularly verbose performer. To take only one example, is it not possible to construe the opening of this sonata as a triumphal, rather than a retreating, trajectory? Doesn’t the descent into the lowest register bring with it connotations of increasing mas-

26

“cello-and-bow thinking”

culinity and thus authority, supported by the attendant increase in resonance and volume from the instrument? And doesn’t the gradual progress of the performer’s left hand from soprano to bass registers inflect this with an additional rigidity, involving as it does a motion upward, against gravity, which actually requires more muscular contraction in the upper arm as the phrase continues? The answer, of course, is yes. It’s a rather nice reading of the passage, in fact. The prerogative I have taken of interpreting it in another light would go unquestioned in performance. I propose performance and analysis as two faces 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 authoritative reading simply auto-digests, leaving us with its compost: that complex layering of interpretations that builds up around any work of art, and, culturally speaking, constitutes the nourishment it must have in order to survive. Eschewing authoritativeness, however, we must still have plausibility; and it comes readily enough if we focus more historically on the composer at hand. Explorations of his music’s placement within its cultural milieu confirm these executional readings, as well as suggesting further terms for and conceptions of the Boccherinian character, with its marked tendency to gravitate toward ease and comfort—there is something positively gentlemanly about the way he refuses to sacrifice the performer’s ease to virtuosic excitement—toward introversion, toward melancholy, and, in and through all of these, toward an unorthodox kind of goal-less pleasure. Through the music, one intuits an appealing and most interesting character. Much of this book will be given over to placing that character, and those intuitions, in historical context.

the second half of the movement To return to the sonata: if the section we have considered so far suggests Boccherini’s character to us through its physical and experiential elements, how does its second half continue or build upon this process? Special caution is required here. Twentieth-century ears, even highly educated ones, will have been raised on a diet of Viennese conventions in late eighteenth-century music; a particular “template” of first-movement sonata form, laid out in elegant practice by Haydn and Mozart, theorized in loving detail by German critics of the first part of the nineteenth century, and taught as a kind of gospel ever since, has a hold over modern expectations that should not be underestimated. One of its side effects has been a certain deafness to earlier or non-Viennese models, resulting at worst in their interpretation as incomplete or clumsy attempts at the “real thing”—an inevitable result of elevating a certain stylistic moment as classic. Boccherini is one of

“cello-and-bow thinking”

27

a number of eighteenth-century composers whose instrumental music suggests other pathways to coherence. Late Viennese sonata form makes a sadly Procrustean bed for the piece under consideration here, as it does for much of his music. It is safe enough, however, to locate our expectations within some broadly defined parameters of the way sonatas behave. By this halfway point in the movement, our outlook as listeners (or as the kind of sublimated or deferred listeners that readers of musicological description perforce become) will differ from what it was at the outset. We no longer confront the piece with the implicit question, “ What do you have to show me?” since that “what,” in the form of the sonata’s theme or Main Idea, has been shown. In the process, it has become more or less personified, so that we will be likely to regard it not as “what” but as “whom” (such personification is of course especially clear in a solo sonata). Our listening interest and engagement will henceforth center around the progress of this sonic being through certain vicissitudes, and our expectation will focus on an eventual return to or reconciliation with its initial aspect. Thus our question has become, “ What is going to happen to you?” In contrast to the listener, however, the prospective performer, whose primary concern is physical exigency, keeps asking the same question as at the beginning: “ What do you have to show me?” Thus the performer continues to engage with the second half of a sonata in its expository capacity. Is such exposition even susceptible of development? Do narrative structures of characterization and expectation operate on a kinesthetic level? Some of the possible intersections between a listening and a performing engagement with a work play out in the opening bars of the second half of the sonata, which begins at 4:14 on CD track 1 (see example 2). This half of the piece begins with the opening theme in the dominant (upbeat to bar 33), 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 “take it as read,” directing our attention toward what is to come: presumably a section of vicissitudes. Executionally, meanwhile, the descending trajectory of the tune, its small repetitions and its pitch confirmations rounding off into quasi-martial dotted rhythms are likewise familiar; but to the hand, there is much more that is familiar than that is new about the register in which they appear, for it is the same register and the same position in which the preceding fourteen and a half bars have taken place—the thumb has been planted across the B b –F fifth ever since bar 183. Such familiarity is in danger of breeding contempt, or at least hand-strain: maintaining a fixed-thumb position for extended periods is not particularly comfortable, and by this point not only attention but considerable desire is likely to be focused on getting somewhere else. The longed-for exit from the fixed-thumb position takes place gradually in the course of the phrase’s descent (a characteristic piece of Boccherinian tech-

Example 2. Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, i (Allegro), second half of movement.

vc.

basso

j bb c œJ œ œ œœ œœ œJœjœœ œœ œœ œj œ . œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œj œ j b & œ œ . œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œœ . œœ œœ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ J . 33 J œ J J œ œ œ n œ ? bb c ‰ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ . nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b .. bb . œ. œ œ B b ˙ œ œ n œœ œ œ . œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ n œ n œ œ œ ? œ b & œ . œ œ .œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ. w œœ .. œ.œ p œ œ œ œ Œ ‰ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ ? b b œ .œ œ . œ œ .œ œ ‰ Œ œ b J ˙ bœ 36

40 œ j œ œ B b bb b œ œ œœ œœ œœ œ œœœ ? jB œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œb œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ? bb œ œ œ œ ‰ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œj œ b nœ œ

B b bb 43

? bb

1

b

j j ˙ b œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ B Œ dolce j œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ‰

œ. œ # œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œjn ˙ œ œ . ˙ œ œœ œœœ œœœ œ œ

œ œ œ bœ œ nœ œ

j j b bb œj œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J B J œ j ? b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J b J 46

1 Probably:

? bb

b

œ œœ œ œœ œœœ œ œ

28

œ ‰ œ J

œ

œ

œ

œ ‰ œœ œœœ œœœœœ œœœ œœœ J

Example 2. (continued)

b b œ œ œjœ œ œ œ B b

œ œ œj œ œ œ œ

œ

50

œ œ bœ bœ nœ œ bœ bœ

œ

? bb 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 œ œ bœ b 53

bb œ œ œ bœœ œ bœ œ œ œ œœœ œœœ ‰ ˙œ B b œ b œ œ œ œ b œœ œ ? b b œ ‰ œJb œ b

œ

œ nœ

56

œ œ œ

˙ bb ˙ B b œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ ˙œ

j ? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b

Œ

œ œ ˙œ

Ó

œ

˙

j ‰ œJ œ ‰ b œ

œ œ ˙œ

œœ

œ J

œ œœ

j 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 n œ œ œœœ œ œ

œ

œ

œœ œ 3

˙ b b œ œ œ œœ bœ œ œœ œ˙ b œ œ B œœ

˙ ˙˙ ˙

59

˙˙ ˙ ˙

˙ ˙˙ ˙

˙ ˙˙ ˙

? bb œ œœ 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 b 3

˙ b b b ˙˙ B ˙ 62

3

œ œ j œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œJ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œJ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ

? bb 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 b 64

B

b bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

? b œ bb

Œ

œ

œ

Ÿ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œœ œ œ

œ

œ

j œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ

œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ (continued)

29

30

“cello-and-bow thinking”

Example 2. (continued) 6 bb b œœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœ B J J 66

? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b Ÿ b bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ B 68

? bb œ b

œ. œ œ

œ œ œ

?

Œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ œœ œ œ œ œ

nical courtesy, its stepwise motion downward allowing a gradual release of the accumulated hand tension). Thumb-position is finally abandoned altogether in the last half-beat of bar 33, just in time for the martial gestures of bar 34. At the end of bar 34, therefore, both listener and performer will be chiefly focused on the question, “ Where now?” But the desires motivating that question in the two parties are quite different, as bars 35 and 36 make clear. To the listener, the abrupt return to the opening idea in the tonic and in a familiar register may constitute a disappointment: this is scarcely new! Or it may be a puzzlement: is this some sort of premature recapitulation? But for the performer, it is both relief and pleasure in that relief: how thoughtful of the 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 and arm 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 or comfortingness. Novelties, developments—vicissitudes, in a word, as we encounter them in this piece—will tend to be of this elusive type. Meanwhile the ear’s eagerness for newness, intensified by having been checked, seems to be acknowledged in the omission of the double-stops, with their settling effect, at the end of the phrase (bar 362) and then, most promisingly, in the two-octave arpeggio that sweeps upward out of the closing gestures. Now we would appear to be going somewhere!—and so we do, gesturally speaking: straight off a cliff. Bar 37 is unprecedentedly static, an unexpected dominant of A b major, hanging over the third in the bass, suspended for an endless-seeming half a bar, resolving leisurely in the second half, and marked piano (CD track 7).

“cello-and-bow thinking”

31

What has happened to the sense of momentum? The hand, especially the right hand, has been summarily arrested; a much slower bow speed than hitherto required in the piece will be necessary to sustain this double-stop for an entire bar.11 Too much momentum in that rising arpeggio in bar 36, and it 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 perhaps slow down slightly, measure and collect itself, at precisely the moment when 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 a clear and characteristic direction. In this second half of the piece, it has taken a scant five bars for the same scenario to play itself out twice: at precisely that part of the piece where an appetite for newness might be keenest, momentum is checked, boldness restrained, desire firmly redirected inward. As a consequence of this, the listener receives the modulation to C minor that closes 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 pioneering foray away from the introversions of the first half of the piece, but rather an intensification of them. In the next six bars the left hand is given an enjoyable respite from fixed positions of any kind, and allowed to maneuver around the neck of the instrument 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 resemblance between these passages, but to the hand the resemblance is very strong; this type of writing is scarce enough in this piece to feel really distinctive when it arrives, distinctive enough that we might speak of it as an executionally constituted theme. Both passages generate pleasure through the moving-inward gestures involved in executing descending melodies and chromaticisms: in the earlier passage this was most clearly shown in the shift to the minor mode that began in bar 133, while in this episode trajectories of descent can be traced through bars 39–40, and again in 41–42. Harmonically, too, a “moving inward,” or at least homeward, has been achieved by the time we arrive at the cadence in bar 44, which makes a firm statement in the original dominant, thereby sending a strong formal signal. We are primed to hear . . . something. Dare we expect a reprise? Perhaps the question ought to be, a reprise of what? The passage that begins in bar 45 implies that the left thumb will be positioned on the same barfifth as the one used at the beginning of the piece, E b –B b above middle C (a fact somewhat obscured by the use of “old tenor clef ” at the beginning and soprano clef here). The exigencies of finding this position, and Boccherini’s earlier compositional gyrations around those exigencies, will be pretty strongly ensconced in the player’s muscle memory, especially if the first-half repeat has been taken. Kinesthetically, positionally, this does indeed feel very

32

“cello-and-bow thinking”

much like a return; the “out-thereness” of this high position will have been supplanted by a sensation of familiarity peculiar to this piece. In the executional sense this position, merely as a position, could be said to constitute a theme, an interpretation supported by the fact that the left hand does not move from it again until the final two chords of the movement: once this return has been accomplished, it is decisively maintained. In this sense, bar 45 is very much a reprise. Meanwhile, the audible features of the passage mitigate the kinetic reprise in a way that is psychologically astute. Too unanimous a sense of return at this point, in the context of a piece so characterized by myriad little pullingsin, repetitions, and confirmations, and things would shut down altogether; the sonata would die of premature closure. And so in bar 45 Boccherini destabilizes the harmonic return by the use of a G, and not an E b, in the basso part, 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 is not casual: in any vocal score of the period, it would imply that a new character is singing. And sing she does: this is the first and only time in the entire piece that the soprano register is used with no hint of retreat. Bars 45–46 and 47–48 constitute a beautifully balanced antecedent-consequent pair, and bars 49–51 sail out unabashedly cantabile over a newly rich and flowing accompaniment texture. The whole passage receives the only explicit expressive marking of the whole sonata: dolce. Affectually, it is not only sweet but serene. In his book on Boccherini’s symphonies, Luigi Della Croce includes a short section entitled “Il ‘cielo’ di Boccherini” in which he offers a collection of passages reminiscent of this one, with the following commentary, itself of a curiously eighteenth-century flavor: The suavity of Boccherini’s melodies . . . sometimes assumes the “open” form of a celestial message announced in the middle of a work, independent of the context and in any case not part of a preordained system of statement, response, 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 value touches the right chord, beginning a discourse that finds an immediate echo in the soul.12

The whole passage distinguishes delicately between the acts of returning and of retreating, for the hand’s enactment of return to the E b –B b bar-fifth brings to the ear a brief, calm vision of new horizons. That it comes at exactly the point where, physically, the experience is of a cessation of newness suggests a subtle meaning: the sweetest, most Arcadian face of the new is located in what we know best. But we know that earthly paradise is also inevitably unstable and tempo-

“cello-and-bow thinking”

33

rary. In this case its disintegration comes precisely at the moment that the ear detects a familiar melody, in bar 52: and what should return here, but the most anxious, unstable gestures of the whole piece? Being thus recalled to “reality” is an uneasy sensation, both to hand and to ear: the minute syncopations are not gratifying to execute, evading as they do the centering and settling of the right hand involved in emphasizing a beat; nor does the ear have a happy time making melodic sense of the apparent whole-tone scale produced through chromatic alterations in the first half of bar 52. Only in the second half of bar 54 do these nine bars of fruitful disparity between auditional expectation and executional sensation come to an end, when the piece’s second theme arrives in the proper and expected tonic, its bagpipe-like, fixed-thumb stability making a fitting resolution to the instability of the preceding section, as well as an earthier version of the Arcadian ideal. From here to the end of the movement, repetitive flourishes and accumulations of resonance proceed along exactly the same lines as in the first half, from bars 183–32. Enough of exquisitely conflicted subtleties: this closing material both sounds and feels facile, spinning forth and blithely repeating cadential formulae, and being gratefully written to sound considerably more difficult than it is.

carnality and compositional process This sonata is but one of more than thirty such works which hold a special pride of place in Boccherini’s oeuvre by virtue of their beauty, originality, and distinctive technical demands, and through their centrality to an understanding of him as a composer. They are central in the sense that they are probably mostly early works, and of a formative nature: Boccherini was performing in public by the age of fourteen, and his main stock in trade as a 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, that their composer did not include any of the pieces in the catalog of his own works that he made retroactive to 1760.13 For the purposes of a carnal musicology, Boccherini’s sonatas are central because of the way they evoke the physiognomy of the personal, and through the evidence they offer of the influence of physical action and sensation upon artistic production. “An earlier process has been internalized into the finished forms of the figures . . . His figures act out his creative process in the shape they have taken; and this displaced performance of the self feeds an idiosyncratic vitality into his depictions.”14 This characterization of the paintings of the elder Tiepolo (an elderly resident of Madrid when the young musician arrived there in 1768) seems uncommonly apt for Boccherini, even as it begs important questions. In the case of Boccherini’s music, that “performance of the self ” displaces

34

“cello-and-bow thinking”

itself directly onto or into the living performer, to whom there is such poignant experience available through attention to physical sensation. Vivid it may be, but it is also momentary, leaving much about Boccherini’s process still opaque, particularly as it pertains to the issue of the way one idea arises from another, particularly the way continuity and contrast are achieved. If the themes in this sonata movement are conceived through a process of physicalistic association and transmutation of gesture, how was that process initiated and sustained? Did Boccherini just imagine playing, a kind of cellistic subvocalization informing his decisions—writing seated at a desk, the cello across the room, his process one of a more or less deliberate reflection on and reprocessing of earlier cellistic forays? Or did he improvise, experiment, fool around on his cello while seated next to a writing desk, and when something fine came to his fingers, quickly grasp a pen and write it down? Each approach would be likely to produce different results, especially in the way one theme or gesture moves into another.15 There is evidence of both these kinds of composerly engagement with execution in this sonata. The first, a kind of macro-level, corresponds to the process of dispositio described by musical rhetoricians: the positioning and transpositioning of themes into certain places in a movement, a conscious, desk-seated process of deliberation and design, with the design in this case strongly suggested by certain conventions of first-movement form. The second 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 other themes might relate to them. Because this process was, for this composer, so kinesthetic, I will submit that it was also usually not conscious. Its re-creation involves fixing our imagination and our surmise upon what were at best elusive states, fugitive acts, and it is of its essence that its most characteristic manifestations occur in what are, formally speaking, subsidiary passages. One imagines, for instance, how a passage like bars 5–6 of this sonata might have rushed into the composer’s fingers (first upon the instrument, later translating that touch through a quill pen) as the suitable, the comfortable thing to do in just such a place. The little repetitions, the lightly descending scales, sound and feel like those grateful turns of the hand that instrumentalists typically do unthinkingly as part of warming up: habits, little gestural ingrainments. That this passage is not memorable melodically and never recurs (except in the taking of the repeat) is of its physicalistic essence: it consists of noodling. As such, it is entirely defined by its function, which is to settle the hand to the more public business of the piece. The sonata’s opening bars are much more difficult to execute and, one surmises, to generate: such gestures do not rush to the fingers for their comfort or their obviousness, but would have to emerge from some kind of dialogue between kinesthetic inventio and deliberate reflection upon the requirements of distinctiveness and a clear character in a good opening theme. One

“cello-and-bow thinking”

35

can postulate that, seated at the cello under this mandate, and responding gesturally to the implicit need for boldness, Boccherini reached high and far down the neck of the instrument; but once the act of playing began, undertook the physical enactment of a different mandate, that of sentiment— neither bold nor fond of difficulty, but consoling and compassionate—thus drawing from that initial flamboyance an artful but unmistakable trajectory of retreat. One can further postulate from such a scenario a particularly Boccherinian set of tensions among the sensible esthetic of mid-eighteenthcentury music, the virtuoso’s natural impulse to show off, and conventional exigencies of form, affect, and presentation. There is similarity here between the carnal description of music that I am proposing, and an account of a dance or set of oratorical gestures. Themes sometimes become pictures of themselves, their particular characters read through a series of visual associations with physical gesture, such as “moving the arms in toward the torso connotes heartfeltness.” This invites our consideration of a third level of compositional process: besides unconscious kinesthetic invention and conscious aural deliberation, the composer-performer contends, more or less consciously, with the self-consciousness attendant upon the near inevitability of being seen. (Organists and offstage trumpeters are the only soloists regularly exempt from this aspect of performance.) In terms of compositional process, the visual images created by the physical gestures of playing will tend to be by-products, and not sources, of aural and kinesthetic impulses; but it is important to distinguish between their functional secondariness in the creative process, and their very considerable problematization in latter-day understandings of instrumental music. Our disdain of theatricalization and visualization in instrumental performance runs deep, a legacy of the German idealism that was developing during Boccherini’s own day, and of the powerful notion of absolute music that emerged from it; more even than physical sensation, the notion of visual effect as intrinsic to the instrumental work is likely to seem excessive, even repellent. Yet the fact remains that all experienced performers develop considerable awareness of what they look like in performance, even if only in order to restrain themselves from gestural excess and thereby simulate transparency; and it is also a fact that the visible element of a musical idea will function in varying degrees for the listener-observer, confirming or resisting that idea’s sonic presentation. In Boccherini’s case, it will generally tend to do the former, and will frequently do so with real artfulness; in the case of, say, Beethoven, it will often do the latter, and for reasons no less artful. A performance- and body-oriented musicology is positively obliged to account for the visible, especially in the case of a composer like Boccherini, who as an Italian of his generation was only minimally under such restraints as we have subsequently invented. There is one place in the movement under discussion where the visual el-

36

“cello-and-bow thinking”

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

in conclusion The act of describing and interpreting this aggregate of fleshly phenomena called a sonata is a complex one, perceptually, epistemologically, linguistically. The shading over of sentir into sentire implied by Rousseau, its continuation into interactions with auditional expectation and visual spectacle, mean that I can never be sure whether the experience I am describing is primarily heard, or primarily felt, or primarily seen. (The question must and should arise as to how far it is meaningful to subscribe to the notion of their separability in the first place). It is certainly appropriate that such ambivalent language should be used to propose the habits and features of this man with whom I have arrived at so peculiar an intimacy, a man who cannot be here to confirm or deny my accuracy. Because of the huge privilege I enjoy in this situation—that of being alive—I am obliged to assert here that at no time do I wish my descriptions to imply that Boccherini’s creative choices were made for him by his habits or his character, however powerful or ingrained these things might appear to have been. I have been using this sonata movement for the traces it offers of the way choice may have been encountered, considered, and engaged. It is not that his designs are in any strong sense medium-determined. He had chosen and developed this inventive medium after years of experiment with

“cello-and-bow thinking”

37

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

Of course there are differences. When he wrote his sonatas, Boccherini, unlike the Tiepolo described here, was a young man; in them one cannot rightly credit him with the mature artist’s “years of experiment” so much as a healthy and versatile faculty of experimental intuition. The following chapters will trace some of his processes in the years of experiment that were to come, and the evolution and attenuation of his “cello-and-bow thinking” into other 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 letter to his publisher Ignaz Pleyel, who had asked him to produce works that were simpler, briefer, and more accessible to the amateur. (We must infer this from Boccherini’s reply, since Pleyel’s letters are lost.) Pleyel had been publishing Boccherini’s music in Paris since 1796. By 1799 their relationship had become strained; it seems that Pleyel took increasing numbers of professional liberties, sending payments late or incomplete, failing to return manuscripts, and requesting changes in musical style to suit the market.1 This last presumption was apparently the most difficult for Boccherini to stomach; it exasperated 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 I had written as you advise me to do; no more would you be Pleyel, the Pleyel that you are. . . . Bear in mind that there is nothing worse than binding the hands 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 to Pleyel—this time, we infer, to an accusation of “unfriendliness” and inconsiderateness—Boccherini had written, All those who know me and who have dealings with me do me the honor of judging me a man of probity, honest, sensitive, sweet-natured and affectionate, as my works of music show me to be. It would be truly strange if for Pleyel alone 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 correspondence, most of which is politely reserved in tone. They are further striking in their absolute and uncompromising welding of selfhood to art. What we are to understand from this is that Boccherini does not write music the 38

“as my works show me to be”

39

way he does because he likes to, or believes it to be the best way, or thinks it will have the best effect; Boccherini is Boccherini because he writes the way he does. What he is, his works show him to be. This chapter is an account of forces and events that corroborate Boccherini’s summing-up of his life into musical works. This turns out to be a roundabout affair, for we have no reliable, first-hand records of Boccherini’s person and character. Yves Gérard, who has a more comprehensive and thorough knowledge of Boccherini sources than anyone else alive, laments “the fundamental difficulties inherent in the problem of providing documentation and also compiling a biography of Boccherini,” characterizing them as twofold: locating original documents, and finding first-hand corroboration of what he calls a “solid mass of second-hand information.” (Later, he calls it an “infernal labyrinth.”)4 Of the occasional self-revelations in Boccherini’s letters, those quoted above are by far the most complete. More surprisingly, first-hand accounts of Boccherini’s cello playing are almost entirely lacking. While there are plentiful indications of its having been held in high esteem—“much applauded,”5 “an exquisite cellist, who enchanted especially through his incomparable tone and expressive singing on 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 details of what he heard; and that writer, the Parisian memoirist Louis Petit de Bachaumont (1690–1771), was terse and quite unflattering. In his Mémoires secrets, in an entry for 2 April 1768, Bachaumont gave Boccherini’s friend and traveling companion the violinist Filippo Manfredi a mixed review and then remarked, “M. Boccherini played the violoncello to similarly little applause; his sounds seemed shrill to the ears, and his chords inharmonious.”8 Anything more illuminating on his playing we must more or less imaginatively infer from Boccherini’s idiomatic writing for his own instrument. In the matter of portraiture we have been rather more fortunate. In addition to a number of engravings, there exist two fine, expressive oil paintings of Boccherini. The most famous of these now hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia (see figure 2). Long attributed to Boccherini’s fellow Lucchese, Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), it is now more safely 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 to play F above middle C with his second finger, by the look of things. Dressed and wigged very elegantly, he gazes out at the viewer with a poised and inviting expression.10 Another portrait in oil, dated 1764–68, has recently been authenticated through the energetic efforts of Dr. Gerhard Christmann of Budenheim, Germany, 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

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.

“as my works show me to be”

41

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.

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 sober finery; his gaze is assured; his face seems to be the same face as the one in the 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 several sheets of music manuscript. The extroversion of the first portrait, its sense of being at the very point of making sound, the arched, expectant eyebrows of the young man’s gaze, are replaced by something graver, less mobile, more

42

“as my works show me to be”

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

j j œ œœ œœ œ œ œjœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œœ œœ œœ œ œ [ n] œ J # œ ‰ œ &b c œ œœ ‰ j œ ? b c œ #œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ ‰ [# ]œJ œ œ #œ œ ‰ œ Andante

3

&b œ œ ? b œ.

œ œ

œ œ œ œ J

œ

#œ

self-contained. He holds in his hand not his tools but his works, or works in the making, for these scraps of melody and accompaniment look like sketches (see example 3). The differences between these two portraits suggest a crucial distinction in the identity of this artist. Even as he produced music that beautifully demonstrates the interdependence of performer and composer, the terms of this interdependence were being reconfigured in European musical culture. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the printing of music and its distribution to a swelling middle-class amateur market was redefining what a composer was. Most importantly, he no longer had to appear in person as a performer to be perfectly familiar—a household guest, as it were—to a very large public indeed. This was only one arena of society in which ideas of performance (whether theatrical, musical, or social) and its proper relationship to personal identity were shifting with worrying rapidity. How and within what parameters was the performance evidence of the person? To whom was any given performance properly directed? Many circumstances of Boccherini’s career, as well as details of his music, suggest that his relation to questions of this kind was neither casual nor unexamined.

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

“as my works show me to be”

43

eration of an impressively hoary wooden cross, said to date from Roman times, provided the pretext for city-wide spectacles. Over the first part of the century it had become Luccan tradition to stage an opera seria by Metastasio at Lucca’s Teatro Pubblico during the festa. Leopoldo Boccherini, Luigi’s father, was a “contrabbassista soprannumerario,” a supplementary bass player in the civic orchestra, and consequently he played in some of these productions. We can thereby suppose that the Boccherini children attended them, hearing mostly pasticcio operas that featured arias by some of the foremost composers in the serious style (Hasse, Gluck, Traetta, and, in 1757, Galuppi, whose 1751 setting of L’Artaserse was given whole and without interpolations) performed by distinguished singers (Gaetano Guadagni in 1757 and Caterina Gabrielli in 1758 and 1761, to name only the superstars), and seeing ballets by leading choreographers of the time (Antoine Pitrot in 1757, Giuseppe Salomone in 1758, Vincent Saunier in 1761) performed by fine soloists (in 1755, Francesco Turchi, Pitrot himself, and his consort Mimi Favier in 1757; and in 1761, Onorato Viganò). Boccherini would later encounter a number of these luminaries in Vienna and Paris, while a few of them would appear later still in Madrid. The choice of a bass stringed instrument for Luigi makes perfectly conventional sense as a passing down of a valuable skill from one generation to the 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 energetic about training all of them in the performing arts.15 Luigi and his elder brother Giovanni Gastone (b. 1742) began singing, as soprano and contralto 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 1755 and 1761 respectively, as dancers in the corps de ballet at the Teatro Pubblico.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 during the family sojourns in Vienna. Given the familial emphasis on dance, it is not unlikely that Luigi himself received 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, highly visualized management of bodily gesture that such training ingrains—a consciousness that can be seen to inform, and that most usefully explains, many aspects of his compositions. In any case, the training of all of the Boccherini brood was pretty squarely focused on arts pertaining to the theater. In doing this, Leopoldo was directing his children toward the maximally prestigious careers modeled for them every year by the singers and dancers imported into Lucca for its opera productions. He was thereby also encouraging his children to leave Lucca, since such careers were built upon touring. Luigi’s instrument would not ordinarily have lent itself to a career either theatrical or prestigious in any way. At mid-century, in all but the very largest

44

“as my works show me to be”

musical centers, the cello was at best inconsistently distinguishable from the bass in matters of size, construction, and role within ensembles; it was only beginning to be considered a virtuoso instrument in the hands of a few extraordinary players. Yet we see Luigi bidding fair to join their ranks from a very early age.19 There is a record from August 1756 of the thirteen-yearold’s performing a “Concerto di Violoncello” of his own composition for Giacomo Puccini, Lucca’s maestro di cappella, organist of the cathedral, and an ancestor of the more famous bearer of that name. On 4 August 1756 Mass and Vespers set to music at the monastery of San Domenico, for the feast of that saint. . . . Luigi Boccherini [was paid] for a violoncello concerto which he played on the day[,] after the first psalm, and played again to oblige me at Mass and Vespers.20

In addition to other solo appearances in his native city, Luigi was clearly being introduced to the itinerant life of the virtuoso. He may have performed as far afield as Rome and Venice;21 in March 1761 he performed a cello concerto “in an entirely new style” to enthusiastic applause between the two parts of an oratorio by Jommelli in Florence,22 and there is a further mention of his appearing in Modena in 1762.23 Meanwhile, in December 1757, Luigi and 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 work in Vienna. They returned to Lucca in September 1758, departing again for Vienna in April 1760 and staying until March 1761; and they were there again from April 1763 to April of the following year.

vienna The financial basis of these journeys was theatrical work: for the other children, dancing, and for Leopoldo and Luigi, playing in the orchestra of the German theater at the Kärntnertor. This latter was fairly humble employment: “ We can assume that they were . . . among the lowest paid musicians in an orchestra that ranked second to the orchestra of the Burgtheater in prestige, and in remuneration.”24 However grueling and inglorious, this work maintained father and son in Vienna, a place of enormous potential for anyone with ambitions in the performing arts. All the Boccherini children made good use of that potential, especially the three eldest. Maria Ester was to become one of the Burgtheater’s handful of featured dancers, appearing regularly in pas de quatre and pas de deux.25 She subsequently toured as a soloist to Bologna and Trieste. Giovanni Gastone did not pursue his initial career as 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 strong endorsement of his talents by Raniero de’ Calzabigi;26 in Giovanni’s stint as chief poet and artistic director at the Burgtheater from 1769 to 1775; in his

“as my works show me to be”

45

eventual election to the Arcadian Academy in Rome; and in the fact that his libretti were regularly used by the court composer Salieri, among others.27 As for Luigi, there are four extant Viennese records of solo performances at the Academien, concerts of non-theatrical music given every Friday (and three times a week during Lent) on the stage of the Burgtheater. The first is in a letter written by the Luccan ambassador to Vienna, Giovan Battista Sardini, on 9 March 1758: “[Leopoldo’s] son who plays the bassetto in the concerts at the court theater is much applauded.”28 Two other records date from April and October of 1763, and another from 1764.29 Such appearances before the Viennese public were a good source of both prestige and income, and, not incidentally, of contact with some of the leading virtuosi of the day. At the time of Luigi’s visits to Vienna, some of these were fine players indeed: the violinists Pietro Nardini and Karl Ditters,30 the horn player (and friend of the Mozart family) Joseph Leutgeb, and—interestingly in their potential as role models—the Italian cellists Francischello (Francesco Alborea) and Antonio Vallotti. The prima donna Caterina Gabrielli was regularly featured during these years, and the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, who premièred the role of Gluck’s Orfeo, sang in the April 1763 Academien in which Boccherini also played, while Florian Gassmann “appeared as an accompanist 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 electoral courts of the Empire, where he received great compliments on his violoncello playing.”31 This is a very impressive claim, for it takes Boccherini to Prague, Dresden, Hanover, Berlin, Munich, Mannheim, Mainz, Trier, and Cologne by the age of eighteen; since there is absolutely no corroboration for it (and since Boccherini states in the same sentence that from Lucca he had been “twice called to Vienna,” rather a dressing-up of the circumstances of the Vienna journeys) it must be treated with caution. Daniel Heartz has examined this claim meticulously;32 with him we may at least allow that by 1760 Boccherini might have toured from Vienna as far as Munich, where he would have been heard by members of the Dresden and Cologne courts taking 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 notable degree of success for one so young, and among whom his ideas of musical effectiveness were shaped during a formative period of his life? Viennese musical culture in the 1750s and 1760s was very centralized; its “theatricality and cosmopolitanism” was enacted almost entirely in the court theaters and in a handful of noble salons.33 This culture was in part a reflection of Imperial preferences, in part evidence of resistance to them: the Empress Maria Theresa was given to strenuous interventions in her subjects’ taste. Evidence

46

“as my works show me to be”

places Luigi in the intense rehearsal and performance schedule of the Kärntnertortheater; troc places him also at his sister Maria Ester’s side, hearing her accounts of the spectacles in which she took part, and, time permitting, accompanying her there to listen and observe from the parterre noble of the Burgtheater.34 The Burgtheater alone offered an overwhelmingly eclectic mixture of the musical, the dramatic, and the terpsichorean: French classical spoken drama; Parisian opéra-comique adapted by Gluck for a Viennese audience; the occasional Metastasian opera seria, used ceremonially to mark Imperial birthdays, important marriages, and the like; bold experiments in dance by Starzer and Gluck, Hilverding and Angiolini (of which more below); and, after 1759, Italian comic opera presented by itinerant troupes. The German theater in which Luigi worked operated in particular tension with Imperial taste. Maria Theresa had “cracked down” on its offerings in 1752, restricting the number of performances and censoring the German theater’s main repertorial fodder, the Stegreifkomödie, as it was called: impromptu comedy. By the time of the Boccherinis’ employment there only five years later, however, there was little sign of this attempt at elevating Viennese taste through restriction. This vulgar, topical, semi-improvised genre had roots as deep in popular affections as in the commedia dell’arte, and no amount of Imperial censorship was going to suppress it for long. The music was pasticcio drawn from Italian comic opera and German and Austrian folk music, and so most of the records of the Kärntnertor performances do not name a composer.35 It is not easy to assess the nature of the influence of the Stegreifkomödie on Luigi’s choices as a composer. With the exception of a few explicit evocations of Spanish peasant music and his generic affection for drones and bagpipelike effects (which I have linked to certain technical aspects of string playing in chapter 1), he rarely composed in any folk style, let alone in the bauerisch mode used with such gusto by Haydn and other Viennese composers. But he was certainly well versed in its dramatic strengths, which are the strengths of the comic style everywhere: rapid, deft characterization, ambiguity, potential irony, self-referentiality, virtuoso physicality, and grotesquerie. The most interesting and profound Viennese influence on Luigi’s artistic development, however, came through happy circumstance: the very years of his family’s involvement with the Imperial city’s dance culture were also those of this culture’s most famous reform, a reform that consolidated some radical shifts in the whole idea of embodied performance. If we judge by sheer number of representations, the ruling Viennese passion of the day was for ballets. Silly and serious, short and long, they accompanied performances in every other genre, even spoken drama. (The records of Philipp Gumpenhuber specify that “two ballets are performed every day on which there is a show in each of the two theaters.”)36 Speaking merely quantitatively, then, Luigi would have played, seen, and heard more dance music than anything

“as my works show me to be”

47

else, whether in the course of his duties at the German theater, or in the hypothetical position we have assigned him, observing rehearsals or performances from the parterre noble of the French theater. During Luigi’s first visits to Vienna, virtually all ballets in both theaters were choreographed by Franz Hilverding, with music composed by Joseph Starzer. These men had begun developing the stately, abstracted French danse noble toward some degree of narrative coherence and coordination of dramatic action with musical events (necessitating, on the near side of the footlights, an unprecedented coordination of choreographer and composer).37 Hilverding and Starzer’s reforms were to some degree a practical response to their audiences’ less-than-abstracted taste. This was a taste that ran toward the improvised buffoonery of the German comedy, but in so doing ran also toward an embodied stage practice based upon everyday human gestures, and consolidated in “a true bond of affection between the actors and their audience.”38 The relationship sought by the audience, then, was one of a personal identification with the dancers. In developing the pantomime ballet, as they called it, these Viennese reformers built upon this identification between performer and audience, and transformed bodies from symbols to protagonists: suffering, changing fellow selves whose embodiment, displayed upon the stage, evoked or provoked the bodies watching and breathing in sympathy from under wigs and within corsets. Hilverding and Starzer’s work was continued in the later 1750s and into the 1760s by the dancer and choreographer Gasparo Angiolini and the composer Christoph von Gluck. Their first thoroughly coordinated collaboration, the full-length narrative ballet Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre, premièred in October 1761; Maria Ester Boccherini danced in it. Luigi was not in Vienna at the time, nor did he return there in time for any of the recorded repeat performances that season. Yet it is certain that he knew this piece, because he later based a movement of a symphony upon the striking music with which Gluck portrays Don Juan’s entry into Hell.39 Despite his absence for the première of Don Juan, it would not have been difficult for Luigi to make the work’s acquaintance: its immediate and lasting success meant that scores circulated widely and that instrumental performances—of its demonic music in particular—continued to be very popular in Viennese venues both public and private.40 One can readily imagine parodied or vulgarized versions 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 knowledge of what was arguably the most influential stage work of his generation from the fact that it was still in repertory when he arrived in Vienna the following April. The embodied implications of pantomime ballet were to inform Luigi’s subsequent development as an artist; his eventual realizations of some of

48

“as my works show me to be”

these implications are, I would argue, among his most important contributions as a composer. As it happens, his works could be counted among the more direct realizations of the pantomime reform that we now possess, for from these red-letter years in the history of dance scarcely any choreography survives.41 In large part, reform choreographers seem to have relied on elaborate descriptions in which the gestural process of an entire ballet is laid out in prose.42 These descriptions testify to the very developed powers of physical observation and gestural reading-in being cultivated at this time, acknowledged by Angiolini when he speaks of the necessity of choreography that analyzed “the meaning of gestures, observed their connection and correspondence, recognized their value and harmony.”43 The mark of dance in general can be felt in the steady, confident periodicity of Boccherini’s music, its reliance on the foursquare phrase construction that is the dancer’s touchstone.44 The mark of the pantomime style in particular can be felt in the telegraphic, visualistic expressiveness of many of his melodies, harmonies, and timbres, which suggest that he precisely “observed [gestures’] connection and correspondence, recogniz[ing] their value and harmony” just as Angiolini recommended. Thus Boccherini’s occasional abandonment of periodicity is never casual, but always in search of heightened dramatic effect, implying a curtailed or extended physical gesture that could more vividly convey an emotional reality. By 1764 the Boccherinis, father and son, had returned to Lucca, where an official post as “eletto suonatore di violoncello” (for which Luigi had been angling from as early as the 1760 letter quoted above) had materialized. That the two continued to be energetic about regional touring is evident from records of their participation in orchestral concerts in Pavia and Cremona in 1765 under the direction of Giovanni Battista Sammartini. For these events, organized to honor a visit by the Habsburg Archduke Leopold and his wife, an orchestra of sixty musicians from all over northern Italy was assembled; among them, Luigi and his father were distinguished by having come the farthest, and by the honorary designation “Professori.”45 Leopoldo Boccherini died suddenly of a stroke in 1766. His son continued to perform all over northern Italy. One of Luigi’s most interesting activities during this period was attested to many years later by the violinist Giuseppe Cambini, who tells us that he played and toured in a string quartet with Boccherini, Pietro Nardini, and Filippo Manfredi—the very first recorded instance of this configuration of instruments as a discrete ensemble with its own special repertory and expressive powers. Boccherini’s own catalog tells us that his first opus of string quartets, op. 2, was written in 1765; they seem to bear witness to a process of composition that refers to the specific talents of his colleagues. Their virtuosity is acknowledged in a degree of independence and showiness of all four parts that was very unusual for the time, and they attain at times a dramatic, quasi-Angiolinian vividness of expression.

“as my works show me to be”

49

paris Throughout these years of his early manhood we can assume that Boccherini’s ambitions also turned toward Paris. Parisian influence had been strong indeed in Vienna since 1759, when the impresario Durazzo and the poet and playwright Favart established a “pipeline” through which Parisian ballets and opéras-comiques made their way directly to the Austrian capital. In the 1760s, moreover, Paris was probably the largest city in Europe,46 and a point of intersection and cross-pollination for all the major musical styles of the day. From the viewpoint of an ambitious young cellist, it was the seat of a veritable dynasty of peers, the greatest concentration of cello virtuosi in any one place at that time. Perhaps most importantly, however, in view of the subsequent development of Boccherini’s career, Paris was the undisputed capital of music publishing. In late 1767 Boccherini made the journey to Paris via Genoa, traveling with his fellow Luccan, the violinist Filippo Manfredi.47 He stayed there until the following April. Boccherini had had the good fortune to be present in Vienna during one of the most interesting passages in its illustrious musical history. The period of his visit to Paris was scarcely less interesting. Although the famous Querelle des Bouffons had taken place more than a decade before Boccherini’s arrival in Paris, its negotiations between social classes and political positions, staged as a polarity between French and Italian style, remained emblematic of the Parisian cultural climate: a climate filled with urgent inquiries into the representation of human nature, which were finding much of their best and clearest expression through explicit reference to music-making. The Parisian scene was far-flung and heterogenous, despite the inevitable royal efforts at control and centralization of musical culture.48 Both performance and discourse about performance had broad reception, with musical events to suit the taste of every social class, and an impressively high rate of literacy to accommodate the attendant flood of discussion.49 For anyone engaged in performing music, this meant that what one did was never safely “just music,” but always potentially a statement, assertion, move, or counter-move in an unstable, passionate arena of public discourse about human nature and human rights. For “official” musical theater in Paris, the 1767–68 season of Boccherini’s arrival was one of especial precariousness. Since the previous year, the Académie Royale de Musique—the redoubtable Opéra—had been performing in a temporary structure built upon the stage of the huge, box-shaped Salle des Machines in the Tuileries Palace. The company’s old home had burned in 1763; the reconstructed theater was not to be finished until 1769.50 The Théâtre-Italien was struggling with dwindling audiences and attendant financial problems, and was performing in the sixteenth-century theater of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which was generally acknowledged to be an inadequate and awkwardly located space.

50

“as my works show me to be”

Meanwhile the boulevard theaters, so named because they were being established along the outlying boulevards of the fast-growing city, consolidated and brought indoors many of the grass-roots events of the ancient outdoor fair theaters. Their offerings were, to say the least, eclectic: commedia dell’arte, vernacular drama with interpolated singing, acrobatics, stunts, contortionists, animal acts, wicked satires of current offerings at the Opéra, and—thanks to continual efforts by the royal academies to restrict any infringements on their monopolies in opera and spoken theater—increasingly serious experiments in narrative ballet. Even as the officially sanctioned theaters attempted to put limits on the popular theaters’ burgeoning success, they imitated them. While skirting frank spectacularity, the offerings at the Théâtre-Italien in the mid-1760s certainly favored variety: a typical evening’s entertainment contained a comic play in Italian, one or more of the various kinds of opéras-comiques, and, more often than not, an entertainment in the new pantomime style of dance as well. These offerings changed nightly, maintaining a loose rotation of fifty or 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 parterre and seen new works such as Les Moissonneurs of Favart and Duni, or L’Île sonnante of Collé and Monsigny, both of which were premièred during this period; or popular older works, some of them perhaps familiar to Boccherini from their appearances on the Vienna stage: Rose et Colas, On ne s’avise jamais de tout, or Le Roi et le fermier. While the Théâtre-Italien recycled its repertory energetically, nothing much more than ten years old appeared on its boards during the 1767–68 season. But the Opéra was a different story, going well beyond the practicality of revivals into profound retentiveness. Very much older repertories were offered along with the new, in a strange Parisian mixture found nowhere else in musical theater of the time. Not only Rameau’s but also Lully’s centuryold tragédies-lyriques were still in repertory at the Opéra in the 1770s, albeit with certain features (notably the dance music) updated.51 If Boccherini took the opportunity to join the parterre crowd during one of these performances, he would have heard and seen something quite different from anything in his previous, or indeed subsequent, experience. Tragédies-lyriques were deeply old-fashioned by 1768, and their critics spared no invective in saying exactly why. The dragging character of the language, the inflexibility of our voices, the tone of lament which reigns perpetually in our opera, give nearly all the French monologues a slow tempo; and since the beat cannot be felt in the song, nor in the bass, nor in the accompaniment, nothing is as dragging, as lax, as languishing as these beautiful monologues which everyone admires while yawning; they would be sad, and are boring; they would touch the heart, and only afflict the ears.52

“as my works show me to be”

51

That tragédie-lyrique remained in repertory was emblematic of Parisian conflations of the musical and the political: tragédie-lyrique had been invented to glorify royalty, and it continued to represent it almost to the bitter end of 1789. So polarized and polarizing are the critical terms here exemplified by Rousseau, that their opposite number can be pretty precisely inferred by simple 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 to say, implicitly republican. Whether politically supercharged, as in Paris, or more generically symbolic of social class, as in Vienna, the serious-comic polarity was arguably the central axis of musical tastes in Europe in general at this time. However, polemics about it tended to simplify or even bypass the sound of the music involved. Politically speaking, Rousseau could not afford to acknowledge Rameau’s peerless ear for dramatic excitement and instrumental color, or his genius for matching musical motions to danced ones, a genius perhaps rivaled only by Gluck. Boccherini, on the other hand, was under no such deafening obligation, and was to draw on both serious and comic traditions throughout his life. Although lacking the politically volatile potential of staged narrative, instrumental music was also immensely popular in Paris. The Concerts Spirituels, the main showcase for instrumentalists in the 1760s, existed as a counterpart to the Opéra, frequently using its soloists and orchestra, and functioning only when the Opéra did not. At the time of Boccherini’s visit to Paris, the concerts were notably dominated by cellists, especially Jean-Baptiste Jansson l’aîné (1742–1803) and the Duport brothers Jean-Pierre (1741–1818) and Jean-Louis (1749–1819), all of whom played their own compositions. The records of programs given at the Concerts Spirituels and the reviews of them published in the endlessly garrulous Parisian press provide some sense of the hornet’s nest of cellistic competition into which Boccherini had plunged. Jansson, who had debuted at the Concerts Spirituels in 1755, was at the peak of his very considerable success there by the mid-1760s, playing solos of his own 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 always surprises and charms at the same time.”53 Jean-Pierre Duport had debuted at the Concerts Spirituels in 1761, and was held in great favor thereafter; he played his own concerti and sonatas up to eleven times a season. A review of 1762 lavishes praise upon him in terms that give a nice idea of what the Parisian public valued in an instrumental soloist: a speaking quality, expressive immediacy, and ease: “M. Duport has performed new works upon the violoncello every day, and has won new admiration. The instrument is no longer recognizable in his hands: it speaks, it expresses, it renders everything [at a level] beyond that charm one had believed reserved exclusively for the violin.”54 In 1768 the younger Duport, Jean-Louis, made his debut at the Concerts

52

“as my works show me to be”

Spirituels at the age of eighteen: “A precise, brilliant, astonishing execution; a full, flexible, gratifying sound and a bold, sure style announce the greatest talent and a virtuoso who is of an age usually given over to study. He was heard with admiration by the connoisseurs.”55 Six weeks later Boccherini appeared before these same Parisian connoisseurs, playing one of his own sonatas, and was mentioned (with lamentable lack of descriptive detail) in the Mercure de France: “Boccherini, already known through his trios and quartets, which are very effective, performed in a masterly fashion, upon the violoncello, a sonata of his own composition.”56 Although we have only this one published review, and Bachaumont’s unhelpful mention of the same occasion (see above), Luigi’s playing must have found other Parisian audiences than those of the Concerts Spirituels. This could have happened at one of the city’s redoubtable salons, many of which had long featured music on a regular basis; preeminent during this period, following the death of La Pouplinière in 1762 and the dissolution of his famous orchestra, was the salon of the Prince de Conti, which flourished from about 1761 at the Hôtel du Temple. The prince maintained an excellent orchestra, “one of the best and most complete that one could see.”57 It had a large wind section, including such up-to-the-minute instruments as clarinets, and featured many current luminaries, both instrumental and vocal, as soloists (it was this salon that the ten-year-old Mozart visited in 1766). Conti’s roster of employees included Jansson, from 1764, and the elder Duport, from 1766. The Duc d’Orléans also kept an orchestra on retainer. At the very least, Boccherini probably attended events at such establishments, where musicians were often treated as guests rather than servants. We can only speculate as to whether he ever performed at them. If the account of Boccherini’s biographer Picquot is correct, Boccherini is especially likely to have appeared at the salon of the Baron de Bagge, following an introduction by the publisher La Chevardière.58 The baron did not maintain an orchestra, but preferred to present musicians in a more intimate setting: “Every Friday during the winter Baage [sic] . . . holds at his house one of the finest private concerts in this capital. It gives him pleasure to admit all the foreign and amateur virtuosos who wish to debut in this capital 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 salon from about 1760. Boccherini may possibly have resided with him during his Parisian sojourn.60 The baron seems to have been something of a character. 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, none too kindly, by Fétis and others for his peccadillo of paying virtuosi to “take lessons” with him, and then claiming them as his students.61 Boccherini did not dedicate any works to Bagge, but if he stayed there it seems fair to as-

“as my works show me to be”

53

sume that he would have performed for (and thus with) this eccentric but evidently generous amateur. One cello concerto by Boccherini, G. 573, presents an interesting circumstantial case for a meeting between Boccherini and the elder Duport at some Parisian salon, perhaps that of Bagge. In this C-major concerto, the slow movement (Largo cantabile) is, very oddly indeed, in D major. The orchestration of the movement is also odd: except for a short tutti introduction and postlude, it is unaccompanied—or rather, the accompaniment to the solo part is entirely self-provided: the cello double-stops its own bass (see example 4a). In his violoncello treatise of 1813 (published in 1820), Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle, et sur la conduite de l’archet, Duport the younger includes two études by his elder brother. One of these, the eighth in the book, is a piece in D major which dispenses with the other études’ second-cello accompaniment in favor of a self-provided one (see example 4b). While these two pieces are but vaguely similar to the ear, executionally they are strikingly so: this is an unusual and difficult technique, in which the horizontally executed cantilena of the melody must be maintained unruffled despite the constant vertical dipping motions involved in executing the accompaniment.62 It is tempting to suppose that this similarity represents a little compositional badinage between Boccherini and the elder Duport. Similarly circumstantial evidence exists for Boccherini’s presence in 1768 at the household of another saloniste, Madame Brillon de Jouy, who resided in Passy, then on the outskirts of Paris. According to his catalog, Boccherini wrote six keyboard-and-violin sonatas for her, published the following year by Vénier as Sei sonate di cembalo e violino, dedicate a Madama Brillon de Jouy, da Luigi Boccherini di Lucca.63 In June 1770, Charles Burney also visited Madame Brillon, 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 acquired her 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 executing some of my own music. She likewise composes and she was so obliging as to play several of her own pieces on the harpsichord and piano forte accompanied with the violin by M. Pagin.64

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

54

“as my works show me to be”

Example 4a. Cello Concerto in C Major, G. 573, ii (Largo cantabile), bars 13–20. Largo cantabile 13 solo

B # # 24 œ J

œœœœœ œ œ

‰ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ œ

œ œœ

3

15

œ œœ œ œ œ ? ‰

œœ œ œ œ œjœœ

B # # œj œœ 3

‰ œ

? # # œœ œ œ œœ

17

3

? # # œœ

19

œ œœ 3

œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œ œ

œ

3

œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œ œ

œ J

œ j œœ œ œ œ œœ

j œ

œœ

j œ

œœ œ œ œ

œœ œ œ œ

3

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

# & # cœ # & # w Œ 3

w Œ

œ ‰ œ ‰ œ J ‰

œ œ

‰

œ œ

? œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ Œ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰ J J J

? ## œ œ œ ‰ œ J J 6

&

œœ œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ ‰ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ J ‰ Œ J J

œ ‰

œ

Ó

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ # œœ œ J ‰ J ‰ J ‰ J ‰

œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ ‰ # œJ ‰ J ‰ J ‰ J ‰ Œ

could scarcely have avoided some troc with what was, by the 1760s, a pervasive element in European culture; but in Parisian salons he would have encountered its social manifestations at full strength. Parisian audiences really did weep at concerts and operas; we know this because they were proud of the fact, and wrote about it in their diaries and correspondence. These ready tears were the badge of a sensitivity that was treasured as evidence of a finely tuned organism, a particularly excellent moral fiber. Such exquisite susceptibilities found their truest register in the intimate settings of salons, and in the intimate nature of works written for only a few performers. While Boccherini’s reception as a virtuoso performer in Paris seems, from

“as my works show me to be”

55

the scanty available evidence, to have been rather mixed, his compositions for small ensemble were warmly received there from the very beginning. As even his sole published performance review testifies, he was “already known through his trios and quartets, which are very effective.” It is telling that Boccherini had evidently taken careful steps to ensure his Parisian reception as a composer, sending his compositions to publishers well before making the journey himself. In April 1767, some months before his arrival in Paris, the Mercure de France had announced Vénier’s publication of an opus of six string quartets by “Bouqueriny”;65 in the same year, a set of six string trios was published by Bailleux (in July)66 and Grangé brought out a Sinfonia in D.67 This astute entry into the publishing world resulted in Boccherini’s first really resounding, and certainly his most lasting, professional success. From 1768 through the first third of the nineteenth century, a generation after his death, Boccherini was a steady presence in the Parisian publishing world, the period’s largest and most competitive music-publishing market. The table in the appendix lists only first editions of his music, the great majority of which were brought out in Paris. If we add to this list, as Gérard has done, the multiple reprintings of some works, works that were attributed to but probably not written by him, and arrangements, both pirated and legitimate—all of these being testimonies, in their way, to his popularity—this authorial presence on the Parisian scene becomes a substantial one.

spain For all the productivity and popularity to which they attest, such successes in publishing did not constitute a secure livelihood. After six months in Paris, steady patronage was no more forthcoming for Boccherini than it was for Mozart when on a similar quest ten years later. Boccherini and his traveling companion Manfredi evidently had plans to continue from Paris on to London, where Italian stringed-instrument virtuosi had enjoyed especial popularity for several generations.68 But other prospects seem to have intervened, and the young virtuosi parted company for a while. Boccherini traveled to Madrid, while Manfredi remained in Paris, joining Boccherini somewhat later. In the end neither one of them went to London. Spain was a rather less obvious destination than London careerwise, and we can only guess at the specific enticements. Numerous biographers, beginning with Picquot, have suggested that the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Joaquín Pignatelli de Aragón y Moncalvo, Conde de Fuentes, provided Boccherini and Manfredi with letters of recommendation to the court at Madrid. Since these letters cannot be found, Tortella has presented an alternative theory. In 1768 the expatriate Italian impresario and music publisher Luigi Marescalchi and a partner, Francisco Creus, had secured a contract with the Spanish royal house to present Italian opera at the Sitios Reales, the “royal

56

“as my works show me to be”

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

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

“as my works show me to be”

57

any case, his name appears as composer of an insertion aria in the libretto printed for their performances of Gian Francesco Majo’s L’Almería at Aranjuez in the spring of 1768.70 We may also suppose that he undertook this work in Spain in order to support himself while pursuing a more personal goal. Among the singers for Marescalchi’s company was an Italian soprano named Clementina Pelliccia. Boccherini was to marry a Clementina Pelicha in San Ildefonso, another of the Sitios Reales, in August 1769.71 In the spring of 1770, after about two years of membership in Marescalchi’s company (doubtless supplemented by free-lancing), Boccherini was officially hired by the king’s brother, the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, as “virtuoso da cámara y compositor de música.”72 Up to this point Boccherini had negotiated a career as international virtuoso/composer with reasonable success. After it he became, as the titles on his publications proudly attest, a member of the court of the Infante. This was no casual employment, but a principal object of eighteenth-century musicianly ambition. It made one a person of substance and it cemented one’s prospects; one entered such service with the expectation of remaining there for life.73 While this exchange of freedom for security had been Boccherini’s object throughout, a less foreseeable part of the bargain was the degree of his subsequent isolation. Within a few years of his appointment there unfolded a complex set of machinations on the part of the king to exclude his brother’s children from succession to the throne. As a result Don Luis was essentially banished, his household forbidden to reside in or near Madrid. There followed 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 and his family included; there were stays in Talavera, Torrijos, Velada, and Cadalso de los Vidrios between 1776 and 1777, when Luis decided to settle in Arenas de San Pedro on the Rio Tiétar, about eighty miles west of Toledo (see figure 4).74 Luis’s new palace there was not habitable until 1783, and its construction was never completed. Most of these towns were too small to figure on period maps, and remain fairly remote to this day. A measure of their cultural isolation in the eighteenth century can be found in the attempted exchange of letters between Boccherini and Joseph Haydn, which is reproduced at the beginning of chapter 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 beaten track of European musical culture than Eszterháza. Perhaps to an even greater extent than most large countries, eighteenthcentury “Spain” was a nominal assemblage of wildly diverse cultures and peoples.75 Its music-making was characterized by a series of sharp dislocations and parallelisms, along lines of social class, national identity, economic exigency, and religious custom.76 The Borbón royalty were French, and French influence was to be felt in every activity of the Spanish upper classes: visual

58

“as my works show me to be”

art, architecture, dance, couture, manners, and morals. Yet, largely through the influence of the music-loving Queen Isabella Farnese (reigned alongside Felipe V, 1714–46), the favored music of the royal house was Italian. It is characteristic of this period that the queens, rather more than their Borbón husbands, were the real music-lovers and to a great extent the arbiters of royal musical 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 famous of all Italian singers, Carlo Broschi, detto Farinelli, to Spain in 1737. It was her son Fernando (r. 1746–59) and even more significantly his musical queen María Bárbara who encouraged Farinelli to develop an opera company. The creative and financial license given to Farinelli by Fernando was almost infinite, and Farinelli’s efforts on behalf of serious opera were so substantial that by the end of his twenty-two-year residence in Spain he had succeeded in making Madrid, from scratch, one of the most important of all venues for this quintessentially Italian art.77 Through his participation in the Compañía de los Sitios Reales Boccherini had been, for the first time in his life, directly involved in playing and composing opera seria. His insertion aria for Majo’s L’Almería is unfortunately lost. There exists a concert aria (aria accademica) in B b Major, G. 557, to a text from Metastasio’s Artaserse, “Se d’un amor tiranno,” which I would propose as an another likely composition from this period.78 Its delicious interaction of obbligato cello with soprano voice suggests a musical portrait of Boccherini’s affectionate yet professional relationship with Clementina Pelliccia. During the period of Luigi’s association with the Compañía the group presented not only serious operas but also comic and larmoyant works by Piccinni, Galuppi, and others, while the unavoidable Serva padrona of Pergolesi had been in repertory since the days of Farinelli.79 Spanish royal and noble audiences were thus quite well versed in Italian theatrical music of all kinds. That this eclecticism extended to the middle classes is suggested in a retrospective memoir of 1785. With the taste to hear [from] such famous singers the best arias from Italy, there spread through Madrid the new taste for their music, and [this] decided enthusiasm instantly ran through all the provincial capitals. There was scarcely a youth, a young woman, an office boy who did not know and sing from memory “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 rooms at every private or domestic function.80

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

“as my works show me to be”

59

does not have to look far to come up hard against evidence of attitudes that were quite distinct from the general European moment. For example, to the very end of the century there were relatively few printing presses in Madrid, and the only ones that really thrived were those that operated with royal support.81 (None of these printed music until the mid-1770s, and even then printing was fitful.)82 Print culture, lifeblood of Enlightenment and subversion alike, was much inhibited under such conditions. Another striking example of a deep conservatism in the midst of modernization can be seen in a decree issued by Carlos III shortly before his death, according to which all the paintings in the royal collection which featured nudes were to be summarily destroyed. (They included numerous canvasses by Titian and Rubens. Carlos IV fortunately disobeyed the order.)83 The Catholic Church had retained a greater presence and authority in Spain than in other parts of Europe, largely through the Santo Oficio, the infamous Inquisition. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Inquisition continued to proscribe many central works of Enlightenment thought; indeed, with the advent of the French Revolution, Inquisitional censorship assumed a central responsibility 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 extremely conservative intellectual climate. Diderot’s Encyclopédie was put on the Index of prohibited books in 1759; all of Rousseau’s works were similarly censored in 1764.85 Extremists like La Mettrie were “all but unknown south of the Pyrenees.”86 The ancient Spanish university system taught little natural science or medicine beyond the systems elaborated by Aristotle, and little theology beyond Thomas Aquinas. There were nevertheless individuals and a few cultural institutions that worked around this repressive climate toward a real “Ilustración,” a uniquely Spanish Enlightenment. Chief among them was the monk Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo y Montenegro (1676–1764), spokesman por excelencia of Spanish critical thinking. In his monumental Theatro crítico universal 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 the rest of Europe but maintained, as he himself attested, a habitual independentmindedness and skepticism, an insistence on figuring out for himself how and why things worked: “I, citizen of the Republic of Letters, neither a slave of Aristotle nor an ally of his enemies, will always listen to that which reason and experience dictate to me, in preference to all private authority.”87 Feijóo was treasured by his own countrymen for these very qualities. His works enjoyed multiple reprintings after his death, so that in the textual sense he is very much a contemporary of Boccherini. It is typical of the complexities of Spanish culture at this time that the taking of religious orders was one of the routes by which educated Spaniards could get information about

60

“as my works show me to be”

the Enlightenment. As a monk, Feijóo had legitimate access to Indexed works and was thus able to provide a taste of their intellectual wares to his readers, though sometimes rather heavily salted with disapproval. In another remarkable example of the fallibility of repressive systems, the 1780s saw considerable Spanish circulation and paraphrasing of the works of the Abbé Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80), a philosophe who approached materialism in great detail through the sensations and actions of the human body, and whose theories inform several sections of this book.88 As part of the Ilustración, Madrid was literally being remade before the eyes 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 seasons with safety and pleasure.”89 Yet the differences between Madrid and its models remained profound. Baron Jean-François Bourgoing (1748–1811), “Minister Plenipotentiary from France to the court of Madrid,” remarked on Madrid’s grand central promenade, the Prado, as follows: In [place of] that motley variety of apparel and head-dresses, which in other public places of Europe, agreeably diversify the scene, you only behold on foot at the Prado, women dressed in an uniform style, muffled up in long veils, black or white, which conceal part of their faces; and men, for the most part, wrapped up in huge cloaks of a dark colour; insomuch that the Prado, however beautiful 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 sounds of the angelus invade the ears of the pedestrians, they instantly uncover their heads, make a sudden stop, as if arrested by some invisible hand, abruptly breaking off the most tender discourse, and the most serious discussions, in order to devote a few minutes to prayer.90

As Bourgoing’s account makes clear, even in the lives of those privileged and Parisianized Spaniards for whom Boccherini worked, galanterie was penetrated with a solemn severity, a “gravity,” and Enlightenment proceeded in an uneasy dialogue with it. Yet, while the currents of Enlightenment thought flowed rather differently in Spain than elsewhere, this scarcely means that they 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 on the function of instrumental music in Spanish culture, its representational fluidity making it an effective carrier of certain Enlightenment ideas, flying handily beneath the Inquisitional radar. Music was not subject to proscription as long as it avoided objectionable texts or theatrical associations: the instrumental chamber music in which Boccherini specialized was never in any danger. But it was subject to very divergent estimations. The playwright Ramón de la Cruz (1731–94), whose sainetes (short vernacular comedies) offer a wonderfully penetrating glimpse

“as my works show me to be”

61

into Madrilenian customs in the last quarter of the century, makes it clear that not everyone in Madrid shared the craze for imported music. “There are those who fall asleep when an Italian aria is sung, and are lifted from their seats on hearing a seguidilla.”91 And in the Diario de Madrid for 5 September 1795 there appeared an interesting discourse on musical style. Pray, what effect can gabbling Italian music produce? Only the very fleeting pleasure of hearing a combination of infinite sounds which never reach the heart. . . . I cannot bear to think that this Italian music has perverted our simple, graceful, expressive national melodies, which were true to our character and 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 preserve some of the charm of Spanish music in their boleros, tiranas, and other dances. . . . If it were not for these, even our cooks would by now be singing Italian arias, and our olla podrida [a traditional stew with several different kinds of 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; and by the anonymous author of the Diario article to the heart, to indelible memory, to dance, and, finally, to the difference between processed foodstuffs and flesh. The apposition is of a disembodied artificiality (imported culture) with a physicalized genuineness (indigenous culture), and it ran through many levels of Spanish society at this time. This tension and intrication between the imported and the indigenous is the most important characteristic 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 in 1770 and published in Paris in 1772 by Vénier. The opus bears the unique dedication “to the Gentlemen Music-lovers of Madrid” (“Alli Sig. Dilettanti di Madrid”).93 The number of noblemen in Madrid was considerable in 1770;94 like their counterparts in the other big cities of Europe, they met in private gatherings and disported themselves with chamber music, with conversation, and with food. These salons, or tertulias, as they were called in Madrid, housed yet further cultural cross-currents. The most aggressively Francophile, or afrancesado, establishments had frequent personal connections with Parisian, English, and Viennese circles, and, consequently, good access to proscribed literature, officially discouraged ideas, and foreign art and music that were otherwise difficult to come by. A characteristic example of this is the contract with Joseph Haydn negotiated by María Josefa, the Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna, in 1783. Through her representative in Vienna the Condesa-Duquesa attempted to get Haydn to send nothing less than “all his musical compositions,” at a rate of twelve per year. This rate proved impossible to maintain, and the contract eventually devolved into

62

“as my works show me to be”

a piecemeal arrangement; but the net effect was that by 1786, when Boccherini was hired as music director there, the Benavente-Osuna establishment owned a substantial number of chamber and orchestral works by Haydn that were to be found nowhere else in Madrid.95 The poet, intellectual, statesman, and amateur musician Tomás de Iriarte composed a verse description of a musical evening which gives some idea of afrancesado musical taste and practices. There are nights when one can find congregated twenty or maybe more aficionados who play their part all at once. My contribution is neither much nor very little and thus among them I take a decent place, for when I don’t play the violin, I play viola .... We sample an abundant collection of modern German music, which, as far as symphonies go, consistently takes the prize from the Italian. If someone dedicates himself to counterpoint and brings in any of his work, the amateur orchestra tries, examines, and assesses it. Thus with kindness the participants hear my own sinfonias concertantes.96

Iriarte was also a regular at the Benavente tertulias, which boasted a professional rather than amateur orchestra. To judge by Iriarte’s report, that orchestra’s audience, the “signori dilettanti di Madrid” for whom Boccherini composed, were real connoisseurs with considerable, hands-on experience of the music they heard. At the same time, and not infrequently coming from the same circles, assertions of a self-consciously Spanish musical taste were to be found. As early as 1742 the influential Catalan composer and theorist Francisco Valls had complained of foreign musical styles as “invaders,” the Italian solely concerned 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 artistic position. Self-conscious “Spanishness” appeared perhaps most characteristically in the tonadilla escénica, a short comic genre, generally sung throughout. The tonadilla had its heyday in Madrid during the second half of the eighteenth century. The use of local color and casts of characters recognizable from daily life, the satirical tone, and the free mixture of spoken dialogue, simple recitative, and through-composition in tonadillas and in zarzuelas suggest that Spanish composers had made a kind of stylistic end-run

“as my works show me to be”

63

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.

around the conservatism of the imported opera seria, and by the 1760s were producing dramatic music that was fully up to the European moment: that moment being, above all, the comic and sentimental styles. Afrancesismo had a counterpoint which took a singular form, one which further distinguishes this period of Spanish cultural history. This is majismo, the deliberate assumption of Spanish working-class garb and manners. Majismo was a deliberate response to the perceived artificiality of the upper-class afrancesados as epitomized in the petimetre (petit-maître), a bourgeois dandy, the opposite number of the majo and a frequent object of derision and disdain. Goya’s early cartoons for tapestries in the various Sitios Reales show us the details of the majo costume while offering a subtle interpretation of its gestural accompaniments (see figure 5). Goya’s majos and majas have shed their “huge cloaks of a dark colour” in order to play outdoor games, dance,

64

“as my works show me to be”

or enjoy the sunshine. They share a “naturalness” which manifests as substance, fleshliness. These people have weight, visibly distributed and controlled through their musculature, informing the trajectory and extent of their gestures, whether these be stilt-walking or the subtle adjustments of posture involved in balancing a jug of water on the head. One sees none of the drooping signifiers of melancholy in their poses; they bend only to accommodate gravity. Although Goya’s models are nameless, they are often a bit too real, their faces and gestures rather too vividly expressive, for their iconic function as pastoral decoration on the walls of palaces. Any simplistic class-opposition of majismo and afrancesismo was much complicated during the later part of the century, when the costumes of majo and maja were taken up by the upper classes to signify repudiation of French culture—in effect an early kind of sartorial nationalism. Such complex webs of opposition and alliance played out not only in dress and gesture, but in dance as well. Felipe V had introduced French courtly dance to Spain, grandson of Louis XIV that he was. As in France, this art spread from theaters to private establishments, from staged representations to an embodied social currency, from royalty to nobility and the merchant classes. On the French model, courtly dance became the pretext for formal gatherings, and the chief language of social hierarchy and gender within them. Yet all the while there were other gatherings, majo gatherings, which featured the indigenous dances. Increasingly as the century progressed, those gatherings were imitated by the wealthy, and even encouraged by official culture, so that one might find a fandango danced in the state-sponsored balls of the 1760s, or a seguidillas boleras as the pièce de résistance at a nobleman’s party in the 1780s. Composing successfully for this complex and ambivalent Spanish musical landscape meant being fluent in a great range of styles: not only majismo and afrancesismo, but French (as opposed to Frenchified), Italian, and “modern German music”; not only dance, but theatrical conventions serious, comic, and in between. By virtue of his training and his exposure through travel to different kinds of music, Boccherini was well set up to maintain such competency, and he used it to good advantage throughout his career in Spain—which is to say, the rest of his life: for we do not know him to have left the Iberian peninsula again.98

Chapter 3

Gestures and Tableaux If [dancers’] motions and features are in perfect consonance with their inward feelings, their expression will be so of course, and give life to the representation. . . . To be successful in dramatic compositions, the soul must feel and be powerfully moved, imaginations should be enflamed, and genius be, as it were, the lightning that foretells 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, he must necessarily cause in himself every affect which he would arouse in 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 apostrophes to performers to lend their attention to the visible elements of their performances, by making their feeling selves available to sight, and instrumentalists were not exempt from this expectation. Up to a point, we approximate this in current concert practice. We like to see some evidence that the instrumentalist is moved by what he is doing: the in-drawn breath, the furrowed brow; perhaps, at the climax, a tasteful grimace, a sweeping follow-through with the hands. The performer who makes expressive sounds through his instrument but does not supply us with these elements will likely seem cold or inhuman, no matter how impassioned the sounds he is making: one has only to think of Jascha Heifetz. But neither do we want very much in the way of gestures and visible expressivity; or if we do, we may be perceived as rather lowbrow. The latter-day terminus here would be Liberace, who, with all the panache of an opera seria producer, used costume and set design to expand upon an already lavish gestural style at his instrument; it was largely the extent to which his performances were spectacles that brought him into disrepute with connoisseurs. This degree of constraint upon the visual element represents a sea-change 65

66

gestures and tableaux

in the reception of instrumental music, one which was already under way during the final decades of Boccherini’s life. The same change, or set of related changes, was responsible for a precipitous decline in his posthumous reputation, 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 simplicity, and the opinion of him held by the artists of that land may be summarized in words pronounced by Spohr in Paris, during a musical gathering, where some of the Italian master’s quintets had just been played. The celebrated German violinist and composer was asked what he thought: “I think,” he answered, “that this does not deserve to be called music!”1

What “music” was supposed to be changed a good deal between the end of the eighteenth century and 1835, and nowhere more radically than in the German-speaking lands from which Spohr hailed.2 We do not know which of Boccherini’s works it was that Spohr so disdained; but we might imagine his expostulation coming in response to a passage of the sort shown in example 5 (CD track 10). The third-inversion 1 chord (the piece having modulated to E major by this point) and its resolution to a first-inversion tonic cannot, it seems, be returned to often enough. The cellist moves again and again, 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 which is stacked an entire triad with which it forms multiple, rich dissonances, to the much weaker, less resonant, and (in relation to the upper parts) more consonant G #. Scarcely an unusual harmonic gambit; but it is repeated to an unusual degree. The cellist’s tactile-acoustical experience of resistance and release in this situation is, like most pleasures, heightened by repetition. Above this, the upper parts create a complex texture of interlocking repetitions, both small- and large-scale. The viola repeats a bar-long figure with several small contour variations; the violins begin at the half-bar, trading off syncopated melodic gestures and arpeggiated figures (which, on the micro-level, contain many repetitions of the note B); in the second half of the passage (halfway through bar 14) they drop together into the alto register to play a melodic figure in lockstep thirds that repeats every bar, while reiterating a short-longshort rhythm at every half-bar. For the violinists, then, in addition to the halfbar alternations of harmonic friction with release which underlie the passage, there are myriad small interactive melodic opportunities: in their tradingsoff there is the subtle pleasure of trying to mimic one another exactly, while their lockstep thirds raise the issues of balancing the sonority (the lower voice slightly firmer and louder than the upper, the intonation pure enough to permit a timbral blend) and ensemble (the frisson of playing appoggiature together). All these layered, interactive repetitions do not escalate; their small frictions and overlappings do not even suggest a direction. They invite the

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

# # œj œœ œœœœœ & # c #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 11

vn. 1

## & # c

Dolce

j ‰ œ œ œ #œ

vla.

˙ œ p B ### c œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ

vc.

? ### c

vn. 2

œœœœœœœœœœ

Allegro brillante

˙

cresc.

œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ

œœœœ cresc.

‰ #œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

R.

˙

#œ œ œ œ

œœœ

œ

#˙

œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ p mo. f R. œ œ œ œ œ ## œ œ œ œj# œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ & # œ œ œ œ œœ œœ p p R. # # œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ #œ œ œ œ B # ‰ #œ œ œ œ p mo. cresc. f œ œ œ œ œ #˙ ? ### ˙ œ œ œ p cresc. 15 œ œ œœœ œ ## #œ & # œj œj œ œ œ œ œ . œœœ œ œj œjœ œ œ œJ œ . œœœ œ œj œ œ œ œ f ### j j j & œj# œj œ œ œ œ œ . œœœ œ œj# œjœ œ œ œjœ œ œ œ œ œ œj # œj œ œ œ œ œ œ f # B ## ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œj # # œj & # #œ

œ œ œ œ

? ###

#˙

13

˙ p

˙

˙

#˙

67

˙

‰ œj f

68

gestures and tableaux

player’s ear and eye toward nothing beyond himself and his colleagues in the intimate act of playing. It is typical of Boccherini that such an inward focus occurs in the middle of an apparently extraverted first movement, written in the “bright” key of A major and marked “Allegro brillante.” Thus Boccherini offers a plate of momentary delicacies to the players; but what are we, as listeners and observers, to make of such music? We can rationalize it easily enough: it is simply and unambiguously periodic; it participates in the arsis-thesis phrase construction that late eighteenth-century theorists regarded as governing both the localized structure of the bar and the disposition of sizable chunks of music. A whole phrase (later, even a whole section of a movement) could be characterized as weak and antecedent, or strong and consequent. In a latter-day extension of this kind of understanding, Christian Speck uses a number of quasi-architectural terms—Schlußstein, Eckpfeiler, Stufe, Gerüstbau (keystone, corner-post, step, scaffolding)—in his detailed 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). But neither Speck nor any other writer on Boccherini has really addressed the topic of his repetitiveness. It is flatly incredible that they would not have noticed it. If the players of the quartet quoted in example 5 take the notated repeats, the static seven-bar passage in question occurs four times at this pitch level and four times a fifth lower. Although this is not repetition in the strictest sense, containing as it does a host of small, subtle (albeit reiterated) variations, Boccherini can most certainly do that too. In either case the effect is similar: the music circles serenely in place. Movements such as the Larghetto of the Quartet in D Minor, op. 9, no. 2, G. 172, consist very largely of a chain of such circles (CD track 11). There is “motion,” insofar as a modulation to the relative major will have been achieved by the end of the first half; melodic events will consent to be parsed according to an extended binary form; but so conventional are these traits, and so pronounced the repetitiveness, that it is surely the stasis itself that is most memorable—most thematic, in the eighteenth-century sense of the Main Idea. This music goes nowhere except where 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’s lifetime such writing had, on occasion, been a problem. According to this story, Boccherini had been given the opportunity in Madrid to play chamber music with Carlos IV, king of Spain and an amateur violinist. The composer brought along an opus of quintets. Carlos takes up his bow: he always played the first violin part; now there appears in this part a figure of great repetitiveness and complete monotony. Do si, do si: these two rapidly flowing notes are repeated to the point of covering

gestures and tableaux

69

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. He becomes impatient, his bad humor crescendos, his voice joins his bow in articulating the monotonous figure in a ridiculous manner; finally, abandoning the labor 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 second violin and viola parts, or to the pizzicato presented by the violoncello while I keep the first violin on this uniform figure. The figure loses its monotony as the other instruments enter and mingle in the conversation.” “Do si, do si, and that for almost half an hour! Do si, do si, delightful conversation! 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 in 1788, a full ten years before Boucher’s arrival in Spain. Boucher himself does not seem to have been regarded as a particularly sober or veracious character. Moreover, the quintet referred to here cannot be identified.4 Yet for all its questionableness Castil-Blaze’s story points very nicely at the nature of the interest generated by Boccherini’s repetitive music: an interest constituted in performative interaction. The description of the way repetition frames a textural and harmonic “conversation” rings true for any number of such passages, and lends this story a kind of circumstantial authority. Christian Speck has written on the logic and structure of Boccherini’s phrasing. He does not offer examples of the more peculiar edifices that Boccherini was wont to produce by effectively eschewing any larger-scale relationships; but he acknowledges the way in which such passages assume an esthetic identity in their own right: “The listener has been offered an acoustical eyeglass, so to speak, with which the transition from one level to another can be examined.”5 This eyeglass is lovingly trained on a small and extremely ordinary event: in example 5, for instance, 2 –3, over and over again. Gradually a richness reveals itself. This is the unsuspected richness of the everyday, one with 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 drama is true; his personages have all possible reality; his characters are taken from the middle of society; his incidents concern the customs of all civilized nations; the passions he paints are those I experience in myself.”6 Diderot writes here of Richardson; he might equally have written this of Greuze, and it is tempting to suppose that had he heard Boccherini’s music in its repetitive

70

gestures and tableaux

vein he would have included it in his estimation. The “world in which we live” 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 the central culture of that world was that of sentimentality—or, to give it the French name by which Boccherini would have known it, sensibilité. By the end of the eighteenth century a delicate tangle of topoi had grown up around the musical presentation of sensibilité. Boccherini would have had any number of opportunities to become acquainted with its roots, especially in the realm of theatrical music; and we know that he took those opportunities because his engagements with the sensible style contain some of his most distinctive traits as a composer. His sonatas and quartets are rich in these engagements 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 feeling. As suggested in chapter 1, Boccherini tends toward larger melodic trajectories of descent and subsiding, which are easily read as representations of inwardness; so too his marked penchant for the minor mode. He favors diminished-seventh harmonies for their conventional associations with tender anxiety. Texturally, he frequently employs throbbing accompaniments, stringplaying enactments of the sensible protagonist’s palpitating heart. All of these features are sufficiently common in Boccherini’s early work that they can be found almost at random in the quartets opp. 8 and 9; they can be heard all together 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 to manifest in slow movements. Practically speaking, slow tempi simply allow more time for sentimental reflection to be elicited. An argument could be made here for the primacy of the Adagio, rather than the opening Allegro, within compositions from the sensible tradition. Conceptually speaking, while a first movement sets forth a sonata’s Main Idea (as any number of late eighteenthcentury theorists make sure to tell us), its slow movement—less immediate, arrived at after the ritual of theses and antitheses, and located at the temporal “heart” of the sonata as a whole—sets forth its Main Sentiment. Maynard Solomon has pursued a similar idea in reference to Mozart; he suggests that Mozart developed an “adagio/andante archetype” in which a slow movement delivered the main emotional impact of an entire sonata. The movements Solomon cites, however, all contain a drastic contrast between an initial sweetness or repose and some darker state—anxiety, doubt, even torment—which Solomon memorably dubs “trouble in Paradise.”7 By these lights, the most highly marked sensible passages in Boccherini’s slow movements serve a rather different purpose: whether occurring as distinct episodes with independent thematic material, interrupting the narrative flow of an otherwise conventional movement, or constituting an entire movement built in this manner from the beginning, they are yet sweeter than what surrounds them.

gestures and tableaux

71

In the paintings of Luis Paret y Alcázar, who entered the employ of Don Luis de Borbón at about the same time as Boccherini, we can see what might best be called a French sensible style profoundly and subtly interpenetrated with 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 sometimes eclipsed by exuberant swathes of satiny fabric, brilliantly rendered for its reflection of light. These images can take on a magical aura: “Out of an apparently conventional practical structure arise, however, evanescences, flashes and raptures of great lyricism, of the most delicate tonalities, overwhelming the instantaneity of the model. We find an ambience of spectral evocations, like the palpitating residue of a dream-reality. And in all of these there 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 nonrepresentational means such as color; and achieved principally in reference to the human body. Within their luminous cocoons, Paret’s bodies are minutely rendered as to character. In renditions of group scenes, even the most incidental person has his or her own particular expression, a selfhood delicately written upon the stance and countenance (see figure 6). Boccherini also exploits sensible conventions in ways distinctive to himself which tend to foreground the physical experience of those involved in making the music. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the matter of dynamics. Boccherini is extremely partial to soft dynamics—a fairly predictable concern, perhaps, given the sweetness and softness characteristic of sensibilité; but he distinguishes himself from his contemporaries through the frequency with which he admonishes the instrumental performer to play quietly, 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 the Quartet op. 53, no. 1, che appena si senta (scarcely audible): an exquisite, indeed an almost precious attention to the gestures involved in playing emerges through such particular distinctions. This affection for fine degrees of softness is further inflected by the marking rinforzando (or “Rf ”), an ambiguous direction which can mean a momentary crescendo, a longer swell, or an accent, the manner of its execution contingent upon what the other parts are doing. Such intimate contextualities, fluctuating from moment to moment, are invitations to the performer to embody sensibilité, developing “that disposition linked to weak organs, the result of a mobile diaphragm, a lively 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 instructions in the dramatic works of his brother, Giovanni Gastone. Gabriella

72

gestures and tableaux

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

Biagi-Ravenni has pointed out Giovanni’s “particularly attentive care” to minute details of stage direction in his libretti. Single, crucial gestures are prescribed (“lowers her eyebrows,” “avoids him without looking at him”) and qualities 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 progress of a scene can be intuited from reading them alone, as Biagi-Ravenni notes; she adds, “Such precise attention to everything that can be communicated in the theater by means of images, movements, and gestures is small wonder in a librettist who was also a dancer working in Vienna in the years in which the pantomime ballet saw its greatest triumphs.”11 Boccherini offers another musical representation of sensibilité in certain repetitive passages in which a definable single melody, a singable line or profile to the whole, is only intermittently to be found (CD track 13).12 His highly developed and personable sense of line is one of his most distinctive features as a composer; but in passages like these he forsakes or explodes it. He accomplishes this through nearly constant registral displacement and free imitation of short fragments among the parts, keeping all involved within a harmonic

gestures and tableaux

73

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

104

vn. 1

& b 42 œ

vn. 2

&b

vla.

Bb

vc.

?

b

109

&b &b Bb ?b

≈ œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ ≈ œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ ≈ œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ œjœœ œ œ œ ≈ œ. œ. œ. œ Ÿ p ( p) f 24 œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ b œ œ œj œjœœ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ p' f p 24 œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ p œ bœ p œ bœ œ bœ œ bœ f œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 42 p ( p) f œœœœœœœ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œjœ œ œ œ R . . . . . . œ Ÿf R. j œœ œ j œ œ œ œj ‰ œ œ bœ œ œ œ bœ œ œ Ÿ f œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ bœ f œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

field, within a group tessitura (with considerable exchange of individual tessiture), and within a rhythmic field “stamped,” as Speck puts it, by the rhythmic profile of the fragments involved,13 and reliably contained within periodic phrase structure. The distinction of melodic foreground from accompanimental background has collapsed, and we are suspended in an amiable kind of Brownian motion-without-direction, a stretto without stress.14 This can involve just the lower voices, with the top voice sonically separated into a “holding pattern” of repetitive melody (see example 6), or all four voices may be equally involved (see example 7; CD track 14). The abandonment of melodic narrative in these passages enacts a tendency in all sensible art to leave lacunae. Not providing quite enough information is integral to the style, as a way of inviting rather than directing attention. In painting, we have the evocative emptiness of landscape; we have also a midcentury cult for the non finito, a painting deliberately left unfinished, and the rapidissimo or fa presto, a telegraphic painting done in a very short space of

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

vla.

## & # cœœœ œœœ œ Œ œ f f ## ˙ œ œ œœœœœ & # c œ f œ œ œœœ œœœœœœ # # B # c œ

vc.

? ### c

48

vn. 1

vn. 2

## ˙ & # 52

˙

Ó œ

œœœ œ f œœ œœœ œ f œ# œ ˙ Ó ˙

∑ œ

œœ œœœ œ œ f j œ œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ f Ó ‰ œ œ œ œ Œ Bœ œ

œ

Œ œ J œ#œ œ

f œ œœœ 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 f f Ó ∑ B ### ˙

œ #œ œ œ œ œ ˙

f œ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ # œ œ B ### œ œ œ#œ ˙ f f 56 # # & # œœœ œœœ œ Œ œ œ ## Ó & # ˙ œ Œ Ó ˙ œ œ œœœœœ œ œ œ B ### f B ## œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ#œ

74

œ Ó

œ

j nœ

œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ Ó

˙ œ

Œ

œ

œ

gestures and tableaux

75

time (Fragonard was perhaps the greatest master of this style). Such works left open an esthetic space into which viewers inserted themselves, with all of their suppositions, assumptions, and putative completions, in order to actually participate in the making of the painting. “The opportunity provided by laconic imagery [made] every perceiver into an artist—a personne d’esprit.”15 Diderot’s considerations of sketches and rapidissimi read very much like considerations of improvised music-making: “Sketches often have a fire that a painting does not. . . . The pen of the poet, the pencil of the expert draftsman, has an air of running and playing. Rapid thought characterizes in one stroke; the vaguer the expression of the arts, the more the imagination is at ease.”16 I would submit that the musical analogy here is to a particular mode of sensible performance in which the viewer/listener is every bit as active and sensitized as the painter/executant. A performance so constituted is very much a mutual undertaking by artist and recipient—a joint “speculation,” as it were. What is being improvised on the spot is not any particular configuration of tones but rather the relationship between the parties involved. “These lines do not so much chart the intended position of an edge as speculate about what a lively form of edge thereabouts might be. They are not generated by immediate study of nature; they do not describe the accidents of particular form.”17 Elsewhere, Diderot is perfectly clear about the likeness of this mutualized sensible viewing to musical reception—and he locates it specifically in instrumental music. The sonata or symphony whose wordlessness so taxed generations 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-made symphony express almost anything I want; and since I know better than anyone else how I can be moved, because of my experience of my own heart, it is rare that the expression I assign to [instrumental] sounds, which according to my current situation may be serious, tender, or gay, will fail to touch me more profoundly than one that is not so much of my choice. It is somewhat the same with sketches and pictures. I see in the picture something pronounced: in the sketch, how many things may I suppose that are barely announced!18

Boccherini’s textural, lineless music offers many such passages that invite the listener to suppose something “barely announced.” The most characteristic come in slow movements (CD track 15). With this disappearance of line we lose all sense of piece-as-oration, the rhetorical metaphor that had informed composition, performance, and reception for almost two hundred years. No one in particular is speaking to us here; the orator has apparently stepped down from his podium to take a stroll beside us, exchanging disjointed sweet nothings in a twilit garden. The timbral ambiguity (it is virtually impossible for a listener to distinguish which instrument in the ensem-

76

gestures and tableaux

ble is responsible for which sound), the relaxed tempo, and the soft dynamic create topical resonances: such passages are evocations of the nocturnal, the mixed 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 evoking a specific nocturnal singer, the nightingale. This bird’s sweet but eerily disembodied song entails a complex and ancient set of associations: mourning for 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 Boccherini’s quartets, but can be found in the slow movements of his instrumental ensemble music in all genres. Even in his cello concerti the soloist sometimes shows an abstracted tendency to wander away from his podium.19 While their metaphorical and imagistic origins are many and rich, such passages also have some genesis in a kinesthetic response to the real-world realm of acoustics. The acoustics of a room can affect virtually every aspect of the way a passage sounds and feels and what it evokes. The fresco painter negotiates this ambient element intimately and precisely in planning and executing his work. A painter working on the walls and ceilings of large interior spaces naturally lit may respond to a lighting ambience rather as a musician responds to the acoustic of the space in which he performs. For a performer at Tiepolo’s level this is not simply a matter of “good light,” in the simple sense of sufficient illumination for the work to be seen. It is much more a matter of structure and liveliness, or bounce; of suggestion and the necessary stimulation of difficulty. The good lighting ambience is positive enough [i.e., as a presence or factor in the creation of the artwork] to present a problem [in the sense of something to be extensively chewed on and digested into forms and decisions].20

Ideally, one would pursue this sight-to-sound analogy with an acoustical account 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 and shadow on Tiepolo’s painted surfaces in the Treppenhaus at Würzburg. An appropriate space exists: there are rooms in the palace of El Pardo outside Madrid which remain in their eighteenth-century condition, including (crucially in terms of resonance) wall tapestries and heavy drapes. Ideally, one would play a quartet there many times. One would use the very instruments for which Boccherini conceived the work. One would move about the room(s) in search of their “sweet spots”; one would try the piece with an audience present, and without. One would eventually arrive at a thick description, full of nuance, one that would give back to Boccherini’s textural music some of its own irreducible substance—something like the following:

gestures and tableaux

77

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

But here, of course, is the definitive difference between painting and music-making: the degree of materiality, and thus the degree of material survival, of the medium. We have scores and instruments (the latter often much altered) but the bodies and the sounds they made are long silenced. What is more, most of the rooms for which we may reasonably assume Boccherini’s chamber music was initially conceived are simply gone, or altered beyond recognition, or in ruins. El Pardo is now used by the Spanish royal family and their illustrious guests, and is not readily available for impressionistic musicological experiments. The current whereabouts of Boccherini’s Stainer cello are unknown.22

tableaux From the standpoint of the listener-observer, in soft and repetitive passages the player’s appearance, heavily constrained, is undemonstrative, apparently anti-theatrical. Yet in this near-motionlessness there is a subtle theatricality at work, that of the tableau. During this period the troc between the visual and the performing arts was most characteristically expressed in a choreographic and dramatic penchant for tableaux vivants, the most explicitly painterly of theatrical devices; and concomitantly, by the development of a theatrical painting style in the peinture morale of Greuze, as well as by the frequent involvement of painters in set design. Such was the conflation of stage with canvas that it is often impossible to determine which image came first, since “once the work was painted, and widely diffused by means of engravings, it served as inspiration in its turn for the staging and designing of later creations in the theater.”23 Examples are legion; the most famous is probably outside of Boccherini’s sphere of experience, but serves to illustrate the cross-currents of influence during this period. In Act 2 of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro, first performed in 1784, in the scene in which Chérubin serenades the countess, the actors are instructed to arrange themselves “as in the print after Vanloo called ‘Conversation espagnole.’” The engraving of this 1755 painting by Carle Van Loo (1705–65) is by Beauvarlet. Here we have an image of music-making, transposed to a staged tableau with song, and finally given a continuous musical setting in 1786 by Da Ponte and Mozart.

78

gestures and tableaux

Boccherini probably missed Figaro, but he might have seen a revival of Don Juan in Angiolini’s Vienna staging. Here again, staged practice had been influenced by engraved image, in this case Boucher’s engraving of the encounter between Don Juan and the statue, which had graced the 1749 edition of Molière’s play. This practice of conflating representational media was by no means confined to professional circles. Tableaux historiques, which displayed famous events, and pose plastiche, which displayed moods or states of mind, were popular drawing-room entertainments throughout Europe.24 They remained so for many decades: the reader may recall that such activities were a central focus 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 the tableau is frequently attested to in period criticism of his compositions. He even became, on occasion, an emblem for a visualistic listening. In the following extract a Parisian pamphleteer writes from the midst of the maelstrom of the 1770s “Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes”; Boccherini’s music is being pressed into service in an argument for the very concept of music’s having “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 employs by turns sweetness and reproach. One almost desires to put words to it; played a hundred times, it still presents the same meaning and the same image.”25 Some of the ambivalence at work within the eighteenth-century fascination with the tableau is evident here. The writer’s image is neither fixed nor particularly “true”: the woman he has imagined is above all changeable. The more subtle-minded Diderot went so far as to personify an opposition to legibility in women who behave in this manner: “ We don’t want to know everything at once. Women are aware of this: they agree and then refuse, expose and then cover themselves. We love it when pleasure lasts; it must therefore have some progression.”26 Another association of Boccherini’s music with painting was made by Pierre Baillot, who wrote circa 1804 that Boccherini’s quintets presented a “full, august harmony which invites recollection, which casts the imagination into a sweet reverie, or which fixes it upon enchanting tableaux; it is the grace of Albane, it is the naive sensibility of Gessner.”27 “Albane” is the Italian painter Francesco Albani (1578–1660), whose work had enjoyed considerable popularity in eighteenth-century France on the basis of certain “small cabinet pictures with graceful figures in sunny landscapes.”28 Boucher and Fragonard both admired and copied Albani; nineteenth-century art critics were to turn upon him, however, regarding his pastoral elegance and his emphasis on pearly-skinned, sun-dappled naked bodies as “shallow, decorative, and even immoral,”29 and thus mirroring the critical turn of fortune that their colleagues in music dealt to Boccherini. Baillot also makes an association between Boccherini’s music and the Swiss poet, painter, and engraver Salomon Gessner (1730–88). Gessner covered

gestures and tableaux

79

much the same pastoral ground in all the media of which he was master. His engravings of landscapes in particular convey a tranquil nostalgia. His métier as a writer was prose-poetry emulating works of antiquity, mainly the Old Testament or the pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil. In imitation of the latter, he called 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; he smiled back for the last time through the light haze, which, like golden gauze, gathered glistening around distant vineyards, groves, and pastures; all of Nature saluted his departure in the soft purple after-light that glowed upon the streaky clouds; the birds sang to him the last song, and in pairs sought their safe nests; the shepherd, accompanied by long shadows, played his evening song as he returned to his hut, as I peacefully fell asleep. Have you, Philomel, through your tender song—has a lurking woodland god awakened me, or a nymph, that rustles shyly through the bushes? Oh! how lovely everything is in its mild beauty! How still the country slumbers around me! What rapture! What gentle ecstasy flows through my fluttering heart!30

In painting and engraving, Gessner and his contemporaries, painters like Vernet and Loutherbourg, tended to dwarf the people in their landscapes into insignificance. One might well ask where the embodiment was in such a genre, and how sensibilité could be supposed to operate without it. More than in any other manifestation of sensibilité, embodiment in the pastoral landscape seems to have been the responsibility of the observer or reader: it was almost entirely introjected. One simply put oneself into the deliberate emptiness of these scenes and imagined things. Diderot’s 1763 account of an unidentifiable Loutherbourg paysage models this process through a Gessnerian ellipsis. The eye is everywhere arrested, entertained, satisfied. . . . Ah! My friend, how beautiful nature is in this little canton! Let’s stop here; the heat of the day is beginning to make itself felt, let’s lie down alongside these animals. And while we’re admiring the work of the Creator, the conversation of this herdsman and this peasant girl will amuse us; our ears will not disdain the rustic sounds of this cowherd, who charms the silence of this solitude and relieves the weariness of his condition by playing the flute. Let’s rest; you’ll be beside me, I’ll be tranquil and safe at your feet like this dog, constant companion of his master’s life and faithful guardian of his herd; and when the weight of the day has fallen away we’ll continue on our way, and in a more distant time we’ll still recall this enchanted spot, and the delicious hour we’ve spent here.31

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

80

gestures and tableaux

rather easier for us to snicker at Albani’s, Gessner’s, and Diderot’s sentimentality than to enter candidly into their scenarios. Being in a contemplative style, Gessner’s work is not ideally represented through short extracts; similarly, the peacefulness of a Boccherini quintet movement best emerges through its full, exquisitely uneventful duration. Both require time, and a willingness to let one’s attention unmoor itself within time, a type of reception that is in considerably shorter supply today than when Gessner and Boccherini were writing. All the same, it must be admitted that such time and the untroubled, untrammeled leisure it bespeaks have always been more of an ideal than a reality. Arcadia is by its very nature forever somewhere else and 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 the Salon of 1767, which was open for public viewing up through early October of that year.32 Of course we cannot know for a fact that he was there; but in any case the works exhibited there were a very active part of the troc within which Boccherini moved in Paris. The paintings of the Salons were framed, hung, and framed again by the Parisian tradition of copious intertextual discourse; they were further disseminated to the public by means of engraved reproductions (which Boccherini easily could have seen); and they are among the clearest emblems we have of period understandings of embodiment. They present bodies seen, and so evoke the modes of seeing elicited by bodies. The clarity and suggestiveness of the criticism surrounding these images reaches a pinnacle in Diderot’s marvelous descriptive accounts, themselves entitled “Salons,” which he produced from 1759 to 1781. Such clarity would seem naturally to result from the way painting presents bodies not in motion, but frozen in time, mid-gesture, accessible to being rationalized in a way that a living, moving body—or the sounds it makes—constantly eludes. I say “would seem” because there is a crucial and problematic assumption here: sensory experience is assumed to make its most powerful impact by means of the tableau. The tableau posits a mysterious, ideal synoptic moment, where narrative and indeed any temporality at all give way to an insuperably intense impression, a brand seared upon the mind of the observer. This moment is at the heart of much mid-eighteenth-century discourse on the transmission of meaning. Rousseau called it the “most vigorous” form of language, and went so far as to use it to explain the very power of narrative, as if it were a cumulation of internally constructed apparitions or tableaux, which “strike redoubled blows” to the senses, producing a more emotionally and morally intense effect than was possible through a single glance.33 Diderot took a dif-

gestures and tableaux

81

ferent tack. In his thinking, the tableau freezes narrative action, but it also summarizes it. We not only read, but read into its figures those events that surround the represented moment; we imaginatively improvise their histories, construct their futures: “In the first moments of vision, one is affected by a multitude of confused sensations, which untangle themselves only with time and through habitual reflection on what is taking place within us.”34 Reflection, the “descent into oneself,” serves the necessary function of grounding the received image in the viewer’s subjectivity. Thus internalized, tableaux become representations, not of things, but of our feeling reaction to things. Diderot called them “hieroglyphs.” Hieroglyphs in turn require further reflective unpacking and analysis (amply demonstrated by his narrative ellipses in the “Salons”) in order to attain their fullest meaning in dialogue with reason. Thus tableaux shift responsibility for meaning onto and into the viewer, briefly but with great intensity. In all the arts, this absorption of the receiver (audience member, Salon-goer, sonata player, novel reader) into the received (opéra-comique, Greuze canvas, Boccherini violin sonata, Clarissa) is the crucial maneuver of the sensible style. Greuze’s renditions of scholars or maidens or patriarchs absorbed in various objects of contemplation are themselves fetishes of this receptive process, epitomized for Diderot, as for so many others, in the novels of Samuel Richardson: “Oh Richardson! One takes, regardless of the role one has [in life], a role in your works; 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 actively into these stories, but also engaged to be entered into, influenced, changed by them. Accounts of Richardson’s readers run together, in style and 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 see tears flow, he breaks off, he sobs; suddenly he gets up, he walks without knowing where he is going, he utters cries like a desolate man, and he addresses the 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 to the world was genuine, because it was helpless. Audience members arrived at states of weepy dishabille; the reader of Clarissa knows not where he walks; Werther spends some last despairing hours unseen, even by the omniscient narrator, on the peak of a rugged mountain. Yet the theatricality of these sensible manifestations makes it clear that the competing and older requirement of legibility had by no means been superseded. The whole situation was more than a little paradoxical. In terms of the absorptive ideal, observer and observed will be most convincingly collapsed if any reminders of their separateness, such as performative self-consciousness or exaggeration, are

82

gestures and tableaux

suppressed. Thus some accounts of sensibilité present it as an emphatically non-visual, in fact an anti-visual, experience: “It seems to me that those who want to infer a knowledge of souls from a consideration of faces invert the order of nature, because they give the eyes an office which pertains principally to the ears. Nature made the eyes to register bodies, the ears to examine souls. To those who would know the interior of another, what is most important is not to see him, but to hear him.”37 Visual art of the 1750s and 1760s increasingly emphasizes images of people who are intensely absorbed in their own actions and feelings, immune to any awareness of being seen that might manifest as distraction or self-consciousness. They gaze anywhere but at the viewer.38 Ideally, the living, breathing images of theatrical tableaux operated under the same restriction, their refusal to acknowledge any sight-based relationship “eliminat[ing] the beholder from in front of the work, often with the side-effect of creating a higher degree of illusion and a stronger emotional impact.”39 In viewing painting, as in reading fiction, the issue of who was performing what (and upon whom) in this equation could be evaded easily enough; not so in theatrical genres, which thoroughly and deliciously problematized the issue of whether one’s absorption was in the plight of the mythical Iphigenia, or in her poignant personification by Sophie Arnould, bosom heaving in a revealing white gown.40 And by this logic, it was the muted gestural palette of the saloniste at music, the mutually sustained fiction that he was not interesting to watch, or at least not there to be looked at, that made him capable of delivering the most powerful emotional impact of all. Boccherini’s published chamber music was chiefly intended to be played and enjoyed in salons.41 There the performer entered into sensibilité with a few very close associates, they too absorbed in the act of performance; but with even a few non-playing listeners in the room, the equation was changed, theatricalized, and the amateur chamber music performer became available for sensible absorption by his listeners. Yet he was not costumed, nor veiled by a fictional narrative, nor separated from his listeners by a proscenium. The nature of his role was profoundly unclear; he appeared to be merely himself. He was engaged in an activity that displayed his body in its most exquisite capacity for interactive responsiveness, and without verbal mediation. There is potential here—one might suspect a deliberate invitation—for a listener’s absorption to become an erotic one. This finds echoes in the expertly borderline salaciousness of some of Richardson’s scenarios, where seduction is always, in the end, and despite her own delicious vacillations, resisted by his heroine; the whole experience then with a confident ostensibility being assigned to the service of morality. In the following extract from Richardson’s Clarissa, the hero/villain Lovelace gives a male confidant an account of his rescue of Clarissa from a house fire, and of her subsequent near-rape at his hands:

gestures and tableaux

83

Wicked wretch! Insolent villain!—Yes, she called me insolent villain, although so much in my power! And for what?—only for kissing (with passion indeed) her inimitable neck, her lips, her cheeks, her forehead, and her streaming eyes, as this assemblage of beauties offered itself at once to my ravished sight; she continuing kneeling at my feet, as I sat. If I am a villain—And then my grasping, but trembling hand—I hope I did not 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! And screamed. No help for a poor creature! Am I then a villain, madam? Am I then a villain, say you? And clasped both my 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 it is frequently unclear who is speaking, or indeed whether they speak or merely think: boundaries of self are blurred, both on and off the page. Some of Diderot’s accounts of Greuze walk this blurry line for pages at a stretch, further begging the question of where sensible absorption ends and prurience begins. Of the 1765 canvas La Mère bien-aimée (see figure 7), Diderot wrote with fascinated censure, “That half-open mouth, those swimming eyes, that reclining attitude, that swelling neck, that voluptuous mixture of pain and pleasure, will make all virtuous women lower their gaze and blush in that place [i.e., the Salon].”43 Women might blush; Diderot was honest enough to acknowledge that men, 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 virtuosity: “On her forehead, and from the forehead onto the cheeks, and from the cheeks toward the throat, there are passages in incredible tones; it teaches one to see nature, and reminds one of it. One must see the details of that swelling neck, and not speak of them. It is quite beautiful, true, and wise.”44 True and wise and deeply risqué. This inevitable receptive conflation of the sensual with the sensuous is the place where sensibilité and virtuosity collide. One response to the uneasiness of this situation appears in changing protocols for concert behavior. By the early nineteenth century, advice such as the following was becoming increasingly common: “The listeners must sit at some 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 preludes so unpleasant to every sensitive ear, so as not to weaken the beautiful, grand effect which such stillness and surprise call up so wonderfully.”45 This advice was offered by Johann Baptist Schaul in 1809 and directed specifically to listeners to Boccherini’s string quartets. By 1809, nowhere more

84

gestures and tableaux

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

than in Germany and nowhere more fetishistically than around string quartets, such audience behavior was becoming a ritual enactment of a Kantian “disinterested contemplation.” Schaul calls such listening “the capacity to value [music] according to its merits” (“um sie nach Verdienst zu schätzen”), among which merits its embodied visibility is emphatically not counted. This erasure has become something quite different from the original absorptive maneuver, in which performing bodies were by no means erased, but rather deliberately conflated with the observer’s own. Boccherini does seem at times to have walked that blurry erotic line painted by Albani and Greuze, and inscribed by Diderot and Richardson; but he also partook very ingeniously of a fund of sensible topoi developed in the theater, inviting the non-playing listener to create in his or her mind’s eye that missing costume, proscenium, or narrative, and thus neatly channel the uneasy intimacy of chamber-music performance into references to theatrical conventions.

gestures and tableaux

85

tragedy The most consistent theatrical reference in Boccherini’s music was to tragedy, an association perceived by a number of contemporary connoisseurs. Thomas Twining, a musical enthusiast and correspondent of Charles Burney, wrote in 1783, “Haydn, I think, is much oftener charming than Boccherini. 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 upon Boccherini’s face; he is all earnestness, & Tragedy.”46 This is likely to surprise us now. We can readily identify the galant in Boccherini; we hear and respond to the charm, the sweetness, the perfect willingness to be decorative. While we might take exception to Felix Mendelssohn’s dismissiveness in describing a quintet by Boccherini as “a peruke, but with a very charming old man underneath it,” we nevertheless recognize his estimation.47 With application, perhaps, we discover a more serious vein in Boccherini’s work. But tragedy? The incomprehension is not our fault, nor Mendelssohn’s; the theatrical genres that Twining refers to had all but disappeared by the time of Mendelssohn’s birth, and are deeply alien to us now. Twining meant the tradition of serious opera, above all opera seria, the expressive and formal conventions of which informed so much eighteenth-century musical reception. From the audience’s point of view, the affective impact of serious opera resided in a chain of discrete events, the arias, each one crafted to present a single character’s particular emotional or psychological state as vividly as possible. The sequence of these events and the material connecting them were of secondary or even negligible importance in performance. Their impact chiefly came not through cumulation or the logic of narrative but, in a word, through the tableau. In spoken theater and in pantomime dance, the tableau had a specific relation to tragedy. “Portrayal of the stronger, more violent passions often entailed a static staging of tableau-like images. Seized by hatred, terror, jealousy, or vengefulness, the body became rooted, its limbs contorted, its focus downward.”48 When Diderot wishes to convince us of the expressive power of gesture in general, he does so with a series of snapshot-like images drawn exclusively from tragedy: highly charged confrontations from Corneille, and Lady Macbeth’s somnambulistic hand-washing.49 That eighteenth-century audiences heard/saw serious opera in Boccherini’s music is made explicit by the following passage, in which a phrase from the Quintet in A Minor, op. 20, no. 6, G. 294 (1775), is taken up by a French reviewer for its specifically tragic mode of expression. The way the reviewer conflates tragedy, sensibilité, and visuality is absolutely typical of the time, and a mirror to Boccherini’s “unsmiling face.” In order to feel the impact of something, one must “see” it.

86

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

œ

Poco Adagio sostenuto

&c 5

&

˙

˙

œ

œ

œ

˙ œ. œ

#œ ˙

œ

˙

œœœœ

œ œ

œ

œ œ œ œ ˙t

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙

The bow falls from his hands, and he cries out: Behold the first accent of Ariadne’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 Boccherini reply: We want a soul, and you have only wit: go write your epigrams and your calculations.50

The line is elegantly mournful, its falling and retracing of a diminished seventh across its first three bars accomplished with no fewer than three sighing gestures: one rising in yearning, two falling in resignation. Somewhat unusually, it is played by the second cello; the young man of the account is presumably a cellist, and not a violinist, as we might otherwise assume. Thus to 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 its usual range.51 The unexpectedness is a perfect touch. Ariadne, after all, does not expect to be abandoned; her grief is fresh with wounded astonishment. In his violin method of circa 1803, Giuseppe Cambini invoked operatic tableaux in his examples of how to play expressively. Using the opening firstviolin 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 uninflected execution, through the basics of expressive playing—appropriate fingerings and articulations, dynamics, and finally imagery: “Above all, think that you wish to move me . . . electrify your arm with the fire of this thought . . . 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 unhappy! And you will not deign to console me!’”52 Cambini does not specify the source of his text; quite possibly he invented it, with the assurance born of a lifetime’s familiarity with the expressive conventions of serious opera. The voice and the character implied could be that, for example, of Arbace in Metastasio’s Artaserse, Act 1, Scene 14. Unjustly accused of treason and murder, he pleads for consideration from his lover Mandane; he has reason to believe she knows better than to condemn him; but she is not yet softened. They have the following exchange:

gestures and tableaux You are deceived—

Arbace: Mandane:

87

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 Cambini’s lines (suitably transposed to his native Italian) as its text, and Boccherini’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 of association 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 ourselves its license and its particular excess, we reclaim a central mode of reception for Boccherini’s music and for that of his contemporaries. Other contemporary writers heard and saw the comédie-larmoyante in Boccherini’s music. Of all theatrical genres this was the most explicitly sentimental; 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 the dancer and romantic lead Louise-Rosalie Dugazon (1755–1821), and then in 1789, to the music of Paisiello and in the person of the actress and singer Celeste Coltellini (1760–1829). Stefano Castelvecchi has explored Paisiello’s arsenal of compositional devices in this influential scene; chief among them are strategies of interruption and incompletion, “a fragmentary and incomplete quality,” “gaps even inside words.”54 Sensibilité is registered through the breath: something patently invisible, communicated aurally by means of agitated reversals, repetition, disrupted rhythm, or tear-choked issuance in the voice. For the reader of a text it is recreated by means of “interrupted phrases, broken syntax, repetition, typographical exuberance (ellipses, dashes, exclamation points, italics).”55 Nina demonstrates that when sensibilité

88

gestures and tableaux

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 Nouvelle Méthode.

b &bb c

œ

œ

Che!

tu

nœ

œ

sai

che

j

œ œ . œ œ œ œ œÆ œ œ œ œ œ œÆ œ J son

in - no -cen-te,

tu mi

ve - di

œ œÆ œ J J

j œ œÆ œ œ œ œ œ Œ J J J

mi - se - ro! E non mi con - so - li!

is taken to its limit, its terminus, it becomes actual derangement, with all coherence drowned in reactivity. Yet she is not histrionic; her music essentially implodes from its own heartfeltness, becoming the more disjointed, the less sonically demonstrative, as her feelings grow the more insupportable. In terms of the absorptive ideal, observer and observed will be most convincingly collapsed if any reminders of their separateness—such as performative self-consciousness or symbolic exaggeration—are suppressed. In Nina’s case, even a coherent melody was too much of a fiction. Some of Boccherini’s palpitating, fragmentary instrumental gestures would readily have recalled such images to a period listener. Louis-Luc Persuis (1769–1819), violinist, composer, and from 1817 briefly director of the Paris Opéra, provides us with a late example of this response. He first staged his pasticcio ballet, Nina, ou La Folle pour amour, at the Opéra in 1813, and went on to revive it in Vienna. Persuis had staged his charming ballet Nina in Vienna. It is known that the authors of these sorts of works readily made use of the most celebrated composers, borrowing from their works those pieces which they judged most appropriate to the situation they sought to render. Here, the scene in which Nina, learning of the death of her lover, abandons herself to somber despair, the precursor 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. This beautiful conception was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm; and while the most distinguished connoisseurs were vying with each other in congratulating the author of the ballet, Persuis said to them, “The piece which so justly excites your enthusiasm is, however, the work of a musician for whom you have but little regard; it is taken in its entirety from a quintet by Boccherini.” And in fact it was the finale of the Quintet in C Minor of op. 17 [sic: within Picquot’s cataloging system] that had secured this triumph for the author of Nina.56

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

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

vn. 1

vn. 2

vla.

vc. 1

vc. 2

œ. œ œ œ. œ œ œ. œ œ œ. . . ‰ J ‰ J ‰ œJ œ œ ‰ œJ œ œ ‰ J ‰ J

Allegro assai

b &b b c œ p b &b b c œ f œ B bbb c

œ

œ œ ‰ œ p œ œ œ ‰

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ nœ ‰ œ œ #œ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ #œ œ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ

fp œ ? b b c œJ ‰ œJ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ J ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ b J J p ? b c œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ Jœ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ j ‰ j ‰ bb J J J J J œ œ p b œ œ ‰ œ. œ œ ‰ j n œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ # œJ n œ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ j J J &b b œ J J J #œ #œ 70

œ b & b b ‰ œ nœ ‰ œ #œ œ

‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ ‰ n œj ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ n œj J J J

œ œ œ ‰ #œ œ nœ

‰ œ œ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ œJ

j j ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ Jœ ‰ œJ

? b b œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ b

j ‰ j ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œ œ

œ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ J

? b œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ bb

j j j j œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰

j œ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰

B bbb ‰

(continued)

89

90

gestures and tableaux

Example 9. (continued)

b œ œ #œ nœ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ j J & b b nœ œ ‰ J ‰ J ‰ J J #œ œ Œ 73

j j j j j b & b b ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ ‰ n œ ‰ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œ ‰ n œ œ Œ B bbb ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ J J

j ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œ œ Œ J

? b j ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ bb œ J J

œ ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ J œ Œ J J

j b œj ‰ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰

œ ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ Œ J œ J J

? bb

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

the reform body All of these modes of representation and reception hark back, with varying degrees of conflict, to that deeply ingrained insistence on legibility, the “desire to have the physical face of the world converted into signs,”58 which had long set the French (and so in large part the European) critical standard for any account of human nature in any medium. In the mid-century debates about the theater and the meanings of “naturalness,” in the attempts to fix meaning—whether musical or verbal—that underlie the endless Querelles, we glimpse Enlightenment tensions between society and the individual being worked out as tensions between legibility and passion. But nowhere is passion epitomized more clearly than in “the dancing body in the relentlessness of its motion and the inevitability of its evanescence.”59 Choreographers in Boccherini’s day struggled to find new methods for articulating human passion within the beautiful but formidable abstractions of

gestures and tableaux

91

the belle danse that they had inherited from the preceding century; this was the project of the reform ballet of Angiolini and his contemporary JeanGeorges Noverre. Both were articulate and eloquent writers, and in the context of our discussion of instrumental music their remarks are worth quoting at length, since, as Noverre put it, “A composer of music should understand dancing, or at least know the times (temps), and the possibility of introducing such motions as are suitable to the different styles, characters, and passions.” 60 Boccherini is a very particular case of this. Although he wrote relatively little for the stage, and almost no dance music per se, his was a terpsichorean family, and his sister danced as a partner of none other than Angiolini himself. The ideal body types and movement types described by Angiolini and Noverre speak not only for the theater, but for the everyday bodily experience of a great many people—certainly every class of person involved in either the production or the reception of music such as Boccherini’s. The sight of dancing bodies trained toward articulating certain movements inscribed those movements as ideals, made of them models for the watching individuals’ 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 great artist, and . . . for him, exaggeration makes the resemblance complete. . . . He enlarges, he exaggerates, he corrects forms. . . . It is the figure which he has painted that will remain in the memory of people to come.” 61 To a very great degree, Westerners experience self within the representational frameworks of what is seen (though, post-Revolutionary republicans that we have since become, we might suggest to Diderot that it is not only the “great artist” who communicates those frameworks). Kinesthetic experience of selfhood is indelibly affected by sight. It is my further thesis here that this visual-kinesthetic matrix of experience was borne out in the acts of hearing and interpreting music. An ideal early eighteenth-century body, as visibly expressed through the belle danse, had been above all erect, encased in armatures to ensure and to emphasize this posture; motion had taken place around this core, adorning it with carefully codified gestural traceries without ever altering its unity and dignity. Period writers on esthetics took it almost for granted that this architecture 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 through space, as it meant melody through aural memory. As there were five stances and seven movements, so there were a certain number of possible melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic events; and every effort was made to fix their significations in advance. That neither the proper number of musical events nor their proper affectual correspondences could ever be clearly stated, as they could for ballet or painting, was of course the rock of difference from other media on which Enlightenment music theory was eventually to wreck

92

gestures and tableaux

itself. Yet whatever its theoretical contradictions, there can be no doubt as to the hegemony of this general style of reception, in which elaborate classification and compartmentalization served an unquestioned core of experience. Angiolini provides his own classification of contemporary theatrical dance, in which four basic styles are identified in order to praise a fifth, the pantomime style that he was instrumental in developing (and that was at its heart a rejection of the classification of experience). Corsetry and tonnelets were being abandoned; the new flexibility signaled permeability, a susceptibility to emotions, which he exhorted dancers to cultivate and to render visible. Angiolini’s discussion begins at the antipodes of expressivity, with what he calls the grotesque style: “These buffoons proceed entirely by leaps and bounds, and usually out of time; they sacrifice it willingly to their perilous leaps. . . . It excites in the spectators only astonishment mixed with fear, as they see their fellow creatures risk their lives at every instant.”62 Angiolini also likens this style of execution and choreography to the commedia dell’arte. He credits it for its virtuosity; but to this he firmly links a paucity of signification. These dances and their dancers present an athletic rather than 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 employed by the grotesques. . . . These comic dancers, if skillful, can make us admire strength joined with precision and lightness, and can even make us laugh sometimes, by artistically turning into grimaces the facial contractions made necessary by their efforts.”63 Angiolini compares the creators and dancers of such ballets with the authors and actors of farces, and dutifully reminds us that Molière himself wrote in this style. The comic dancers’ agility makes it clear that the kind of dramatic truth that could properly be located in stillness or in motion was a matter 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 and true,” he was not contradicting his own earlier emphasis on the expressive truth 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, Anacreontic, or Roman subjects, subjects such as (he tells us) the Opéra furnishes to choreographers. He also informs us that, properly and delicately presented, this style can move hearts in the same manner as a happy dénouement at the opera, or the reading of a novel: “It requires of those who execute it precision, lightness, equilibrium, softness, and grace. It is here that the arms (if I may be permitted that expression) begin to enter into dance; and

gestures and tableaux

93

they must be supple and graceful. In the first two genres [i.e., the grotesque and the comic] they count for nothing.”65 This is the first style for which “softness,” “le moèleux” [sic], the key physical condition of sensibilité, is mentioned. The emphasis on the arms is echoed by Noverre, who tells us that “Less attention should be given to the legs, and more care bestowed on the arms; cabrioles should give way to expressive gestures.”66 This befits a style that is concerned with touching hearts; emotional communication is something done with the upper half of the body. The fourth category is the august danse noble or belle danse; Angiolini acknowledges this as “the most beautiful, the most elegant, and also the most difficult.” However, he also criticizes this style as having expressed little to spectators, save perhaps a certain generalized voluptuousness, on account of the custom of masking the dancers. With characteristic fair-mindedness, Angiolini delivers his culminating praises of pantomime style by reference to the works of his colleague and competitor Noverre. But pantomime dance that dares to rise to the representation of the great tragic events is without doubt the most sublime. Everything the belle danse asks of a Duprés and a Vestris, [pantomime dance] demands of its dancers, and that is not all: the art of gesture brought to a supreme degree must accompany the majesty, elegance, and delicacy of the belle danse —and even that does not suffice: the pantomime dancer must, as we have said, be able to express all the passions, and all the movements of the soul. He must be strongly affected by everything he would represent, must indeed experience it, and must make the spectators feel those internal tremblings that are the language with which horror, pity, and terror speak within us, and that bring us to the point of growing pale, sighing, shuddering, and bursting into tears.67

Thus these dancers were responsible not only for mastery of positions and steps and styles, but for communicating passions to the observer. Dancers must also act, and act effectively: the spectators’ “pity and terror” is a clear reference to classical tragedy, for which this highest and most difficult kind of dance was reserved. This entire discourse on movement styles appears in Angiolini’s preface to his and Gluck’s pantomime treatment of Voltaire’s Sémiramis, a tragedy of the most grimly unremitting kind. And yet this tragedy had not the stern stiffness of execution of its French classical 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 period use the word is “softness”; moelle is also marrow, the heart of the bone, and moelleux also means pithy, substantive, lingering, whether of discourse or of wine. Diderot’s favorite exemplar of le moelleux is usually Greuze; in seeking to convey the affective impact of his paintings he repeats and dwells lovingly on the very term.

94

gestures and tableaux 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 fabric against the skin of the caressing finger, the resistant yielding of the breast to the palm of a pressing hand; but it is also, and explicitly, the susceptibility of that flesh to emotion, up to and including the intense emotion of tragedy. A mid-century reform body was ideal to the very extent that it felt and instantly conveyed transparency—or, to use another word favored by writers of this period, penetrability. Such “true” flesh in its ideal presentation was often female, but a remarkable feature of this period in the history of embodiment is the degree to which men sought to conform themselves to this ideal, making themselves penetrable, and taking pride and pleasure in so doing.69 In Angiolini’s text, the degree of physical hardness—the muscular strength required to leap in the grotesque style or perform quick, mechanically repeated intricate movements in the comic, and the facial contortions resulting from such efforts—is the precise degree of removal from expressivity. Another feature of the reform body was its integrality. Movements were not visibly articulated nor isolated from one another, so that the whole of the organism appeared affected, penetrated by its own slightest tendency. Diderot called this ideal “conspiration”: “It is not in school that one learns the general conspiration of movements; conspiration felt, seen, extending and 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, the same response from the rest of the machine.”70 As classification of experience 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 vivid sonic analogies to this new, penetrable, conspirational ideal, radically redefining the “actions and positions” of musical motion in the process, and thus of the listening ear. We have seen that Boccherini went so far as to borrow from Gluck on one occasion, using the latter’s Don Juan of 1761 (see chapter 2). Boccherini’s ability to call up tragedy for his listeners without benefit of staged action suggests that he well understood Gluck’s musical-dramatic techniques; and we might point to several particular traits in this regard. One is chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of light and shade, comic and tragic, recommended by Angiolini as a “pass[ing] instantaneously from white to black.”72 This is at times rendered instrumentally by Boccherini as drastic contrasts of tender and violent. Boccherini also shared Gluck’s genius for refining the

gestures and tableaux

95

nuances of gravitas through tone color; his skill demonstrates the truth of Angiolini’s perceptive remarks on instrumentation: “In order to awaken terror, or courage, it is in vain that one uses flutes, violins, cellos. It is the instrument, and not the note, that produces the effect: the melody, the modulation, and the various motives must contribute to it, but without the correct and varied application of the instruments one cannot hope to attain a particular effect.”73 Boccherini had an unerring instinct for the expressive qualities of instrumental tessitura in assigning a melody. The “Ariadne” opening to the A-minor quintet cited above, where the second cello sings in an alien and troubled alto register, is a striking example. He also had a matchless skill in matters of sonority, the crucial art of doubling and voicing; some passages have such evocative power on this basis alone that one can imagine “growing pale, sighing, shuddering, and bursting into tears” merely at their timbre (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; everyone knows the indifference of spectators to unknown personages.”74 Only when a performer demonstrates human commonality with the viewer is the absorptive maneuver possible, and humanity was increasingly understood to reside in the irreducible peculiarity of the individual. As pantomime dance became more popular and sensible reception took firmer hold of public response, movement styles became more and more personalized. By the 1770s and 1780s, “dancers’ performances were no longer compared to a single, ideal form. Instead, dancers were perceived as initiating their own styles.”75 This increasing individuality was also reflected in changes in the process by which professional dancers learned a ballet. Rehearsals were reconceived to foster dramatic engagement: Noverre went so far as to advocate that dancers should not have their actions taught to them mechanically by the ballet master. Rather, A skilful Ballet-master must act in this case as some poets do . . . and implicitly rely 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 not act with sufficient spirit, so that its object is not fully answered. [Here is the language of the poet.]—Just so the Ballet-master must rehearse over again a scene, till the performers have reached that degree of natural expression common to all men, and which displays itself with equal truth and energy, when it is the result of feeling.76

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

96

gestures and tableaux

an approach might have translated into professional music-making; we glimpse here the possibility that the whole concept of “rehearsal” as we now understand it has changed beyond all recognition. But it is important to recognize that such radical practices took place in a context where the stories being staged were taken from the familiar pastures of mythology or classical drama. This, together with the practice of publishing written accounts of the action to be staged, reduced the choreographers’ and dancers’ burden of legibility. It simultaneously encouraged spectators to practice their own, highly controlled versions of penetrability by identifying with the archetypal characters, seeking their own human commonalities with even the dreadful Don Juan or Sémiramis. For all the eloquence expended by Angiolini and Noverre in the service of dramatic progress and bodily reconfiguration, in actual practice these choreographers and their contemporaries never rejected the older gestural values 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 can infer along these lines how the same audiences might have shaped their way of listening to a sonata, a genre fully as regular as a classical ballet, and as stereotypical as any myth, even as it offered increasingly refined opportunities for absorptive identification with the performer. As Noverre tells us, regularity 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 giving an account of the sentiments and the character of the person performing it. Indeed that character, that person, is a character or person only insofar as he performs himself physically, according to Feijóo, who adumbrates postmodernism by two centuries and makes the radical argument that identity does not reside in physiognomy: “The lineaments of the body or of the face do not naturally signify the dispositions of the soul. . . . This natural representation cannot consist in anything but various, subtle, and delicate movements which the different dispositions of the soul cause in the body, especially the face, and above all the eyes. . . . We call these subtle movements gesture.”78

spanish dance and gesture Feijóo wrote against the background of Spanish preoccupations with performance and human nature. These were substantially the same as the French preoccupations, but the stakes were quite different. Early in the century the Borbón dynasty had introduced the belle danse to Spain, where it developed into a repertory of courtly dances known as danzas; by mid-century, as in France, the artifice of this gestural repertory was beginning to suggest a fa-

gestures and tableaux

97

tal inauthenticity. But it also inevitably represented foreignness. The indigenous or “low” dances, bailes, were practiced in increasingly self-conscious tension with the danzas over the course of the eighteenth century, giving Spanish contributions to later-century theories about the performing arts a peculiarly nationalistic flavor. Heartfeltness, human commonality, absorptive strategies, softness, penetrability—all had their place in Spanish society; but if you knew them as sensibilité, you were an afrancesado and by definition divided against your own people. To know them as inherently Spanish qualities was to participate in an active construction of embodied “tradition” that marks this period. The second half of the century was witness to an extraordinary process whereby features both gestural and musical of many earlier bailes were combined, by performers and theorists alike, into a scant handful of signature dances: the fandango, the seguidillas (with its descendant the bolero), the jota, and the tirana.79 These few bailes, together with the highly professionalized flamenco practices consolidated around the same time, became extraordinarily successful in representing (and inevitably reducing) the Spanish national character in the ensuing centuries. Majismo, the focal point of late eighteenth-century “Spanishness” and the opposite number of afrancesismo, is palpable—in fact by some accounts it is defined—in the evolution of the seguidillas into the bolero.80 Seguidillas were originally in a rather fast triple meter, but increasingly complex, showy choreography worked against musical momentum, slowing the beat down as the decorative gestures multiplied. In late-stage, “bolerified” seguidillas, of which Boccherini’s may serve as a good example, a stately triple meter is so subdivided that it poises tensely on the edge of disintegration into a series of smaller gestures (see example 10). It is not difficult to read into this deliberately maintained tension a picture of the majo’s proud refusal to attain or submit—whether to the next strong beat, or to authority in general. Emblematic of this resistiveness was the practice of the bien-parado, or “wellstopped.” At the end of a dance—in some accounts, even at the end of sections or phrases—the dancers froze, holding elegant and artful poses, competing 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 immobile, the body reveals even the smallest movements of the face with tranquility and restfulness. Serenity in difficult steps and moods is the first thing which must be observed in this dance.82

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

Example 10. String Quintet in C Major, op. 50, no. 5, G. 374, ii (Minuetto a modo di sighidiglia spagnola), bars 1–13. Minuetto a modo de sighidiglia spagnola

& 43 ‰ œ œ œ. sempre p & 43 ‰ œ œ œ.

vn. 1

vn. 2

B 43 œ

vla.

œ

œ. œ.

œ

œ. œ .

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

vc. 2

4

&

˙

œ

œ

œ

& 43 ‰ œ œ œ. œ. œ. sempre p ? 43 œ œ œ

vc. 1

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. J

œ œ

œ

œ. œ œ œ œ .

˙.

j ‰ œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ. J 3

œ

œ

œœœœ J

œœœ

3

3

& 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

B œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

. . . ‰ œ œ œ œ #œ J

œ.

œ œ œ œ.

œ œ œ

˙.

& ˙ ?

œ

œ

j ‰ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

98

œ

3

œ

œ

œœœœ 3

œ œœ 3

Example 10. (continued) 7

. & œ œ œ œ œ. &

œœ

œ œ

œ

œ

B œ œ œ œ #œ œ . & œ œ œ œ œ. ?

œ

œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ

Œ

..

Œ

..

Œ Œ

œ

j œ œ

..

œ œ

œ

œ

œ

Œ

..

˙

œ

œ

œ

Œ

œ Œ

Œ

œ

œ

œ

œœ œœ œ œ .. œ œ

œ

œ

2.

œ œ & œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ.

œ œœ

& œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ

œ

11

B œ & Œ ?

˙

œ

œ

œœœœœœ

˙

1.

Œ

j œœœœ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

‰ œJ œ œ J

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

j œ

œ

œ Œ

99

j œ. œ œ œ bœ œ Œ

Œ

œ

bœ

Œ

Œ

œ

œ

œ bœ œ œ œ #œ b˙ Œ

œ Œ

Œ œ Œ

100

gestures and tableaux

his comic dancers, but the physical aplomb to suspend motion abruptly and yet expressively. He would also have recognized the dramatic effectiveness of the bien-parado, which served the same basic purpose as the tableau vivant: however briefly, these “freezes” made bodies legible. As for what was read into that legibility, Spanish tendencies were much the same as French; bienparados seem to have served quite unambiguously to mark and heighten the dance’s erotic progress. Frenchmen in Spain tended to find this even more overt than in France. Bourgoing provides eroticized accounts of several Spanish dances, at a level of detail that makes his fascination clear. The fandango is danced by only two people, who never touch one another, not even with their hands; but to see them provoke one another, by turns retreating to a distance, and advancing closely again; to see how the woman, at the moment when her languor indicates a near defeat, revives all at once to escape her pursuer; how she is pursued, and in her turn pursues him; how the different emotions which they feel are expressed by their looks, their gestures, and their attitudes—you cannot help observing, with a blush, that these scenes are to the engagements of Cytherea, what our military engagements are in time of peace to the true display of the art of war.83

Again, the reluctance to attain or submit. The fandango resembled the seguidillas in tempo (quick to moderate) and meter (triple). Dancerly virtuosity was less important than in the bolero; majismo tension played out rather through a dramatic fiction of infinite deferral and restraint. The characteristic harmonic profile of the fandango reenacted this deferral. Traditionally, sections of the dance alternated between major-mode tonality and the modal 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 by the tonal sections of the dance; but such resolution is not to be. Considerable psychological tension builds up over this subversion of the most basic relationship 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 single zarzuela, La Clementina, G. 540, was written in 1786 at the request of the Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna. A set of villancicos (short unstaged dramas for performance during the Christmas season), G. 539, has been tentatively dated to 1783 by Gérard. In the arena of instrumental music, he made one excursion into a mimetic representation of Spanishness, the Quintet in C Major, op. 30, no. 6, G. 324, of 1780, which is entitled La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid and which contains depictions of Madrid street life: church bells, religious processions, blind beggars, manolos (another kind of majo), and a military regiment’s advance and retreat. As far as bailes go, Boccherini wrote but the one fandango, and the one seguidillas I have presented

gestures and tableaux

101

here. (And as in the case of the Musica notturna, the title of the seguidillas is incorrigibly Italian: Minuetto a modo di sighidiglia spagnola.) Each is exemplary of a style, but it cannot be argued that these pieces represent the composer in any central way. Indeed, he does not seem to have had much confidence in explicitly Spanish music on an international market. In a letter of 10 July 1797, Boccherini expressed reservations to Pleyel about publishing La musica notturna: “Among the quintettini of op. 30 you will find one that bears the title Night music of the streets of Madrid. This piece is totally useless, and even ridiculous outside Spain. Listeners will never be able to understand its meaning, any more than the executants will be capable of playing it as it should be played.”85 One might assume from this that, for all that he could write a rousing fandango, Boccherini was somewhat alienated from the musical culture of the country in which he lived for over half his life. Yet I doubt that Boccherini was alienated. It is simplistic to assume that he remained an outsider to Spanish music all his life; to do so is to locate that musical culture exclusively in its more highly marked indigenous practices, to fall into the trap of equating authenticity with folk music: the very trap which the advocates of majismo and flamenco were energetically digging for themselves. At their most truly enlightened, the thinkers and the artists of the Ilustración—among whom I would count Boccherini—avoided this trap by freely importing and developing influences from outside the Iberian peninsula that seemed beneficial, profitable, or beautiful, confident that their adoption into Spanish culture was in itself enough to eventually ensure Spanishness even as it redefined it. We in turn may focus on the divisions so created; or we may focus on the connections that arose. The latter tend to the interstitial, the transitory, the un-institutionalized: they resemble the development of a pidgin, where imported and indigenous linguistic cultures begin to develop a common new vocabulary. Such a focus is perhaps more difficult, but certainly more interesting. For over half of his life, Boccherini was, to all intents and purposes, a Spaniard. I doubt very much that he was resistant to the Spanishness that manifested 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 levels beside that of the mimetic or self-conscious, just as he had done with the signal features of Viennese or Parisian style. At a subtle level—a level, I wish to reiterate, that has little to do with the posturings of a nationalistic musical jargon—“Spanish” traits can be found in most features of Boccherini’s compositional style. His “pidgin” might include his affection for seemingly endless “vamping” on dominant harmonies, which might plausibly be heard as an extension of the basic idea of the cadencia andaluza —or, equally plausibly, as an extension of the yearning implicit in sensibilité. By means of or-

102

gestures and tableaux

namentation, harmonic rhythm, and periodicity, he interprets and reinterprets the play with restraint and momentum that characterizes the bailes. His skill with the tableau could as well be called a skill with the bien-parado; his persistent executional preoccupation with the particularities of fleshly experience would have been understood by any Spaniard of the day as a Spanish preoccupation; and as I will suggest in coming chapters, certain of his complications of the ideals of legibility and transparency, as well as his cultivation of a particular vein of satiric melancholy, have a peculiarly Spanish cast to them. Ultimately, the nationality we assign to such traits becomes a matter 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 we join our eighteenth-century counterparts in “reading” apparently sonic events for imagistic or tactile associations. Dance types are the most obvious example of this, but there is also the tragic aria, the nightingale from an ornamental cello solo, the memory of velvety skin called up by a diminishedseventh sonority. As performers in search of richer understandings of this repertory, we might further experiment with configuring and understanding our own performing bodies in a range of new ways. Depending on the tradition of appearance being referenced in the piece of music at hand, we might assume our own continual legibility; or the intermittent legibility of freeze-frames; or an elusive Protean changeability. Depending on the kinetic tradition we wish to invoke, we might comport ourselves as expressive gestures around a stable core; or as operating on a continuum from regal/stately to athletic/grotesque; or as newly, radically, frighteningly flexible and permeable, soft above all, and expressive in direct proportion to our softness. Perhaps most globally, we do well to assume our nearly constant role as portals into visualistic fantasies on the part of our audience; and, in this guise, be prepared to offer ourselves as (always carefully unacknowledged) erotic objects. Yet whether we are performers or listener-observers, we will inevitably encounter problems in this venture. We know we will encounter them because this is what happened to our eighteenth-century predecessors, who wrote volubly and brilliantly about the experience. In his 1767 “Salon” Diderot gives extended consideration to a portrait of himself by Louis-Michel Van Loo. Diderot is unhappy with the likeness for several reasons. He says his own children would not recognize the “old coquette” it portrays; and he blames its inappropriate 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 portrait would have had an entirely different tone, one more characteristic of “le

gestures and tableaux

103

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 Metastasian opera seria.87 This would seem to be an invocation of the tragic, its stark tableaux eliciting a truer image of selfhood. But for Diderot, the particular affect of Van Loo’s portrait is not only wrong, it is too fixed, too tableaulike: “I had in one day a hundred diverse physiognomies, according to what was affecting me. I was serene, sad, dreamy, tender, violent, impassioned, enthusiastic. . . . The impressions of my soul succeeding one another very rapidly and all painting themselves on my face, the eye of the painter will not find me the same from one moment to the next, his task becomes much more difficult than he thinks.”88 “Much more difficult” scarcely describes the impossible charge Diderot has assigned to the painter here. He has taken the absorptive maneuver so far, so thoroughly conflating how he looks with the ever-changing flow of how he feels himself to be, that his own body has receded into unpaintability. This tension has a particular application to instrumental music, for it must be admitted that, for all the visual imagination that the performer or his audience brings to the performance, not every movement an instrumentalist makes is legible. In many cases—most cases, truth be told—what the string player does makes no sense as pantomime, and signals nothing at all except what it actually is: the physical movements necessary for making certain sounds on the apparatus at hand. Consequently, one of the most urgent matters represented on stages public and private by Boccherini and his colleagues was their challenge to the very idea of being legible. Icons of unreadability, they gestured tantalizingly on the edge of the abyss of the unfathomably subjective. The challenge had been implicit from the beginning in the cultivation of sentiment in the arts: if the truest and most interesting meanings are those of individual human passions, and if these arise from the recesses of the individual soul, then in some measure their truth will be in their invisibility. Individual selfhood, that crown jewel of sensible Enlightenment, is interpretable only through a tension between appearances and an interiority not ultimately accessible to display. Feijóo and many others acknowledged this, but its implications are most poignantly demonstrated by the course of Diderot’s career as a critic of the visual arts. Norman Bryson has chronicled Diderot’s progress from the overflowing descriptive enthusiasm of the early “Salons”—surely some of the greatest flights of visualistic language ever produced—to a profound disillusionment later in life, arising from the ultimate indistinguishability of such descriptions from fiction. In the consummately

104

gestures and tableaux

brilliant and earnest pursuit of transparency, opacity had been produced.89 As early as 1751, Diderot had adumbrated this crisis in a famous and elegant lament. The state of our soul is one thing; another, our explanation of it, whether to ourselves or to others; another, the total and instantaneous sensation of that state; another, the successive and detailed attention we are forced to give it in order to analyze it, to explicate it, to come to understand it. Our soul is a moving picture, after which we paint ceaselessly; we spend a good deal of time in rendering it faithfully; but it exists whole, and all at once; the spirit does not go by measured steps, as does its expression. The paintbrush takes time to execute 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 excessive, irresponsible, “libertine”? Even Diderot’s voluble genius ultimately foundered on the problem of the nature and extent permissible to performance, as he encountered it in the realm of the descriptive; and yet musicology’s modest pretensions to science involve an unavoidable obligation to this very thing. As it was for Diderot, as it was for Noverre, accurate description is mandatory for anyone who is serious about making sense of the experience of art. In instrumental music, whose visible realization is forever half-formed, the tangles redouble themselves. Yet an actual instrumentalist has never had the luxury to be immobilized by insoluble dilemmas; he chooses a course of action and follows it. Boccherini’s career is particularly interesting for the course he took, and for the philosophical issues that swirl in his wake. Issues of text and performance, authority and permeability, and the limits of the legible are most interestingly demonstrated in his relation to his own virtuoso status as a performer.

Chapter 4

Virtuosity, Virtuality, Virtue Would you not state categorically that true sensitivity and performed sensitivity 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 a favorite of mine on account of its opening phrase (see example 11; CD track 18). Two descending sextuplet groups outline an elegant, tender gesture of descent. The graceful decorativeness marks it immediately as galant; it emerges as sensible too, by the fact of its retiringness (downward reading as inward). It can be conveniently executed with the left thumb set across the fifth C–G; from there, the whole melody through bar 4 lies nicely under the hand. This fingering makes most of it sound on the lower strings of the instrument, and incorporates sensibilité all over again by making the restingplaces on every first and third beat increasingly throaty and soft, intimate rather than demonstrative in timbre, as the overall trajectory of the phrase descends over two bars. As noted in chapter 1, Boccherini is fond of passagework that organizes itself in this way around a single positioning of the left thumb to encompass a phrase, several periods, or even an entire section of a piece. One soon learns to look for such fingerings, because they are so often to be found; if they are not always the only possible solution to a passage, they are almost always the most mechanically logical, and frequently the most interesting as well. In this example, physical convenience and sensibilité entangle themselves, each arguing for and supporting the other. Boccherini himself seems to have been exceptionally fond of his opening idea, for it recurs much more often within this movement than is usual in 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 first half of the movement. It reappears in the tonic in bar 27, early in the second 105

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

1 Moderato

vc.

basso

œ œœœ œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ . œ œ œ Bcœ ˙ ˙

?c ˙ B œœœ œœœ 4

œ œ œ œ œœ˙

10

œ œ

œ œ œ œ#œ œ œœœ œ

j œ œ

‰

œ

œ

12 œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ B œœ# œœœ œ

?‰ 1

B

œ

œœ

œ œ œ œ# œ œœ œ œ œ

rf

œ œ #œ œ œ

p

‰ œ #œ œ

œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ

p

rf

?‰

œ

œ Œ

œ

œ œ #œ ‰ œ #œ œ jœ œ

œ #œ œ ‰ œ

‰

˙

œ

˙

j œœ œjœ œ .œ œ œ œ œœ J œ

7 B œ œ œœ .. œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ

Bœ

˙ ˙

œ œ œœ ˙

œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ . œ œ B œ . œ #œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ #œ œ œœ #œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ

?œ œ

?

œ œ

œ

œ

œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ

j œ œ

‰ œj

œ œ

œ

‰

? Bœ

œ

œ œ

j œ œ

‰

œ œœ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ# œn œ œ œ œ? œ œ

œ œ

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

106

#œ œ

œ J

Œ

Example 11. (continued)

14

?

œB

?œ œ 16

&

œ.

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ# œn œ œ œ œ œ?

f

p

œB

œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

2 &œ

œ œ.

œ≈ J

p

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ œ œ6œ œ œ

?˙

œ œ

Œ

œ œ

œ œ œ .œ œ

t

#œ

œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ;œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœ

œ. œ

œ

œ aœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ sotto voce

18 œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ & œ œ œ œ ;œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ;œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

? œ œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

20

&

˙

?˙

U Œ ‰ U Œ

B

Œ

œœœœ œœœœœœœœ j # œ œ œ œ œ œ œjœ #œ œ œ

‰

#œ œ.

po.

Legate

Ó

‰ œ œ œ 2 Probable correct rhythm: Ì Ì Ì : 3 Probably a C. Ó

œ

# œ œ . # œ œ .œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œ # œœ .

23 B # œ œ .œ œ . # œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œ

?

œ

. ‰ œœ œ œ #œ œ

œœ J

107

j œ

œœ œ

œ œ

Œ

œ œ œ œj œ # œ œ œ ?œœ œœ ‰ B ..

j œ œ ‰ .. œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ 3 (continued)

Example 11. (continued)

j œœ œ B .. œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ œ# œ œ . œ œ 25

? .. ˙ 27 Bœ

œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ

29

˙ ˙

31

œ œ

?N œ bœ 33

B

œ

œ

œ

œ

˙˙ œ

œ

œ

A œ .. œ

B

œ œœœœ œ œ

œ œ

œ J

?

j œ . œœ œ œ œ nœ bœ

œ œ œ nœ œbœ bœ œ œ b œ œ Bœ ? œ œ B œ ? b œ œ B œ bœ œ œœ

? b ˙˙ B

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ

?˙ ?

n œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œœ œ œ .

œ

œ

œ œ

œ

œ

œ œ

œ? œ b œ œ B œb œ œ ? œ œn œB œ œ b œ? b œ œ œB b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b ˙˙

œ nœ bœ œ œ œ œ ’~~~ œ œ ˙

˙˙ œ

bœ . œ. Œ

B

b bb œ

j œ

œœœ6œœ œœ . œ œ

œ œ œ œ ( b) œ # œ œ œ n œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ? œ œ nœ œ œ . bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ

108

Example 11. (continued)

b b œ œœœœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . B b œœ 36

6

œœ

œ

œœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœ 6

? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œœ ;œ ;œ n œ œ bœ œ

bb b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ B 6

38

? bb œ b

œ ‰ Jœ œ œ b œ œ œ œ

œ

. œ. œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ.

œ

b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ;œ ;œ nœ œ b œ œ B b œ œ œ œ 40

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

? bb œ b

œ

bb b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ B

; œ œ; œ n œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ; œ ;œ n œ œ b œ œ

41

? bb œ b

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ B b œœ œœ 42

? bb œ b 4

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Presumably:

œ

QQ Q

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ.

œ

œ.

œ

œ

œbœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 4 ≈ œ œ œnœ

≈ œ œ œbœ (continued)

109

Example 11. (continued)

œ b b œœ œ œ œ œ n œ œœ # œ B b ? bb ≈ œ œ œ # œ b 47 Bœ œ œ

?‰

œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ# œ

‰

j œ œ

‰

nnn

œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ

‰ œ

œ œ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œœœœœ œ œ

œ œ

œ

œœ

‰ œj œ

œ œ

œ

49 B œ œœ œœœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ

?‰

œ

‰

nnn

B

U œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ# œ

œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ

j œ œ

U œ œœ nœœ œœ nœ. œœ

bœ j œ œ n œ œ œœ œ n œ œ œ # œ

44

j œ œ

œ œ

œ

bœ ‰

51 B œ œ œ œ œœ6œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ ? œ B œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ ?

?œ œ

œ œ

Œ

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ

53 ? œ B œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œB œ œ œ œ . œ

?œ œ

œ œ

œ œ

‰

j œ

œ

110

Œ

œ œ œ œœœœœœ œ. #œ œ

œœœœœ

œ œ

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

111

Example 11. (continued)

rK rK rK œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ B œ 55

?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 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ U˙ œ œ œ œ œ B œœ

Œ

U ˙

Ó

57

?œ

œ. œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ.

œ

‰

œ œ.

59 œœ œ œœœ j ? œ. œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ B # œ œ œ .# œ œ .œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œœ B œ œ œ œ œ

‰ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

? Ó

62

B

≈œ œ œ

œœ ≈ œœ œ

?œ œ œ œ

œœ

œœœœ

?

‰ j œ œ œ œ œ

œœ œ œ

œ œ œ œ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ‰ œ œ œ Segue

half (CD track 20), where it functions as a kind of portal to a set of fervent expostulations 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 primed to hear a reprise: the histrionics require resolution into the steady tenderness 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

112

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

technical presentation identical to that of its first appearance: one plays it with the left thumb set in a bar-fifth, and the whole period lies elegantly under the hand (CD track 22). But that hand and all its elegance are apparently misplaced: the bar-fifth is a minor third too high, and the whole passage lies in E b major. The key is scarcely prepared and most certainly unexpected. Its character is wholly different from the traditional candor and forthrightness of C major—qualities particularly pronounced on the cello, which resonates at its fullest in this key. And, as Boccherini carefully signals with his use of clefs, this minorthird displacement marks the difference between an alto and a soprano tessitura; in any opera one might care to name, this alone would signal profound differences in character. Apparently an entirely different person, a soprano with a softer, reedier, more covered voice, has suddenly stepped into the lead role. She holds the stage (and the E b –B b bar-fifth position) for ten or so bars, long enough to really establish herself in a piece sixty-two bars in length; she relinquishes her position only through some rather reluctant modulations and changes of thumb-position, which end in bar 46 with another half-cadence on G (CD track 23). Its resolution is the right and proper one, into the home key. From there to the end of the movement there are no further untoward events; the interloper has disappeared; the opening idea even appears one more time, in bar 54, in its original location and tessitura, as a closing idea. Yet a memory of the irruption lingers; however delicately, it has cast a shadow of question over the whole idea of reprise. The second movement embraces that shadowiness by beginning in C minor (see example 12; CD track 24), in the eighteenth century one of the most emotionally charged of all tonalities, associated with pain, pathos, grief (and of course, in functional-harmonic terms, with the interloper E b major). The countenance of this particular C minor immediately takes us far past any ordinary pain and deep into tragedy: it is an anguished lament, almost demanding that we assign it a persona from among the classic heroines in order to contain its most un-salon-like passion. The tessitura of this voice is a low mezzo (Boccherini has assigned it the tenor clef ), which gives it a certain gravity: let us call her Dido, queen of Carthage, regal even in her extremity. Her second utterance, in bar 5, is a heartbreakingly long messa di voce, six and a half beats in an Adagio tempo, very nearly impossible to execute without acute discomfort and constraint upon the right arm. From it she ascends 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 thumbposition, but must use an unsupported portamento up the neck of the instrument, its technical riskiness a perfect gestural enactment of Dido’s

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

basso

B b bb C ˙ ? bb C œ b

œ œj œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ. œ œ

œ. œ œ. œ œ

nœ. œ ˙ œ. œ œ

œ

b œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ J

œ.

U ? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ ˙ b b˙

B

b bb œ dol:

œ

œ

œ . œ œ . œ œ . œ nœ . œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œn œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œn œ œ œ

6 B b bb ˙

9

œ œ œœ

w

4 j B b bb œ œ œ œ ˙ .

? bb

œ nœ

j œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ . 6

œ œ

U #˙ ˙ œ.

5

U ‰ œJ n œ . ˙ ˙

6 œ œ œœœœœœœ

œ œ J

Œ

B

Ó œ œœ œ œœ œœ

? bb 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 œ œ b 5

(continued)

This seems more likely to be a B b than a C.

113

Example 12. (continued)

b b œ . œ œ œ œ œ b œ n œ œ n œ œ .(b) œ œ œ œ œœœ œœ œ . œ œ B b

œ œ œ œ œ n œœn œ œ . b œœ œ œ b œ œœ œ

11

œ œ œ œ ? b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b 13

B

b b b bwœ œ œ

? bb œ b 15

B

b b b œJ

? bb

b œ

œ

œ bœ

œ

œ

œ

œ

U b œ œ œ nœ ˙

b œ

œ

bœ

œ

œ

œ

U œ œ Mœm J

20 j B b bb œ œ n ˙

? bb

œ

œ

bœ

œ œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œ œJ œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ

17 B b bb œ .

? bb

j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ J

œœœœœœœ

œ

. ... œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ B œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

≈œœœ

œ œ n œ b œ b œj œ œ œjœ œ œ œ ‰

œ

Œ

œ

œ. œ bœ

( )

œ

œ

œ

nœ

œ œ œ bœ œ œ Aœ œ J A œœ J œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

114

œ

bœ

œ J

œ

œ

œ

#œ

Nœœ

œ

œ œœ

œ

115

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue Example 12. (continued) 23 B bb b n œ J

? bb Πb w 25

B bb b

B

œ nœ œ œ œ.

œ bœ J

œ ˙

nœ

œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ

œ w

˙

œ

œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ

? bb œœ b

œœ

œ

œ

œ

œœ

œœ

œ

j œœ œ

œ

œ

U U œ œ œ # œ œ œ n œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ # œ œ œ J œ Ó ≈ ≈ U U œ œ œ ¯ œ œ œ œ bœ œnœ œ œ œ bœ œnœ œ œ œ œ ˙ Ó

œœ œ œ œ œ œ B bb b œœœœœœ 27

? bb œ b

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

B bb b w

œ

œ œ J

œ œ œ œ œ.

Ah

di

chi

mi

fi

-

de - rò,

U ‰ Jœ n œ . Se

tu

œ J

œ

Œ

m’in - gann’?

vulnerability. Beneath it, an augmented-sixth intensification of the standard Phrygian question-cadence communicates her urgency. There is, of course, no answer (see example 13). Ah, di chi mi fiderò Se tu m’ingann’? Ah, in whom shall I trust If you deceive me?

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

116

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

In bidding you goodbye I would lose my life; I could not live Among such sorrows.1

And what better material to accomplish such reflection than something we have heard before (CD track 26)? The resemblance is unmistakable: bar 9 gives us the key, the tessitura, and the melodic contour of the anti-reprise at bar 35 of the first movement (compare 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-century sonatas, but this one has a para-dramatic aptness. The first movement’s puzzling anti-reprise now takes its place as a foreshadowing of Dido’s wretched fate. In a tonality borrowed from an unthinkable future, it expresses artless tenderness 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 memories to which an abandoned lover would helplessly, hopelessly return? Indeed, Dido continues to dwell within their gestural and harmonic orbit, first with exquisite delicacy (bars 11–12), then with increasing obsession (bars 13–16; CD track 27). She subsides in apparent resignation in bar 17, only to break out again in lamentations so extravagant that she seems to have lost her reason: sob throngs upon sob, chromaticism upon chromaticism; she interrupts herself with a near-shriek, modulations abort themselves (bars 18–23; CD track 28). I go . . . but where? Oh God! I stay . . . but then . . . what will I do? Must I then die Without 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 sudden chill: by placing the clef change on the pivotal G, Boccherini signals a new thumb-position, and the cool hardness of thumb tone here takes on a frightening 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 second half of bar 24 has become an imprecation— . . . and may the faithless Aeneas Take with him on his journey The deathly omen of my fate.3

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

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

117

of Didone’s suicide is followed by a serenely distanced licenza. Thus this halfcadence poises us to hear something extravert, preferably something uncomplicated—and Boccherini delivers it (see example 14; CD track 30). Not just uncomplicated, but rather fixed; the rondo theme of the third movement is registrally limited and very repetitive, substituting a flurry of minimally directional motion for any memorable shape. It is completely unsingable: the ghost of Dido’s uncomfortable vocality has been exorcized entirely. But so has any connection to sensibilité. It is not only her agony that has been obliterated, but any memory of her tenderness as well. The exorcism is both sonic and visual. The passage must be executed with the left thumb once again set on the original bar-fifth C –G (and here there really 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 enunciate the tune around the fixed thumb pitches. The left hand position mandates rapid, repeated string-crossings, for which the cellist’s right arm must be articulated at the elbow, so that its upper and lower halves operate in opposite directions in relation to that central fulcrum. Every cellist will work this out slightly differently (some might prefer the chief articulation to occur at the right wrist), but it is certain to produce a visible effect of constraint as well as a segmented, akimbo angularity, anathema to the sensible ideal of physical softness, and to the pantomime ideal of a unified, reactive, expressive body. The rondo theme mechanizes the player’s body in an explicitly theatrical way, forcing it to visibly mimic hammers, levers, fulcrums. The operative image is not even human, but rather the escapement in a clock, or perhaps the rapid shuttle of an automatic brocade-loom, its fixed set of motions producing a handsome if formulaic texture. Rondos by their very structure further analogize the theater, but they do so 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 the protagonist. 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. (One has only to look at the first movement of this very sonata to see this principle at work.) In rondos the opening idea functions mainly to contain the episodes, becoming in the process a kind of frame or proscenium. By this analogy, it is the episodes that emerge as the real matter in question, the characters or events of the drama. In the second episode of Boccherini’s rondo, at bar 108, some brusque Cminor gestures introduce a very peculiar character. It may take a few seconds to recognize her (CD track 31).4 Although her melodic and harmonic lineaments and her tessitura are identical, we had every reason to believe that we 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 consummate strangeness. The passage is marked a punta d’arco al ponte e piano (strisc.):

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

œœœœœ œœ œœœœœœœœ B 42 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 Allegro

vc.

dol: basso

? 42 œ œ œ. œ. œ œ œ. œ.

œ œ œ œ. .

œ

œ œ œ œ. .

Œ

6 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ …œ œ œ …œ œ œ œ œ B œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœ

?œ œ œ. œ.

œ œ œ œ. .

œ œ. œ. œ.

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

11 œ œ œ œ B 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 œ œ œ œ

?œ œ œ œ 16

B œ ?œ œ J ?œ

21

B #œ ˙

œ œ œ œ

B

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ # œ. œ. œ. œ. . . œ œ œ œ# œ œ . . . œ. œ œ œ œœ œœ ‰ J . . . œ.

œ œ œ œ œœœœœœ œ nœ

œ œ œ œ

œ œœ œ ˙ œ

Œ

œ

Œ

b˙ ˙

‰

j œ œ˙ .

œ œ œœ œœ j 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 œ œ œ

118

Example 14. (continued) 25

B #œ ˙

nœ

œ œ œ œ œ ˙

œ

b˙ ˙

œœ

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 29

B

œ œ. œ.

# œœ œœ

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 œ œ

? œœ

œœ

œœ

œ œ

œœ

œ œ

œœ

œ œ

œœ

œ #œ œ œ

œœ

œœ

œœ # œœ

œ œ. œ. . œ. œ œ. œ. œ œ. œ. œ œ. œ. œ œ. œ. œ œ B œ. & œ œ œ œ œ œ 33

? œ œ #œ œ

œ

œ #œ œ

œ

œ

œ

j j j j j j œ œ œ œœ 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 37

? œ œ #œ œ #œœ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ.

œ J

œœ

œ

œœ

œœœ

œ

j œœ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ #œ œ #œœ œ œ œ œ J

j œ œ œ œ œœ 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 & 43

?#œ œ œ œ . œ

œ J

#œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

#œ œ œ œ (continued)

119

Example 14. (continued) 48 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 &œœ œœ

?œ œ œ œ . &œ 52

#œ

œ

œ

œ

œ nœ œ œ œ œ J dol:

?#œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ # œ œœ

#œ

#œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ

œ

œ #œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ [œ œ

j œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ J œ

œ

œ

œ

œ.

‰ œj ˙

?œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

58

&œœœœœœœœ ˙ Mm

œ

œ

œ

œ #œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

63 œ œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ #œ œ #œ & œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

? #œ œ œ œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ. & œ #œ œ œ 67

œ

œ

#œ

œ

œ

œ

#œ

œ

œ

œ

œ nœ œ œ œ œ J

œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ #œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ #œ

dol:

?#œ

œ

œ

œ

#œ œ œ œ

120

Example 14. (continued) 72

&œ ?œ

( B) œ 78

j œ

?œ

œ #œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœœ ˙

œ

œ #œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ œ

j œ

œ

œ œ

?

œ

( )œJ

œ œ œ nœ

B

dol:

‰ œj œ n œ œ œ œ œ

œœœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœœ

( )œ B

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 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ

83

88 B œœœ

‰ œj ˙

f

œ. Bœœœœœœœœ œ ?œ

œ B‰ 6

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœœ

œœœœœ

œ

œ

œ œ

B

œ

œ

œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

Œ

œ

œ

œ

œœœœ œ œ œ. œ.

B

œœœœœœœœ

93 œœœœœ œœ œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœœœ Bœœœœœœœœ œœœœœœœœ œ

?œ œ œ œ . . 6

œ œ œ œ. .

œ

Œ

œ œ œ œ. .

œ œ œ œ. . (continued)

This is notated as alto clef in the MS, incorrect until m. 80.

121

Example 14. (continued)

œœ B œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœ

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

98

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

103 œ œ œ œ B 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 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 108 ? b b œœ b œ œ

? bb œ b 113

? bb n œ b

œ œ œ œ

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

œ œ bœ œ

œ

nœ

? bb œ œ œ œ œ b œ 119

B

b bb œ

œ

? bb œ œ œ œ b 7

œ œ œ

œ

bœ

œ

œ

œ œbœ œ b bb

œ

nœ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ

#œ

œ œ

B

7

œ

œ.

œ

b bb

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

j œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ

A punta d'arco al ponte e piano (strisc.)

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ.

œ

œ œ œ

œ

œ œ œ

Or "strasc.": unclear in MS.

122

œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ

œ œ œ

j œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ

Example 14. (continued)

bb œ B b

œ.

124

œ œ œ

? bb œ b

œ.

bb œ B b 129

œ œ

139

bb B b ? bb

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

˙ œ œ œ

bb B b b

œœ

œ

œ

œ œ

j œ

œ œ

œ.

œ œ œ œ

œ ˙

œœ

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 œ œ. œ œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ œ

œ

œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ . œ œj œ

œ œ œ. œ œ

œ

œ œ

œœ

œ œ

œ

œ ˙

œ

œœ

b œ

144

? bb

r œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ. œ œ

œœ

b

œ.

œ

134

? bb

œ œ œ

œ

œ œ ? bb œ œ b bb B b

œ.

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œœ

œ œ

œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œœ

œ

œ œ

œ

œ œ œ

(continued)

123

Example 14. (continued) 149

B

bb b œ

œ œ œ

œ œ

? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b 154

? bb

b

œ

œ œ

œ

?

˙

œœœœœœœœ œ

œ

œ

œ

? bb n œ œ œ œ b

œ œ œ œ

œ 159 ? bb n œ b œ

nnn

B‰

œ J

? bb œ b œ œ œ

œ œ œœ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

nœ

˙ ˙ ˙˙

œ

œ

œ

nœ

œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

œ #œ

j j j œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ

nnn œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ .

j j 164 B œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ

j œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ ≈ J

?œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œœœœœ œ

j œ

œ.

œ J

:… œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

169 œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ Bœœ œœœ œ œœœœœœœœ œœ œœ

?œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

124

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

Example 14. (continued) 173 œ œ œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ B œ #œ œ œ

?

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ.

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ J

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ J

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœœ ˙

œ

‰ œJ !˙

œ.

178 Bœ œ œ œ œ

œ

?œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

…:

≈≈

j œ

184 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ B œœœœœœœœ œ œœœ œ œœœœœœœœ œ œ œ œ

?œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

189 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. B 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 nœ œ œ œ œ J

œ œ

œ J

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙t

194 Bœ œ œ œ œ

œ

‰ œJ !˙

œ œ œœœœ œ

œ

Π(continued)

125

Example 14. (continued) 200

B

œ

œ. œ

j œ

? #˙

œ

œ. œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ. œ #˙

U˙

B #˙ 206

? œ

œ œ œ #˙

œ œ

œ

œ œ

œ. œ

j œ

œ

œ œ

œ œ œ

œ

U Œ

œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœœœ

œ

U Œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

211 œœœœœ œœ œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœœœ œœœœœœœœ B œœœœœœœœ œ

?œ œ œ œ

œ

œœ B œœœœœœ

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

?œ

œ œ œ œ

216

œ

Œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

126

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

221 œ œ œ œ B 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

œœœœœ

B

œ œ œœ

œ. œ? œ. œ

œœœ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

127

Example 14. (continued)

œ 226 ? œœ œ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

˙ ˙ ˙˙

œ ?œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

˙

Œ

œ. œ.

œ œ

this last word, indistinct in the manuscript, could mean either strisciato, sliding, or, if strasc., strascinato, dragged: thus, “at the point of the bow, at the bridge, and softly (sliding)/(dragged).”5 Follow this extraordinary concatenation of directions, and you get a glassy, choked, and distant tone, and a notably stilted execution on account of the restriction on the amount of bow. This character has acquired an actively unpleasant edge through the brittle glassiness of the ponticello tone, as well as a precisely scripted gestural constraint 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 contained by the blithely mechanical rondo theme amounts to a twist of the knife. The rondo has framed the executant to the listener-observer as a quasi-automaton. When she comes to execute reminiscence in this episode, the question must arise as to how such a creature can feel anything resembling nostalgia. This question is then positively begged by the overdetermined grotesquerie of the ponticello and the sliding or dragging. Which is this cellist’s true nature, then, man-machine or sensible kindred spirit? Which state is her genuine one, which one an actorly assumption? Recourse to the player’s own experience will not be of much help in answering these questions: she is distanced from her own body in the rondo by the necessity of segmenting it in order to execute the theme, and from her capacity to feel by the constraints of the elaborate and uncomfortable performance directions. Even as we puzzle over her nature, in bar 152 she exits as abruptly as she had entered. There are a few more brusque gestures in C minor—as if a curtain had closed upon her somewhat unceremoniously—and from there all is well to the end of the sonata: it is cheerful in affect, entirely unsurprising in form, appealingly brilliant in execution, the final, flashy gestures erasing any lingering questions with sheer panache. Except, except, except. There has simply been too much strangeness in this piece, and that strangeness too clearly intentional, for our questions to vanish smiling into a tonic cadence. To mention only two, and on very different planes: Was the cyclic use of themes between movements, by no means

128

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

common practice during this period, an isolated experiment? And what was Boccherini doing, arch-sensible composer and sublimated tragedian that I have averred him to be, by so courting irony and alienation? The cyclicity was no isolated experiment. Several Boccherini scholars have addressed his experiments with it in every genre of instrumental music; he uses it more, and more consistently and inventively, than any other composer of his generation. Stanley Sadie offers a typology of Boccherini’s many cyclic usages: “The linking of two movements with a common slow introduction; elsewhere entire movements or sections of movements are repeated, most usually so that a fast movement already heard reappears as a finale, or so that a central movement is presented with the same music following as preceding it. Sometimes even more complex schemes appear.”6 Such devices are uncommon in the sonatas, however. I know of only one other example of full-fledged cyclicity in these works, the Sonata G. 569, also in C major. In this piece a peculiar plan unfolds around a stately slow introduction and a gaily tripping rondo theme. Each of these two ideas reappears cyclically—the slow one several times—during the course of the sonata; but the “unity” so produced ends up sabotaging the sonata’s very viability within its genre, because of a problem nested in the allegro tune. By virtue of being a rondo theme, it is already thoroughly dedicated to multiple reappearances. Its further, cyclic reappearance after two intervening movements initiates a second complete rondo movement built upon the same idea. Thus the whole concept of rondo has proliferated, overrun its boundaries, and taken over the piece; there is no conventional first-movement form at all. On this basis—ironically, the basis of excessive unification—some period listeners would have denied G. 569 any proper identity as a sonata and called it a capriccio instead, acknowledging its uniqueness. I know of no other eighteenth-century instrumental piece with this feature.7 Such a witty plan differs in purpose, if not in subtlety, from the cyclic reappearances in G. 17. Both are essays in the complex effects of memory and expectation upon the listener’s perceptions, and as such are obviously quite deliberate; their multivalent complexity suggests that Boccherini could, when he wanted to, engage in a particular species of “cleverness” usually assigned to Haydn. But by and large he did not want to. In general, and notwithstanding these exercises, it does not appear that wit in itself—pinnacle of self-consciousness, crown jewel of Enlightenment—interested Boccherini very much. He may have written an unusual number of cyclic works, but they form a relatively small part of his oeuvre. Much more typical of him is a certain type of reappearance that is ill served by the term “cyclic”; rather, I would call it an art of recycling. Very often, Boccherini shares themes and passages between entirely different works; genre is no obstacle, nor the extent of the recycling, which can vary a good deal. The one factor that he usually retains as a constant is key. The first theme of the Sonata in A Major, G. 13, for ex-

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

129

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 of the C-minor second movement of the Sonata in C Major, G. 17 (discussed above), and that of the C-minor second movement of the String Trio in F Major, G. 95. Another, more extended and more complex example of this sort of inter-generic recycling, noted by Gérard, can be found in the correspondence between the jaunty opening theme of the second movement of the Sonata in A Major, G. 4, the first movement of the Sextet in C Major, G. 466, and the concert aria (aria accademica) in B b Major, “Se d’un amor tiranno,” G. 557. Here even the usual commonality of key has been abandoned. Boccherini dates the sextet 1773 in his catalog; Gérard, reading thematic association as temporal, dates the sonata and the aria to around the same time. This association is reinforced, and a further chronology for it suggested, by Friedrich Lippmann’s theories of the influence of metric verse upon melodic construction in instrumental music. The strong but fluid pulse of the settenari (seven-syllable lines) of G. 557 was by far the most popular metric choice among authors of Metastasian-style libretti. Its typical association with certain rhythmic configurations in melodies, exhaustively documented by Lippmann, would have been kinesthetically ingrained for Boccherini, as for all composers of his generation, through years of exposure to opera seria. It is logical 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 work reappears in a subsequent movement; but a main idea may reappear as a subsidiary 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 an entirely new tune, differing in affect from everything else in the movement, which appears briefly in the second half shortly after the reprise (see example 15a). Something quite like it opens the ensuing Largo; but the resemblance is never reiterated nor confirmed, so that its affectual residue is at best fleeting (see example 15b).9 Striking examples of both inter-generic and inter-movement recycling may be found in the Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, the first movement of which I discussed in detail in chapter 1. Rich and interesting as that first movement may be, the emotional and technical showpiece of the sonata as a whole is its profoundly dramatic C-minor slow movement (CD track 32). Boccherini used the opening theme of this movement more or less verbatim in the slow movement 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 the basis for an extended excursion upon an unprecedented theme by the solo cello. The player who is fortunate enough to be acquainted with both works may well find that there is interpretational “bleed-through”: the immense earnestness of the sonata will turn the rather conventional pompousness of

130

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

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

B # c œœ ..

œœ œœ ..

50

vc.

basso

piano ? # c !˙

˙ !

œ œ #œ œ ‰ J ‰

œœ ..

œœ œœ . .

œ

˙ !

œ J

œ

œ

œ œ J

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

vc.

basso

œ œ œ #œ œ

B# œ

? # œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œ œ œ 6œ œ œ n œ œœ

œœ

œœ

the sinfonia movement toward deeply serious reflection, while the memory of the symphonic setting will inflect subsequent renditions of the sonata with an element of grandeur. In cases like this, any firmly established chronology would be a hindrance upon the play of interpretational association. After the hair-tearing intensity of the sonata’s slow movement, the innocence of the opening idea of the third movement might at first seem feckless (CD track 33). But reflection proves it otherwise. This theme is itself a reminiscence of that memorable “celestial” event at bar 45 of the first movement, where the tonic harmony returned, clothed in an unprecedented theme (see example 2; CD track 34). Through this delicate piece of recycling, Boccherini inflects expectation with memory, very much as he does throughout the Sonata G. 17. A formal incongruity—an inexplicable moment, however lovely—reappears, clothed conventionally as a principal theme. Galatea has been dressed and taught manners. She legitimates herself through “hindsight”; but her very nature is infected by the prodigy of her birth. She has the haunting quality of a déjà vu: we might call this Boccherini’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 the reiteration of material that, while striking, is not properly speaking thematic at all, but transitional. A modulating passage, a reiterative chunk tossed in to fill out periodicity, the offhand figuration that closes a phrase—passages of this sort, sometimes amounting to no more than half a bar, reappear in many different works. Lacking the logic of a derivation from poetic meter,

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

131

lacking even the definition of being a complete idea, no one such passage can reasonably claim primogeniture over another. The recurrences seem almost accidental. And yet one notices them, playing the sonatas. They are a constant and appealing feature of learning this body of work. I think it is the fact that one notices these shared traits while playing that is, in the end, the key to their meaning. They are not accidental at all, but neither are they conscious or self-conscious in the same way that a cyclic reappearance is. They represent not Boccherini’s dispositio —the deliberate arrangement 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 rhythmic figuration, the bodily means by which Boccherini approached his instrument. These moments within the sonatas, like Tiepolo’s ink drawings, “exhibit the process of their making.”10 And in the sonatas above all, that making was grounded in and referred to Boccherini’s own virtuosity. A hand, even a virtuosic hand, makes music rather differently than a conscious intellect, and always somewhat independently from the ear. The stakes are different; ease, familiarity, pleasure are paramount. Left to their own devices, 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 identify different oboists by the melodic patterns they played when testing out reeds. Each had his own, and never varied it.) Released from the exigencies of a particular inventio, negotiating the transitional space before the next one, Boccherini resorted to his hands’ memory of what had worked well in a similar place before—and then, remarkably, he wrote it down. We cannot use such a mode of creation for the dating or periodization of works; hands remember too readily, and too capriciously, across five or fifty years. But we can use it to suggest an alternative to teleological models of artistic development. In certain cases, with certain artists, it seems that idiom is the shaping force in creation, as much as or more than any putative progress toward innovation, or greater complexity, or transcendence. This word idiom and the delicate tangle of concepts and questions it entrains are deserving of a little scrutiny. The Greek combining form idio- denotes any native property: “own, personal, private, peculiar, separate, distinct.”11 In European languages, nouns deriving from the Greek noun form idioma generally refer directly to language itself (e.g., the Spanish idioma, “the common tongue, proper and particular to any nation”).12 But some closely related forms may also take on different nuances emphasizing the quality of distinctness, whether of a whole language (e.g., the French idiotisme, “a manner of speaking adapted to the proper genius of a particular language”),13 as manifested in dialect (e.g., the Spanish idiotismo, “the inflection of any verb, particular construction of some phrase or particle, which has some irregularity, and does not follow the general rule of the na-

132

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

tion; rather, it is used only in some province or part thereof ”),14 or as manifested in general comportment (e.g., the Spanish idioteo/a, “proper, private, singular. From the Greek idiotetos, which means property, or the nature proper to every thing”).15 We cannot help but see the loaded word idiot peering out from these forms, which have no current equivalent in English. The association of peculiarity with stupidity or social incompetence is not new— nor is it unique to English: the primary definition of idiotismo given in the 1726 Diccionario de la lengua castellana is “the universality of the ignorant, or idiots.”16 As a creative principle, the word imposes certain restraints. In musical works driven by idiotism, the composer’s process would involve the presentation of his own, personal, private, peculiar, separate, distinct mode of utterance, its distinctness not necessarily deriving from any generally constituted standard of originality or novelty, but from a particularly constituted one made up of the utterer’s own irreducible habits. Within the world at large, 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 idiom.”18 If models of progress or development can even be applied to this as a compositional process, I propose that they would tend toward precisely the sort of economizing and self-confirming practices that we see in Boccherini’s virtuoso music: a lifelong finding, testing, and proving of those ideas and gestures that sum up the thinker, the gesturer, to himself.19 If historical inquiry can be applied to idiomatic process, it will just as surely tend toward an elucidation of how selfhood was constituted during the period and the places involved, as even my brief etymological excursion suggests. Yet idiomatic creation need not devolve to the idiocy of solipsism. As a form of self-portraiture, it can be moving indeed: a faithful rendering of quirks and asymmetries, of the marks of life’s passage upon a single countenance, ultimately representing to us that tender and awful moment of the self ’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 by Don Luis de Borbón in 1770, and since he was primarily an itinerant virtuoso during this period, his early output is rich in music for solo cello. Gérard estimates that Boccherini had written a hundred works by 1770, including twenty-four sonatas for solo cello and basso, and eight or nine concerti for cello 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 in monastery archives at Seitensetten in Austria.21 These numbers are neces-

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

133

sarily conjectural, because although Boccherini kept a catalog of his own works from 1760, he omitted from it his concerti, cello sonatas, and vocal music.22 Why such a substantial omission from what was otherwise a meticulous catalog? Gérard explains it by saying that Boccherini “reserved [these works] for his own use”;23 this is reinforced by a perusal of the offerings of any major concert series of the day—the Viennese Academien, the Concerts Spirituels, the Hanover Square concerts in London—from which it is clear that an instrumental virtuoso by definition performed his or her own compositions. It is useful to assume, then, that Boccherini did not consider these omitted pieces as “ works” in the sense we understand today, but rather as accessories to performance, essentially personal and circumstantial: vehicles. This would not have been a peculiar attitude. In the first half of the eighteenth century, virtuoso concerti and sonatas “circulated, if they circulated at all, in manuscript parts,”24 with publication gradually becoming a norm for such music only in the second half of the century. This latter period, the period of Boccherini’s working life, saw a profound metamorphosis in the concept of a composition from an irreproducible, characteristic event—“sonata” in the exact sense of “played,” “concerto” in the sense of “given in concert”—to the reproducible, reinterpretable “thing” we call a 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 is the liminal status of virtuoso music better demonstrated than in opera, which was emblematic of the inextricable relation of composed work to performed version. In a traditional eighteenth-century view—and not just an Italian one—the very identity of an opera rested on performers and performative occasions. When Burney wrote his General History of Music in the 1780s, he identified airs from operas composed sixty and seventy years earlier by their singers. Of Handel and Rolli’s Ricardo primo, Ré d’Inghilterra from 1727 he wrote, “The first air for Cuzzoni . . . 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 of the “ work-concept.” Indeed, it still thrives: concertgoers and consumers of recordings speak, with an affectionate fetishism very similar to Burney’s, of “Callas’s Iphigénie,” “Schnabel’s Pathétique,” “Bylsma’s Boccherini.” Such a persistence reflects a common understanding of musical events that has continued to exist apart from and simultaneously with the painfully patrician Kantian separation of the work-ideal from its specific instantiation; it suggests that, to the great majority of people who engage with music in any way, the idea of separating it from its performance is absurd.

134

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

virtuosi For all that a performer-centered understanding of music may have been and may still be the commonest (not to say most commonsensical) view, the nature of those performers was a fiercely contested topic in the eighteenth century. The contests took place at every imaginable level, from the most quotidian to the airiest regions of philosophy; it would not be off the mark to say that performance, and especially performance as personified in the virtuoso, was one of the most intense cultural preoccupations of Boccherini’s day. It is in this fraught context that his exquisite play with form and idiom assumes its full importance. Some typical quotidian contests are implied in the differences between Boccherini’s two oil portraits, reproduced in chapter 2. In the first, he is playing his cello. This identifies him as an instrumentalist version of what in the Middle Ages would have been called a cantor, a singer or choral director, but more fundamentally, a musician physically engaged in the production of music. From the Middle Ages also came the routine presumption that cantores have little perspective on what it is they are doing. They lack theoretical knowledge, and this makes them unfit to engage in poiesis, creation. They are a kind of para-artist. In the second portrait, Boccherini appears before us cello-less with inscribed sheets of music paper, thereby identified as the opposite number of the cantor, the musicus, the expert, concerned 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 the lives of eighteenth-century musicians. We can see it in the payroll records for Boccherini’s first post in Spain. In 1770 Boccherini was hired by the Infante Don Luis as “violón y compositor”—that is, for his skills as both cantor and musicus—at the rate of 14,000 reales de vellón a year, with a raise to 18,000 in 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 de Música,” a title that denotes a full-fledged musicus, his contract stipulated that he receive an additional 12,000 a year just for compositions. Font and his three sons, cantores lifelong, received cautious raises, but were obliged to supplement their earnings in the Infante’s household with such theatrical and orchestral work as they could scare up in Madrid.27 By making efforts to advance to the status of musicus—that is, a composer with a handsome permanent appointment—Boccherini was doing no more than any other ambitious young cantor of his time would have done. To note only the most obvious parallel, his career concerns resemble those of Mozart’s early manhood. But as with Mozart, the evidence of those efforts provided

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

135

by the compositions is both ambiguous and complex. In particular, the extremely personal and idiomatic ways in which Boccherini kept execution and performance central to his composerly thinking, and the degree of his critical and financial success as a composer on these terms, confound the old cantor-musicus divide. It is the virtuoso more than any other kind of musician who can confuse the separation, making clear that within that separation there coils a paradox. For when an art is constituted in such a manner that its performance is its chief glory and reason for being—its end—poiesis, making, collapses into phronesis, doing. The creation, the “thing made,” is the action itself. Why should this matter? The stakes in the cantor-musicus distinction turn out to be high indeed, nothing less than the differentiation of life and art, ethics and esthetics. Poiesis is forever privileged, both materially (through the payroll) and ethically: it is exempt from the restrictions and obligations of the moral life; it alone among human activities may freely subsume means into end. We know these stakes as vividly today as ever before. Treat life as if it 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 harmony but censorship, shackles upon the spirit. A rubric for their distinction is nothing less than vital. It may also be unattainable. This uncomfortable possibility emerges more or less immediately, even if we take the whole discussion back quite a bit further than the Middle Ages. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the distinction when he speaks about art, poiesis: it is always other than phronesis, practical wisdom, knowing how to do, because we engage in it toward the end of making something. “Neither is acting making nor is making acting.”28 “ While making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action itself 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 in terms of artistic practice. He tells us that the two kinds of virtue, moral and intellectual, are acquired through habitual exercise, ethike; they exist in seed form in our natures, but we acquire them, activate them, become them, “by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts. . . . For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”30 The curiously tautological, “bootstrap” quality of this construction of virtue comes close to self-contradiction, and yet it demonstrates Aristotle’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 keep being enacted; thus the virtuoso is obviously one in whom virtue is being enacted with particular perfection. But is this right? Was Boccherini a more vir-

136

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

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

virtuosity contra sensibilité The culprit, in a sense, was the discrete, individual, feeling self, the newly conceived common man, central player of both democracy and sensibilité. Both of these sciences are in the end anti-virtuosic; both locate human virtue in capacity rather than in performance of that capacity. The contradictions thus generated are apparent in Rousseau’s 1754–63 Essai sur l’origine des langues.31 Rousseau proposed a set of bodily markers of human virtue; but they are painstakingly configured as capacities rather than performances. According to him (and pace Noverre and Angiolini!), gesture, although the most immediate form of communication, has at best a sporadic connection to the heart and the imagination. Only expression through the voice (and its reception through sentire) can make available the full richness, the full otherness, the virtue of another being. But this voice has certain strongly marked peculiarities. Its utterances are “genuine” to the exact extent that they rely on those sounds which “emerge naturally from the throat”—that is, they are minimally produced or performed. Complex vowels, diphthongs, and consonants “require attention and practice” and as such represent the interventions and distancings of artifice.32 Rousseau’s idealized throat is open and uncomplicated, as transparent to passion as (he says) perfect language is to its object. This candid melismatic language is characterized by its effortlessness, and effortlessness is ever the marker of the “natural.” Anything that interferes with this throatliness—even the tongue, lips, or teeth—is “enervating,” distanced from original passion, or representing a lesser type of passion, where the highest and most “natural” passions are those of tenderness, pleasure, and self-sufficiency. Thus, for instance, Rousseau characterizes anger as palate- and tongue-formed, while tenderness is glottal; and he characterizes 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 it mildly, physiologically idiosyncratic.33 In Western vocal technique, the actual difference has less to do with any “openness” of the throat than with a degree of sustained support or tension in diaphragm, larynx, and oral cavities; the positions 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 effort, than in speaking, which can issue adequately from a much more variable range of tensions and bodily positions.34 What matters here, of course,

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

137

is not accurate physiology so much as the eighteenth-century conventions of bodily imaging that were focused in Rousseau’s influential account. His idea of vocal openness and indolence concentrates the sensible values of bodily flexibility, softness, and penetrability into a single act—arguably the central act of the performing arts, that of voicing the passions—and it does so by 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 with his surroundings, everything genuine and passionate resided in the physiologies and languages of “southern lands”—his code for Italians—while cold artifice and harsh croaking characterized “northerners”—that is, Frenchmen, and most particularly his anathema Rameau. His national polarization of genuineness and artifice was exactly the reverse of that of Noverre, who presented these polarities in a manner more typical for a Frenchman, and foundational 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 curious and difficult passages, both in music and dancing, as a mere jargon, absolutely foreign and superfluous in these arts; whose voice should be pathetic, as always addressed to the heart: their proper language is the language of sentiment; 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 have no satisfaction in his performance; he affords me no pleasure, nor creates in me the least sensation. . . . An Italian performer, such as I have described comes to Paris; all the world runs after him, though nobody understands him, and he becomes celebrated for a prodigy. Their ears have enjoyed no satisfaction in his performance; nor has 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 celerity from the neck to the bridge of his instrument: he accompanies all these dexterities with a thousand aukward [sic] distortions of his body, and seems to say to the audience, “Gentlemen, look at me, but do not listen to me;—this passage is extremely difficult; it will not flatter your ear, but it will make a very great noise: and I have been studying it these twenty years! ” Plaudits arise from all parts of the theatre, and though he doubtless exercises his fingers very dextrously, yet this automaton, this piece of machinery, receives all that approbation which is constantly refused to a French Performer.36

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

138

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

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 and extraverted physical virtuosity as the grotesque style. In interpreting virtuosity as grotesquerie, automatism, or foreignness, one accomplishes a certain distancing from it, a location of its seductive wonders into categories where human feeling is presumed to be distorted or void. Both Noverre’s violinist and Angiolini’s “buffoons” destroy sentiment through amazement, amazement specifically provoked by the visibility of their virtuosic bodies: “Gentlemen, look at me, but do not listen to me.” Rousseau’s location of expressive authenticity in a vocal process that is fundamentally invisible is no accident. In the Dictionnaire de musique of 1768, he makes repeated 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 knowledge of the touch, and fingering of his instrument; and, secondly, [on] a long custom in reading music, and phrasing it at sight; for while we see separate notes, we always hesitate in the pronunciation; we acquire a great facility in execution 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 antivisuality. If for Rousseau the pronunciation of consonants represented a devolution from the pure melisma of passion, the codification of sound into written symbols was a final, fatal loss of artistic vitality. This is a perfect inversion of the ancient system of values inscribed by Boccherini’s portraits and career, according to which the musicus was explicitly privileged through his production of written and, ultimately, published works. In characterizing virtuosity as Other, these high-minded French-speaking writers pointed directly at the sources of its power over late eighteenth-century minds. To audiences of this period, virtuosity was indeed the perfect antithesis of sensibilité, for by its nature it makes the absorptive maneuver impossible. However spiced by wonder and pleasure, virtuosity inevitably confronts the watcher with the gulf of their difference from the watched; as such it is not far from alienation, and it is to the operations and typology of alienation, and its threat to Enlightenment visions of human commonality, that all these characterizations of virtuosity speak. The huge popularity of virtuosic performances of all types during the eighteenth century—indeed it was a period in which many new kinds of virtuosity were invented or perfected— suggests that alienation exercised a seductive force every bit as powerful as sensible commonality. Creature of his age, Boccherini of course knew this; his sonatas show just how ingenious he was in using his own virtuosity as a means to explore it.

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

139

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 dancer is obviously an impressive athlete in Angiolini’s account; we are moved to astonishment at his daring leaps. Sensible attempts to identify with him result in our fearing for his safety. That he does not fall, does not break his ankle, is perhaps a source of relief, but beyond this rudimentary exercise in absorption we cannot go with him. He is too strange to us; and his strangeness lies in what he does with his body—things we cannot do, would not want to do, did not know were possible, find positively distorted or disturbing— and by the very same token, thrilling. The thrill is that of being confronted by difference. What sort of body can this be? Can it possibly be natural? Thus carefully administered and tightly controlled, our fear of difference is of course also a delicious attraction. At the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna where Luigi and Leopoldo Boccherini worked, little else was presented in the way of dance but this style. The most comprehensive exhibition of grotesque virtuosity available during Boccherini’s lifetime, however, was undoubtedly provided by the boulevard theaters of Paris, in which the gamut of human physical possibility was well and truly run—tightrope dancers, fire-swallowers, contortionists, androgynes. On another level, when little Wolfgang Mozart appeared in Paris for the Prince de Conti in 1764, his hosts delighted in administering tests to the boy. They placed a kerchief over the keys, contrived a variety of dictation or memory exercises for him, and made him play extremely difficult music at sight. This gave Mozart’s childhood performances what Maynard Solomon has called a “vaudeville character,”39 led to regular speculation as to whether the boy was a species of automaton, and further attests to the period’s appetite for prodigies, for feats that exceeded what had previously been thought possible.40 The corrales (public theaters) of Madrid catered to a similar taste in Spanish audiences. A well-developed appetite for illusion had long been cultivated in an entire genre of magic plays, while acrobats performed stunts between theatrical works or the acts thereof. But it was on the streets of Madrid that some the most vivid grotesquerie of the entire eighteenth century could be found (see figure 8). On Ash Wednesday . . . a burlesque procession takes place in Madrid. . . . From the morning onward, bands of grotesquely masked boys and alluring girls invade the streets, leaping and frolicking about. All day long the city is overrun by these boisterous and insolent hordes. In the evening, a procession forms. At its head, three traditional characters: Uncle Chispas, rolling his raging eyes beneath his mask; the girl Chusca, wild and provocative; Juanillo, hunched in his cloak and with the air of the court executioner. Behind them, a gigantic mannequin 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.

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

141

hung a small sardine. After him, jumping, shouting, and overflowing with pranks (lazzi), come all the apprentices, shopkeepers’ dwarves, porters, water carriers, unemployed valets, fruit and vegetable merchants, fishwives, shopgirls, and loose women of the capital. They are all dressed up, some in grimacing masks, others in penitents’ hoods, others still in pointed san benitos [the long peaked caps worn by those accused by the Inquisition]. In the glimmer of the torches, amid the noise of firecrackers, to the dull beating of zambombas [earthenware drums] . . . all these disarticulated puppets, paper kites floating above them, 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, while above them the pelele burns on a stake.41

The grotesque was linked to the Spanish aristocracy’s fascination with majismo. María Josefa Pimentel, Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna and Boccherini’s employer for a few years in the later 1780s, seems to have had a particular taste for it. It was she who commissioned what is one of the most famous repositories of grotesque imagery in Western culture, Goya’s 1799 Caprichos. Goya, for his part, used the grotesque in an ironic manner, as a means 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 which the stability of Enlightenment selfhood is called, however circumspectly, into question. Goya’s “Incómoda elegancia,” a study for an unengraved Capricho, is one of a series of drawings in which various members of Spanish society face mirrors that contain distorted images (see figure 9). The gentleman’s elegant, conventional dress, just like the conventions of sensibilité, or the formal impeccability of the rondo in Boccherini’s Sonata G. 17, is revealed through reflection as a site of extreme constraint and discomfort.42 Boccherini’s cello sonatas and a few of his quintets contain moments of registral prodigiousness that qualify as grotesque, simply by virtue of the fact that no one had written such high pitches for the cello before. For example, in the last movement of the Sonata in B b Major, G. 565, the soloist arpeggiates a G-minor harmony upward, and then upward again, seemingly unable to stop himself; he ends on a g999 above the staff in treble clef, well off the end of an eighteenth-century fingerboard. (There is an irresistible likeness between the left hand at this moment and an acrobat walking a tightrope.) This moment exceeds the tessitura of the rest of the piece by an octave or more, and the tessitura “natural” to the instrument (which is to say, normal by mid-eighteenth-century standards) by at least two octaves. While it is not all that difficult to play, it is most certainly arresting to hear. At the same time, Boccherini’s commitment to “serious” styles was strong enough that he never conflated such showmanship with his compositional main idea. Thus passages of this type all share a similar positioning in the sonatas, quartets, and quintets that contain them, as climaxes within secondary themes, followed by sizable silences (he sometimes marks the subsequent

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

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

143

rests aspettar molto, “ wait a long time”). They mark an ongoing discourse, but never set its tone. The silences that follow these alarming excursions are opportunities for purest gestural dramatization: a slow retrieval of the left hand (perhaps the right with it, for effect?) through the air at the end of the passage, and the bringing of it back toward a normal playing position. Thus might the cellist mime that gesture of astonishment made famous by David Garrick in his portrayal of Hamlet, while the cesura sonically mimes the silencing effect of such untoward statements upon discursive “business as usual.” Moments like this are not common in Boccherini’s work, but they are memorable: they exceed any reasonable expectation. They also exceed the capacity of the instrument to sound beautiful, and in this respect they participate in another feature of the grotesque, in which beauty is explicitly perverted as an esthetic standard. So too is another esthetic ideal, that of naturalness: and certainly, even when played masterfully, such passages exceed the capacity of the instrument to sound “like itself.” Here one might be tempted to invoke that eighteenth-century paradigm of altered vocality and sublimated grotesquerie, the castrato; but these passages go well beyond even that vocal range. This is an Ovidian transformation, not into an altered human but into some other sort of creature altogether: a most unlikely bird. (In this vein, Voltaire is said to have remarked to Boccherini’s contemporary 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 a nightingale.”)43 Other examples of this sort of cellistic metamorphosis occur in passages written entirely in natural harmonics. In the passage shown in example 16, which is embedded in a movement entitled “I pastori e li cacciatori,” the first cello and viola are, presumably, the hunters. They are oddly hoarse and substanceless hunters, however, on account of the passage being situated among rather high harmonics on the cello’s bottom strings. (The viola is playing normally, but will presumably seek to blend with the cello timbre.) We are struck by how unlike itself the instrument sounds, as much as by any hornlike qualities.44 This sort of passage is fairly easy to play; the striking effect is not strongly tied to any athletic level of executional prowess. Its grotesquerie, then, is somewhat independent of virtuosity, at least in the traditional musical sense of that word. But virtuosity it is nevertheless: this is the virtuosity of the actor, whose prowess and whose unnaturalness constitute themselves through his doubleness, the assumption of personae not his own, and around whose figure the problem of alienation crystallized most urgently in the eighteenth century. Doubleness is but a hair’s breadth away from duplicity; the moral implications of this state are not difficult to follow. One might go so far as to suggest

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. Allegro ( I pastori e li cacciatori) vla.

B 24

vc.1

. vicinoœ al ponticello . 3œ e 4 œcorda B 24 armonici œ œsulla œ œ œ œ J p

37

Ó

vc.2

Execution

? 24 ? 24

Ó

Ó O

œ.

œ

œ œœœ œ œ

œ.

œ

Ó

a

a

œ p

Ó

Ó

O. O O.

Ó

Ó

Ó

j O O O O O

O OOO

O

O. O

O

B œ.

j œ œ œ œ œ

œ œœœ œ

œ

œ . œ ;œ

œ

œ

B œ.

œ J

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œœ œ

œ

œ . œ ;œ

œ

œ

42

? Ó ?

Ó

O.

O J

B:œ

œ

œ

B œ

œ

œ

? œj

‰

?

O

47

O

O

O

j j œ ‰ œ ‰

Ó O

O

O O O O bœO

O

O . O OJ b O œ

œ

œ.

œ

œ

œ

œ.

œ

œ J

‰

œ

Œ

O

O

O

O.

144

˙

O

O

O

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

145

that its apotheosis in the alienated nature of the great player constitutes a grotesque on the level of morality; and one would find this very suggestion bodied forth in the unforgettable protagonist of Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau, circa 1761. The Neveu is a virtuoso player, beyond a doubt. His single-handed mimicry of actors, prostitutes, singers, instrumentalists, entire opera companies, is wildly grotesque and uncannily vivid, all informed by an apparent absorptive furor. But the tacit restriction of sensible absorption to “the middle of society” is not for him. He throws himself with equal relish into highflown tragedy and into the most contemptible qualities of human nature, making it ultimately impossible to determine his moral locus, and hence his sincerity. Thus this may not be absorption at all—or it is absorption in the wrong thing: his interlocutor finally bursts out in desperation, “Is this irony or truthfulness?”—exactly the question we might pose to Boccherini in the second episode of the rondo of G. 17, when the first movement’s main idea makes its stilted, distorted, shocking reappearance. The trouble with admitting characters like Boccherini’s Dido-gargoyle or the Neveu de Rameau to one’s music-critical banquet is that in with them blows the wind of doubt. In spite of ourselves we begin to wonder, even in the heart of the most lucid sweetness: is this all it appears to be? Does the performer mean it? (Will she mean it five minutes from now?) And if we ask this about one of Boccherini’s most patently sensible practices, his extremely delicate shadings of soft dynamics, we get a distinctly unsettling answer. In my discussion of this feature of Boccherini’s music in chapter 3, I suggested that such intimate contextualities, fluctuating from moment to moment, are invitations to the performer to embody sensibilité, developing “that disposition linked to weak organs, the result of a mobile diaphragm, a lively imagination, delicate nerves, that is inclined to feel pity, to tremble, to admire, to fear, to become agitated, to weep, to faint.” To undo this assertion, full-fledged doubt is not even necessary, only careful scrutiny. Merely looked at a little more kinesthetically and a little less Rousseauistically, dolcissimo writing proves to embody a nearly complete disjuncture between executional and receptive experience. On stringed instruments, soft dynamics may give the velvety sound of sensible indolence, but producing them for extended stretches takes quite a bit of effort. Every gesture must be restrained at the source; momentum must be constantly inhibited. The player’s general muscle tone will be much more tense than it is when playing full-out—just as the singer’s production of the Rousseauvian melisma turns out to require careful placement and focus. There is no indolence here, no transparency, no naturalness. In fact, in contradistinction to the comfortable state of a “natural” style of playing (such as one would experience, say, in playing mezzo-forte, legato, in the alto range of the instrument), the experience of the physical production of soft dynamics closely

146

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

resembles that of certain unusual playing techniques—armonici, ponticello, col legno —of which Boccherini is likewise very fond, all of them involving a delicate backing-off, a distancing, a making-strange of the player’s habitual physical contact with his instrument. In the case of dolcissimo, the discomfort is not immediately audible to the listener. In the case of ponticello and its kin, it is. Executionally speaking, the heart of Boccherini’s sweetness turns out to be an alienated state. Thus does doubt blow in through the open door and chill our favorite delicacies. 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 ingratiating (this is the Boccherini, we imagine, of Mendelssohn’s “peruke”). He has marked it piano and con grazia (CD track 35). The piece is gratefully written, each part nicely placed upon its individual instrument and the voicing among the 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 which countless dancing masters and earnest pupils had been striving throughout the 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 to the bridge that the fundamental tone is eclipsed by its upper partials. It is difficult to maintain, if only because of all the countless hours spent, early on in the process of framing one’s body to playing the instrument, in learning not to do it. Boccherini seemingly dramatizes the physical rigidity required in executing ponticello by awkward, rapid scurrying gestures. We exit this after only a few bars, to begin a quintessential Boccherinian trajectory of descent, marked dolce —but it descends and pulls into itself too gladly and too far, the first violin line becoming increasingly infested by flats, and the supporting harmonies, as if wincing in protest, moving through three different diminished-seventh chords in as many bars (CD track 37). The whole phrase 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 conventional site of alterity; but it is so very strange, it separates the players from their accustomed ways with such subtle violence, that neither they nor we can recover in time; alienation manages to infect the sweet little minuet upon its return (CD track 38). We cannot help it: this second time, the marking con grazia now seems a bit much (is grace not sufficiently implied by the minuet type?), the repetitive gestures precious, the reiterated accents (fussily marked poco FP in the parts) annoying. We notice a self-consciousness we missed the first time around: why, for instance, does Boccherini give us a thirteen-bar period in the first half of the minuet (and end the second half with it as well), when he could very easily have kept it to a normative

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

147

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 of the trio.

the automatic and mechanical At the Burgtheater during the period of the Boccherini family’s visits to Vienna even those events that were most tragic (in Angiolini’s definition, as antipodal to grotesque), which is to say the opere serie staged in observation of Imperial ceremonies, were rife with showy special effects created by stage machines, whose dramatic function was to inspire a rather un-tragic amazement. Nor was the work of Angiolini, Gluck, and other reformers themselves ever as distinct from matters of spectacle as their theoretical writings, and their posthumous reputations, might lead us to believe. Witness Karl Ditters’s description of the bewitching stage sets for Metastasio and Gluck’s 1754 comedy Le cinesi: Quaglio’s decorations were quite in the Chinese taste, and transparent. Workers in lacquer, carpenters and gilders had lavished all their resources upon them, but their chief brilliancy depended on prismatic poles of glass, which had been polished by Bohemian craftsmen, and were carefully fitted into one another in empty places, previously soaked in coloured oils. No pen can describe the surpassing and astounding brilliancy of these prisms when lit up by innumerable lamps. The reader must imagine the reflected brilliancy of the azure-coloured meadows of lacquer, the glitter of the gilded foliage, and lastly the rainbow-like colours repeated by hundreds of prisms, and flashing like diamonds 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 confront Ditters with this question, we would likely be greeted by bafflement; such questions, and the gulf between art and craft that they presuppose, acquired a 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—were enthusiastically welcomed into eighteenth-century esthetics for their capacity to promote the sense of wonder, and for the confirmation they gave to the Enlightenment’s swelling sense of confidence in human knowledge and human attainment. Incredibly elaborate stage machines were nothing new; they had been a feature of theatrical entertainments since ancient Greek times. Automata, too, had been designed and built for centuries.46 These fusions of technology with artistic purpose were continually refined, and achieved a certain pinnacle during the eighteenth century in the work of Jacques Vaucanson

148

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

(1709–82), a Parisian builder of automata, who created real wonders—most famously, a flute player that played tunes with the correct embouchure and fingerings.47 The same fascination was evident in Spain. In 1755 Fernando VI undertook to have several automata built for him—a “gabinete armónico” containing musical statues, and an “árbol de Diana,” a mechanical tree complete with singing birds.48 These enchanting creations were an efflorescence into art of Newtonian mechanics, that newly minted view of the universe and human nature within it as one gigantic and splendidly regulated machine. Along with the grotesque, mechanism can be counted among anti-sensible currents of thought in the eighteenth century; but of the two it is mechanism that is likely to be the more difficult for us to comprehend. Some of us may be disturbed (as were a great many people in the eighteenth century) by its frank substitution of mechanical laws for an animating divine principle. More of us, perhaps, will encounter ahistorical difficulties, finding oppressive rather than liberatory the materialist presumption that all human actions and reactions can be reduced to logical and mechanical explanations. Our view is shaped both by Romantic (that is, post-sensible) notions of ineffable selfhood, and by our postindustrial mistrust of machines. While we may not go so far as to regard them as “the poisonous engines that have blighted the modern landscape and dehumanized modern relations,”49 neither are we entirely comfortable with the degree to which machines have intricated themselves into, and consequently shaped, the most intimate reaches of personhood and of art. Newtonianism informed not only the remarkable creations of Quaglio and Vaucanson, but, increasingly, many eighteenth-century understandings of the human body. On the level of medicine, it was a revolution, a decisive reframing of nearly every basic principle in the ancient humoric model. On the level of music-making, Newtonian understandings of embodiment manifested themselves in the development of newly methodical, efficient approaches to pedagogy; and metaphorically, as a new set of topoi concerned with images and experiences of this efficiency. In England and France, particularly, the late eighteenth century saw a huge increase in the production and publication of instructional treatises for every instrument. Here mechanical processes, not just of instruments but of the bodies operating them, were conceptualized and systematized; and here we find also a rebirth of ideals of individual bodily efficiency first explored in ancient Greece. Aristotle and his contemporaries make use of the linked concepts of enkrateia, or self-mastery, an explicitly master-servant relation of conscious self to bodily sensation; and askesis, the systematic self-training of sensation and reaction into virtue (whence the English word ascetic). As all these ancient Greek writers make clear by frequently employing horses or dogs as metaphors (or, in the case of Xenophon, by writing actual treatises on training these creatures), the conscious or master self employs askesis along exactly the same

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

149

lines as would the animal trainer, inculcating good habits through strategically administered punishments and rewards.50 In the belle danse of the first half of the eighteenth century, dancers had configured themselves toward carefully constructed generic ideals of beauty and “naturalness,” through which great effort was meticulously concealed. Newtonianism increasingly encouraged them to configure themselves toward an awareness of individual comfort, and a quite different naturalness, one based in the individual experience of ease and in the mechanical efficiency of movement. The London dancing master Giovanni Andrea Gallini articulated this shift toward an increasing personalization of movement style: “ Who does not know that almost every individual learner requires different instructions? The laying of a stress on some particular motion or air which may be proper to be recommended to one must be strictly forbidden to another.”51 The individual body, its unique conformation, its strengths and weaknesses, was the point of departure for this new pedagogy. Its radical individualism modified and to some extent broke down the old classifications of movement type and character; but it is important to remember that the ruling concept—that of there being bodily ideals at all—was by no means destroyed. In many ways mechanism served to reinforce it the more subtly and efficiently. Thus the dancing master, after studying his pupils’ anatomical peculiarities—their physical idiom, in a sense—was the better equipped to amend them toward the “perfections” they lacked, correcting their defects and reinforcing their advantages. The master should observe whether some are weak in the knees and the insteps or in one of these two said parts. For this he should use a remedy and make them do a long daily exercise practicing walking around the room only on the balls of their feet, keeping the knee and instep stretched without any bend whatsoever and, thus exercising for a few hours daily, the weak parts will be fortified.52

The sensations produced by walking around for “a few hours daily” at the extreme of tiptoe cannot be very far off those produced by some of the corrective measures of the old style of pedagogy, such as wearing a tight whalebone corset. The difference is one of the degree of active participation of the body involved. The mechanistic dancer takes it upon herself to reconfigure her body through strategic exercise; there is an implication that because such exercise is mechanically “correct” it will sooner or later come to feel “fortified”: comfortable, right. The dancer will not need to don it as she would 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 preexisting ideals. Nowhere was this ambivalence of purpose more thoroughly

150

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

demonstrated than in the training of soldiers’ bodies, as shown in this extract 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 for the soldier. The head must be erect, standing out from the shoulders, sitting perpendicularly between them. It must be turned neither to the left nor the right, because, in view of the correspondence between the vertebrae of the neck and the shoulder-blade to which they are attached, none of them may move in a circular manner without slightly bringing with it from the same side that it moves one of the shoulders and because, the body no longer being placed squarely, the soldier can no longer walk straight in front of him or serve as a point 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 reader to accept this model of embodied acculturation without deep moral queasiness. Michel Foucault uses the above example as part of his mountainously thorough exegesis of Enlightenment physical disciplines as systems for a strategically internalized coercion of the individual: the efficiently moving soldier, multiplied by thousands, far better serves the purposes of the State.54 Similarly, the mechanistically trained dancer represented the delights of social docility and obedience upon the stage with an ease that erased the degree of self-restraint and pain with which they had been achieved from the experience of the dancer herself. We cannot readily (or advisably!) forget Foucault’s characterization of this attentiveness as a new, unprecedentedly complete, implicitly malevolent level of surveillance. Yet I wish to bear in mind some of its other layers of meaning. The operative layer here is almost inaccessible to us now, yet we know it existed: the fundamental hopefulness of the Enlightenment. In this spirit, mechanistic embodiment was an expression of a belief that bodies—those most opaque, most universal manifestations of humanness—could finally be explained in all their marvelousness. Thus illness would be conquered; thus dancers and instrumentalists would be able to achieve perfect expressivity, merely by recourse to movements that felt right; thus the most cherished human communications would at long last become infallible. We may not be able to regain such hopefulness now but, at least for present purposes of understanding, neither do I wish to relinquish it. Instrumentalists’ regimes for the strengthening of weak body parts can be traced in the method books and collections of études that begin to appear in France, followed by England and other countries, around the middle of the eighteenth century. In the case of stringed-instrument methods, the degree of mechanical explicitness varies pretty widely. In the treatises of the 1740s and 1750s, little more is conveyed than the conventional num-

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

151

Example 17. Chord formations from Brunetti.

?

1˙ 1˙ 1˙

2 b˙ 1˙ 1˙

3 n˙ 1˙ 1˙

bering of the fingers and their correspondence to notated pitches; graduated exercises follow a basic principle of askesis: the development of physical learning through the adding-on of complexities. But as the century progressed musicians began to show a more refined consciousness of kinetic efficiency that recalls that of the dancing masters. I use as my exemplar here a manuscript cello method by Francisco Brunetti, produced in Madrid around 1800, in part because its author almost certainly knew Boccherini himself.55 Brunetti begins with scales, moving away from C major by gradually adding sharps and flats; each scale is accompanied by a short “warm-up,” a sort of proto-étude which focuses on areas of that key that may pose problems as to intonation or left-hand positioning. The warm-up for E b major, for instance, concentrates on the first-position backward extension of the first finger (necessary in this key on three of the 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 association with the familiar. Brunetti’s method resembles others of this period, Duport’s in particular, in being rich in double- and triple-stopped chords. By repeatedly framing the left hand over certain groups of simultaneously sounding pitches, chordal technique uses reiteration to shape it to a system—most fundamentally, to tonality. Although stringed instruments are built and tuned to make tonal formations accessible to the hand, they do not make them inevitable; the very simplest chord-framings, kinetically speaking, bear little direct relationship to tonality. For instance, an index finger across three strings will produce a non-tonal chord; to make something tonal of it, the adjacent finger must 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 extends and braces the hand ever so slightly (see example 17). One system’s “basic” is another’s “moderately artificial.” Beginning cellists spend some time learning first to articulate, then to associate the index and ring fingers, in order to 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. Repetition is 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 inform every repetition. This is the minutest, most incremental level of the Aristo-

152

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

telian, “bootstrap” terms for the acquisition of virtue, terms by which “habituation is not a mindless drill, but a cognitive shaping of desires through perception, belief, and intention. These capacities are involved in acting from character, 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 correct positioning of the left hand in terms of balance: “The thumb is a fulcrum and point of reference for the whole length of the fingerboard”;59 and like several other writers, he likens the action of the left-hand fingers to little hammers. Raoul’s graduated exercises for the bow are beyond exhaustive; he systematizes skills that would rarely, if ever, be used in playing the repertory of his day. To such an overtrained body, more ordinary difficulties will seem easy; and ease, or the appearance of it, is essential to art: “Taste is seldom compatible with difficult exertions.” Late in his long life, Jean-Louis Duport produced a magisterial treatise for advanced players, in which his explicit concern is to correct common bad habits; he does this by reference to a “unity of principles” in matters of technique, and especially in relation to the left hand. Here, mechanism is elevated to a status intrinsic to art. What is properly efficient will work for everyone. If one were to say that there are as many kinds of expression as there are players, I would reply that that is natural, each having to have his own, but for fingering, 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 the bridge 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 much the same fashion as Angiolini and Noverre use the term “aplomb,” to mean that 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 contemporaries do not discuss the mechanics of that quintessential Boccherinian technique, thumb-position. Brunetti’s treatise sketchily demonstrates one way to approach and establish this position: the hand moves up the neck (which is to say, “up” pitchwise although downward in space) and then the thumb drops silently onto the C–G bar-fifth behind the rest of the hand, where it remains for the rest of the exercise. For the scale’s descent, Brunetti dictates that the thumb should be kept in place while the fingers move across to the lower strings, rather than back down the neck. (This transverse “descent” is, incidentally, precisely the maneuver implied in the opening bars of Boccherini’s Sonata G. 17).

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

153

In 1804 a cello method was jointly produced by a team of string instructors—prominent among them Pierre Baillot, who has already appeared in these pages as a champion of Boccherini—at the newly established Conservatoire Impérial de Musique, one of several post-Revolutionary phases in the development of what finally became the Paris Conservatoire. In this treatise mechanical exigency comes full circle onto a dancer-like, visualized self-awareness. Once care has been taken to place the violoncello, the left hand and arm, the bow, the right hand and arm, in the manner prescribed in the preceding sections, one must hold the head and the body upright, avoiding anything in one’s attitude that could have the air of negligence or affectation. It cannot be recommended too strongly to students that they seek to take up a noble, easy attitude; there is a secret relationship between the sense of hearing and that of sight, [so that] if the latter is offended, if someone perceives something constrained or careless in the posture of the performer, that seems to contradict everything he might do with expression and grace, it makes those listening to him suffer, by rendering the more shocking the contrast he presents all at once between his playing and his attitude. Indeed, we would say that it is extremely rare and almost impossible to see a 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 mechanical principles are one thing; setting that trained, efficient body to work in order to produce a theatricalization of mechanism is quite another, although of course the two realms can intersect. Some really peerless examples of such intersection can be found in the solo keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, works dedicated to his patroness Queen María Bárbara de Braganza, and conceivably encountered by Boccherini during his early years in the orbit of the Spanish royal court. Sara Gross has interpreted Scarlatti’s penchant for a certain class of showy techniques—rapid, repeated hand-crossings, and very wide leaps across space in each hand—as instrumental-gestural dramatizations of the particular physicality of Spanish dance. She suggests that these were read by observers (or by their royal executant) as an invocation of that eighteenth-century idea of “Spanishness” that was more or less equated, by Spaniards and foreigners alike, with bodilyness: the proverbial “mutton” as opposed to “spaghetti.”63 Almost as striking to the observer as these aerial gestures, however, is the way the keyboardist’s eyes and attention must be so fiercely focused upon the keyboard. This focus, vital to pitch accuracy, makes it plain how tightly harnessed and controlled that bodilyness must be. Thus these sonatas make the body flamboyant and constrain it at the same time, pressing gesture into the service of a rapidity, profusion, energetic repetitiveness, and redundant precision so marked and exuberant as to constitute a kind of topos of mechanism—including, in its range of cheerfully frenetic affects, its prevailing hopefulness as a view of the world.64

154

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

Scarlattian mechanism, and the frequency with which he resorts to it, is an extreme. Such topoi are much more of a special effect in Boccherini’s chamber music, sunk as it so often is in the anti-mechanics of sentimental absorption, and played as it is upon stringed instruments, whose visible presentation of mechanism is quite a bit less obvious than the keys, levers, and plectra or hammers of a keyboard instrument. But as we have seen in the rondo 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 certain organic weaknesses—notably, that of the left thumb under sideways pressure—in order to achieve this mimicry; and it does all of this in order to perform a view of the world that differs crucially from Scarlatti’s uncomplicated 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 one imagines for oneself is not the heart one has.”65 In his “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” Diderot treated performative alienation with a fullness and provocativeness that has never been matched; his animadversions on the relations between inspiration and technique, sensibilité and virtuosity, and (by extension) self and performance continue to inspire discussion and debate to the present day. The “Paradoxe,” which had its genesis during the 1760s and was circulated through Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire in the 1770s,66 represents a turning-away from the thinking of the arch-sensible Diderot of the early “Salons.” Its thesis is that a great actor—or, to use the more evocative eighteenthcentury 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 is mediocre sensitivity that creates a multitude of bad actors; and it is an absolute 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 virtuosity demonstrated by professional players like Henri-Louis Lekain (1729–78), Claire-Joseph Léris (1723–1803), known as “La Clairon,” and above all the Englishman David Garrick (1717–79), who had visited Paris in 1764. These players were able to present passions vividly and believably; being professionals, they also did so dependably, night after night, and on command. Declaiming en haut voix for hours and for nights upon end presumed a sheer physical toughness which militated against the softness, indolence, and feeble organs of sensibilité.68 Such a physically situated susceptibility was clearly incompatible with the stringent physical requirements of professional playing. Diderot went on to assert that it is in fact incompatible with greatness in any walk of life: “The

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

155

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 consequently a sublime imitator of nature.”69 If players’ bodies were not particularly transparent or penetrable, their souls were entirely opaque. On one famous occasion Garrick performed a sequence of violently characterized emotions for a salon audience merely by removing his face behind a doorway for a few seconds between expressions, reappearing each time entirely and unnervingly transformed. A more quintessential presentation of the notion of the dramatic tableau would be hard to imagine. Diderot, ever the thinker-through to causes, could not square the facility of this demonstration with any notion of sensible transparency in the performer: “Has his soul been able to experience all these feelings and perform, together with his face, this kind of gamut? I don’t believe it at all, and neither do you.”70 Garrick’s was an extreme example of the representational versatility required of professional players, which troubled Diderot even in its more ordinary manifestations. “It would,” he tells us, “be a singular abuse of words to call this ability to render all natures, even ferocious ones, sensitivity.”71 He went on to develop the idea that this very ability meant that players have, in essence, no intrinsic identity: “They are suited to play them all [i.e., different personalities] because they have none.”72 This is not the blank slate of innocence, but a deliberately achieved state of abdication from identity, a removal or separation of self from action, a state of being in which the actors are “suspended between nature and their rough draft”73 in order to make the executional choices that will best delineate the character of the moment. This watchful, deliberative, alienated state at its most effective is characterized, Diderot tells us, by “sang-froid,” cold-bloodedness: the very inverse of sensibilité. A fine example of actorly sang-froid is to be found in the person of La Caramba, the tonadillera María Antonia Vallejo Fernández (1750–87). Although she was highly esteemed for her passionate, impulsive stage persona, she became quite another creature during the 1779 scandal involving Pablo Esteve, the librettist and composer with whom she worked most closely. Esteve had been insufficiently circumspect in some sarcastic dramatic references to his patronesses, the Duquesa de Alba and the Condesa-Duquesa de BenaventeOsuna. La Caramba, however, was very much implicated: she was, after all, the one who performed the sarcasm, and in whose body the overly personal references became readable. During the ensuing legal proceedings against Esteve, La Caramba was called before the authorities, but defended herself wisely by saying that she—poor little thing—did no more than sing the words they put before her, together with the music they also gave her, and that she had too

156

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

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

La Caramba escaped punishment. Esteve could (or would) invoke no such separation from his craft, and spent time in jail.75 In the late eighteenth century actors were what they had been for centuries—a class of people much mistrusted and maligned, and quite separate in status from the societies for which they performed; moral brinkmanship such as La Caramba’s would understandably reinforce their ostracism. (No less a figure than Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos [1744–1811], one of the literary and social architects of the Spanish Ilustración, nevertheless felt called upon to point out that it was precisely because they were held in social and economic contempt that actors tended to be the lowest sort of people, with very little education and no means of self-improvement.)76 And Diderot made it clear with painful honesty that the paradox is not only the actor’s burden, but that of any performer, and indeed of any person in society. Everyone, he reminds us, acts and manufactures feeling at least some of the time: “The sensitive man obeys the impulses of nature, and renders truthfully only the cry of his heart; the moment he moderates or forces that cry, he is not himself, but an actor playing a part.”77 And as with the player or man of society, so with the poet: “One says that one weeps, but one does not weep when one 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 one ceases 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 been exempt from this condition. I have been at pains to show that some eighteenth-century instrumental music-making referred much more constantly and explicitly to theatrical practice than subsequent criticism has been in the 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 expressible through it is very like the relationship of an instrumentalist to his instrument. Diderot makes use of the metaphor on multiple levels. His use of musical terminology (gamme, gamut or scale) to describe Garrick’s salon performance is telling: the Englishman played himself, his own body, like an instrument. When later on in the “Paradoxe” Diderot asserts that “a great actor is neither a pianoforte, nor a harp, nor a harpsichord, nor a violin, nor a cello,”79 he does so in order to make the point that the player is not identified with any one timbre, or role, or set of possibilities, but through his alienated competency is capable of them all: “He has no harmony which

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

157

is his own, but he takes on the harmony and the tone that are appropriate to 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 a role on the instrument of his body.”81 Yet he is not fully identified with that body. In the “Rêve de d’Alembert” of 1769, Diderot develops the idea of the nervous system as a “sensitive instrument,” a network of fibres which he also likens to a spider web, the player-spider a detached consciousness uttering itself through those fibres—and yet always already separate from them. This ambivalent state finds its perfect representation in the figure of the virtuoso instrumentalist, who conveys such astonishingly vivid emotions and images, which may or may not be his own; we cannot be sure; his gestures seem sometimes to signal him, yet in the next instant they are plainly without expressive significance; the physical presence of the instrument would seem to interfere with our capacity to identify with him, and yet it is the very instrument of his expression. His relation to it is separate yet not separate; to us, readable 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 precisely this quality of transparency, he too was an alienated and self-conscious creature. In Diderotic terms, he was inevitably so, simply by virtue of being acculturated. Inevitably also, his virtuosity made him emblematic of this divided state; but he is remarkable in the way he occasionally resists and ironizes sensible transparency through that same virtuosity. Another particularly evocative example of this resistance hides in plain sight, as it were, within the single most famous piece of music by Boccherini, the “Celebrated Minuet,” the third movement of the Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5, G. 275, written in 1771. Over a serenade-like plucked accompaniment, the personable charm of the tune is registrally embedded in and expressively veiled by the second violin part, which appears to be enacting a private little purgatory of mechanistic fixity and inexpressivity (see example 18). The second violinist simply has no time for galanterie; he must concentrate on keeping the constant stringcrossings reasonably even through the length of the bow. The balance between hand and arm muscles is slightly different for every inch of the bow from frog to tip and back again; but the notated figure changes not in the least to accommodate or acknowledge this. Thus a heard effect of understated, undifferentiated rigidity—a mechanical topos—is produced through an equally understated virtuosity of muscular subtlety and flexibility—a state of apparent physical “sensitivity,” itself achieved, as the composer knew very well, through years of rigorous, quasi-mechanical discipline. There is irony all over again (though this time it could not have been intended by Boccherini) in the fact that he presents this distancing maneuver to us in the very piece that was to become such a latter-day icon of ancien régime preciousness.

158

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

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

vn. 1

# # 3 œ œ œ œ œJ œ & # 4

vn. 2

## & # 43 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 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

vla.

# B # # 43 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

t

œ

œ œ œ œ J

œœœœ œ J œ t

œ

œ œ œ œ J

œ. œ

pizz.

vc. 1

B # # # 43 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 pizz.

vc. 2

? # # # 43 Œ

j j j j j j œ œ œ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ J ‰ J ‰ J ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ pizz.

œ. œ œ #œ œ œ œ. ## œ & # #œ œ œ

5

t œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

j 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 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ

œ

œ ‰ .. J

œ œ œ œ

œ

j . œ ‰ .

œ ‰ j ‰ œj ‰ œ œ J J

‰

j ‰ .. œ

# œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ B ##

œ

B ### œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

? # # # œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰

œ œ

œ

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

virtuosity, virtuality, virtue

159

tween composers, audiences, styles, nationalities, are only beginning to be mapped. And yet, for all the Enlightenment’s faith in knowability, this will never be 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 its classically simple structure and its countless appearances in film and advertising, grows a dense, delicate thicket of contradiction and ambivalence, enacted by the second violinist (whose “inessential” part is almost always omitted in transcriptions and adaptations). There, on stage, just to the left of the obvious, is the problem. The more attention we players pay to what or whom we perform, and the closer we listener-observers listen and look, the more entangled we become.

Chapter 5

A Melancholy Anatomy

In 1993, doctors at the University of Pisa honored the 250th anniversary of Boccherini’s birth in a rather unusual way. They exhumed his “quasimummified” corpse from the Chiesa di San Francesco in Lucca, where it had been since 1927, took it to Pisa, and there performed “a complete paleopathological examination” of it.1 Among the observations contained in the doctors’ official report is the following: “The soft tissue examination revealed severe aortic arteriosclerosis and pleural and nodal calcifications, confirming the biographical data of Boccherini’s death from tuberculosis.” A 1996 report on this event, from the local newspaper Il Tirreno, adds that Boccherini was about 1.65 meters tall, and of a rather delicate appearance. [The scientists] consider the more serious pathologies, besides cervical arthritis, to have been calcifications at the thoracic and pulmonary level, which confirm the diagnosis of tubercular pleurisy. “The condition of the teeth, nearly all fallen out, was extremely bad,” explained Professor Fornaciari, “a sign that the master neglected 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 millennia, it took the growth of the modern city and the unprecedentedly close press of the people within it to give the bacillus its full infective scope. David Barnes has estimated that in the early nineteenth century as much as 80 percent of the population in large urban centers like Paris was infected.2 The bacterial basis for this infection, and thus the basis for its effective prevention, was not discovered until 1882; a cure did not become available until 160

a melancholy anatomy

161

the discovery of penicillin in 1928, and even then antibiotics did not come into general use until the time of the Second World War. Explanatory structures were urgently needed for a disease so endemic and so deadly. In the late eighteenth century these structures bifurcated along the lines of social class. On the one hand, the high incidence of consumption in the poorest, most densely populated sectors of cities inspired an endless series of quarantines; these often strenuous official interventions in the movements and assemblies of common people inevitably took on a tone of political suppression. The masses had the potential to infect all of society with the dangerous fruits of their association; containment was imperative.3 On the other hand, consumption among the upper classes could be read as evidence (or cause) of a sensitive, artistic, refined nature, and as such implicitly desirable. This conflation was to continue into the nineteenth century and to find its apotheosis there, becoming a veritable cult of the tubercular, a cult which was “not simply an invention of Romantic poets and opera librettists but a wide-spread attitude.”4 In her essay on the metaphors bound up in illnesses, Susan Sontag positions tuberculosis (by which she means the upper-class version of the disease) as the disease of visibility: “TB makes the body transparent. . . . TB is understood to be, from early on, rich in visible symptoms (progressive emaciation, coughing, languidness, fever), and can be suddenly and dramatically revealed (the blood on the handkerchief ).”5 Like sensibilité, this disease seemed to unite inside and outside. Like sensibilité, it could be linked equally to weak, shrinking delicacy or insupportable excitement, pale invalidism or the hectic bloom on the cheeks. And like sensibilité, in the labile variability of its symptoms it made an excellent theater for the endlessly compelling idea that a person had a public outside and a private inside, which might or might not coincide.6 But consumption lent Diderot’s paradox an urgency that ultimately exceeded anything to do with sensibilité, for the condition was organic, not behavioral. It killed the very people it seemed to explain, and it did so with perfect opacity: nobody really knew why. As such this disease marks the boundary—porous, negotiable, arguable, but boundary nonetheless— between the bodily realms of visible and invisible, culturally malleable and biologically mandated. This consumptive man, the Boccherini of the body, regularly presented and irregularly resisted sensibilité through the body of his works. What I wish to pursue here are the ways in which Boccherini encouraged his audience to read his (or their own) consumption through this sensible window, thus invoking a very particularly inflected and infected embodiment. If we regard consumption, eighteenth-century style, as a deranged terminus of sensibilité, then we will find it summoned above all in musical representations of melancholy, which is something Boccherini’s peers frequently heard and described in his music. This maze of metaphorical associations is itself a kind

162

a melancholy anatomy

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

musical melancholies In ancient and early modern medical writings, music is most generally considered apposite to melancholy, a cure for it rather than a participant in it. Music’s cheering, rousing qualities are routinely praised, and all the familiar old anecdotes—Orpheus, Amphion, Timotheus—trotted out in support. A famous example of this use of music took place in Spain in 1737. Melancholy was something of a hereditary problem among the Borbón royalty. Their passion for hunting, and for the frequent changes of habitation that that passion required, seems to have been one version of that “continual business . . . [to] distract their cogitations” of which Robert Burton speaks, a standard prescription for cure.7 One might be tempted to ascribe a similar distracting function to the hyperactivity of some of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas; less speculatively, the circumstances attending the arrival of Farinelli at the Spanish court are a documented case of the use of music precisely for its 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 be shaved, and rendered him incapable of attending council or transacting affairs of state, the Queen . . . determined that an experiment should be made of the effects of Music upon the King her husband, who was extremely sensible to its charms. Upon the arrival of Farinelli . . . Her Majesty contrived that there should be a concert in a room adjoining to the King’s apartment, in which this singer performed one of his most captivating songs. Philip appeared at first surprised, then moved; and at the end of the second air, made the virtuoso enter the royal apartment, loading him with compliments and caresses; asked him how he could reward such talents; assuring him that he could refuse him nothing. Farinelli, previously instructed, only begged that His Majesty would permit his attendants to shave and dress him, and that he would endeavour to appear in council as usual. From this time the King’s disease gave way to medicine; and the singer had all the honor of the cure.8

Queen and musician-servant were engaged in a perfectly pragmatic musical medicine for the king’s condition; that it was effective is indicated by the enormous privilege that Farinelli subsequently enjoyed. As Burney puts it, “By singing to His Majesty every evening, [Farinelli’s] favour increased to such a degree that he was regarded as first minister.” Rarely do period writers acknowledge that music might have a more ambiguous relationship to melancholy. In one place only in his great 1621 compendium The Anatomy of Melancholy does Robert Burton suggest this: “As [music] is acceptable and conducing to most, so especially to a melancholy

a melancholy anatomy

163

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

boccherinian melancholy At first pass, the idea of Boccherini’s music as melancholy would seem to have been a posthumous development, for the word itself first appears only among his early nineteenth-century critics. Baillot (1804): If all five instruments are made to speak at the same time, it is with 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 being aware of it. Schaul (1809): But what a difference between a Mozart and a Boccherini! The former leads us between jagged rocks in a thorny forest . . . the latter, in contrast, into a smiling country, graced with blooming pastures, clear, flowing brooks, thick groves, wherein the spirit gives itself up with pleasure to sweet melancholy. Carpani (1808): The style of the Luccan master retained something of the ecclesiastic 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 inexpressible charm through their naivety.10

These critics’ idea of melancholy is tied to innocence, to an untrammeled heart, and to the Gessnerian vein of pastoral nostalgia. This is what I might call a species of proto-melancholy. It is a state of absorption, but not consumption; 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 and carrying on, feeling much the better for his spate of involuntary tears. The graver kind of melancholy, the kind that enfolds consumption, is never named by Boccherini’s critics, but it is strongly implied by them through several different metaphorical channels. Somberness, darkness, gloom, all central melancholic qualities, are repeatedly referenced, even in the earliest critical writings. Thus the Parisian pamphleteer Boyé in 1779: “The quartets of Boccherini have something, I know not what, of somberness which makes them comparable to the Nights of Young.”11 This is a reference to Night Thoughts, a work by the English poet Edward Young. Now nearly forgotten, it was first published in 1741, and went through innumerable editions in English and in French in the course of the ensuing hundred years.12 Night Thoughts consists of nine long poems, really homilies in poem form, ostensibly written during nine sleepless nights; they ruminate,

Figure 10. Anon., Night the Third: Narcissa, engraving to illustrate Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, German translation of 1767. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Photo copyright UCLA Photo Services.

a melancholy anatomy

165

apostrophize, and agonize upon death and the fear of death, through topics like “Life, Death, and Immortality,” “Time, Death, and Friendship,” “The Relapse,” “Consolation” (see figure 10). The tone of the work is somber, as Boyé avers, but also sentimental, fretful, devout, and terribly introverted, a dose of sensible, consumptive melancholy concentrated to the point of nearindigestibility 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 dreams Tumultuous; 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 forth Her 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 pulse Of 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 of Boccherini’s quartets. We might suggest that it is just somberness, darkness, and gloom, and leave it at that; or more theatrically (and less wisely) pursue a detailed mimetic correspondence. The opening lines of the poem, with their imagery of a reluctant awakening, find an answer in the main idea of the first movement of the Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171 (see example 19; CD track 39). The lower parts murmur disconsolately, “a sea of dreams / Tumultuous,” and from them awakens the first violin line, whose melody after an abrupt arousal is nothing but tired and tiresome little sighs, over and over again: whether the dreamer’s “ wreck’d desponding thought” descending “From wave to wave of fancied misery,” or the waking mind’s obsessive grief matters little, “ ’tis only change of pain.” A similar quality of hopelessness attends most of the ensuing passages. Where the movement is forceful, it is rigidly, insistently, and futilely so (as in bar 5, or bars 14 and 15), while the second theme (bars 8–11) bears a deadly resemblance to the

166

a melancholy anatomy

first, consisting of an emphatic gesture that turns almost immediately into a long string of sighs. The closing theme, beginning with the pickup to bar 16, is frozen into near- immobility, a disquieting echo of those “dreams [that] infest the grave” suggested by the peculiar, hollow voicing of the rinforzando chords on the third beats of bars 16 and 17. In the second part of the movement the misery intensifies: in bars 33–38, the harmony spirals helplessly toward the flat side of the spectrum, the dominant of F minor resolving to that of B b minor, and this in turn resolving to that of E b minor (CD track 40). E b minor is a truly outré key area, rarely used even in passing; a period description describes it as “mocking God and the world; discontented with itself and with everything; preparation for suicide sounds in this key.”14 This descent from wave to wave of misery both fancied and executional—E b minor being “little practiced on account of its great difficulty in performance”15—

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

F.

b j &bb c œ

j œ

j œ œ œ œ œ œ

j œ

j œ

m. P.

vla.

B b b b c œJ

j œ

œ œ œ œ œj œ œ J

‰

? b b c œJ b

nœ œ œ œ œ œ

œ ‰ J

R. do

Ó œ

œ

F.

œ œ nœ bœ œ

œ œ

œ

P.

œ

œ

œ

? bb n œ b

œ

œ

œ

F.

‰ Jœ

Œ

œ œÆ Æ Æ Æ Æ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœœœœ j j j œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ j ‰ nœ œ œ œ

B b bb œ j œ

Ó

Æ Æ

b j & b b œœ

œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ

P.

3

b &bb

‰

P.

R.do

vc.

œœœ

Æ

vn. 2

œ œÆ Æ Æ Æ Æ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œn œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ

Ó

Æ Æ

vn. 1

Æ

Allegro

b &bb c ‰

œ œ J

j œ

œ

œ

‰ ‰

œ J

• œ P.

œ nœ bœ

œ

œ

œ œ

Example 19. (continued) 5

b bœ &bb œœ œ œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ F. œ n œ nœ œ œ œ F. F. P. P. bb ≈ r b j‰ ≈ r j ‰ ≈ r & œ nœ. nœ œ œ œ œ . œœœ œ n œ. nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ F. F.

F.

B b bb ≈ œ n œ . œ œ œ ‰ ≈ œ œjœ . œ œ œ ‰ J J R R m F. œ nœ œ œ ? b J ‰ ‰ J J ‰ ‰ J bb

P.

≈ œ nœ . œ œ œ ‰ J R Ÿ œ J ‰ œ œ œ œ j œ

≈œœœœ œ œ

P.

œ œ

œ œ

F. 7

b &bb œ b &bb

bœ œ# œ œ œ

‰ œjœ . œ œ R.m œœ b œ œ œ .

œœœ œ œœ œœ r ≈R ≈ R œ ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ R œœœ R. P.

‰ œjœ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœœœ œ œ R. P. Ÿ œ bœ œ œ œ j œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ . œœ b œ B b bb n œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ P. R. j j j ? b œ œ œ œ b b œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœ ÆÆ

Æ

Æ

P.

R.

œœœ

10

b & b b œ œœ œ œ œ œ

œ.

Æ

b & b b œ œœœ œ œ œ R. œ j B b bb œ œ œ œ œ

R.

˙ œ

˙ œ

œ

œ

œ

j œ

˙!

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œœœœ

œ

œ

œœœœ

œ

œ

œ

P.

R.

? b b œjœ b

P.

P.

œ œ r ≈ R œ ≈ œR œ œ ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ b œ R

œ œ œ œ

œ. P.

œ

(continued)

167

Example 19. (continued) 12

b œ œ œ & b b nœ œ œ œ nœ œ nœ œ œ œ œ bœ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ nœ œ œ

Æ Æ

R.

œ œœœœœ œœœ œœœœœœœ œ œœœœœ œœœ œœœœœœœ Æ Æ

&

b bb

œ bœ

B b bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ j ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœ œœœ œœœœœ

F.

P.

œœœ j œ

Æ Æ

b & b b œjœ

F.

P.

œ Æ œ œ œ œœ œ œ P.

œ Æ Æ œ œ œ œœ œ œ Æ Æ

F.

F.

j

P.

B b bb

F.

P.

j œ œ œœ

œ œœœ j

Æ œ Æ œ œ œ œœ œ œ

F.

F.

P.

œœ œ j œ

Æ Æ

œ œœœ

‰ œJ œ

F.

P.

P.

j œ

F.

P.

∑

? b œ bb J

‰

F.

F.

œ J

~~~~~~~~~~~~ b & b b œ œ .œ œ œ œ

œ. œ D.

∑ œ

‰

œ. œ

œœœÆ œÆ œ œ œœ

œœœ Æ Æ

b j & b b œœ

‰ œJ œ

Æ Æ

14

‰ œJ œ

‰

Æ Æ

? b bb œ œ œ

œ

œ J

œ J

‰

œ J

‰

‰

œ

œ

œ J

‰

16

P.

b j &bb œ œ

R.

P.

j œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ .œ œ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~ R. j œœœœ œ œ

j œ œ

R.

B bb b ˙

R.

˙

˙

˙

œ

R.

P.

œœœœ œ œœœ œ œ

œ

P.

j œœœœ œ œ

j œ œœœœœœœœ

P.

˙

œ

œ

œ.

j nœ

˙

œ

œ.

j nœ

R.

œ

P.

P.

? bb œ b

œ

œ

168

Example 19. (continued) 19

b & b b œ. &

b bb

j œ œj ‰ Ÿ

j œŸ

‰

œ. œ œ

j œ œ R.

P.

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œœ œ œj ‰

? bb

œ

œ

œ

œ

P.

œœœœ P.

˙

˙ œ

‰

œœœœ

œ R.

j œ. œ œ œ

B b bb œ

œ

œ

P.

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ R.

b œ

œ. œ œ

˙

œ

R.

21

b & b b œ œ . œœ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ R.

bb

j & b œ œ

œœœœ œ œ œ œ œ P.

j œ œ

j œœœœ œ œ

R.

B b bb ˙ ? bb œ b

œ

P.

23

b & b b œ. b &bb R.

F.

j œ œœœœœœœœ

P.

˙

œ

œ

œ.

j nœ

˙

œ

œ.

j nœ

R.

P.

œ

m œ j œ œ œ. œ œ F. j œ ‰ œ œ j œ

œ

œ

œ œ. œ œ œ œ. œ œ . œ œjœ . œ œjœ . œ œœ œ . œ œ j j œ œ ‰ œ ‰ j j ‰ j œ œ œ. œ. œ œœ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

B b bb œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œ . œ œ œ

œ

? bb œ œ œ œ œ b œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ. œ œ

œ

œ œœ

œ œœ

œ. œ

F.

œ œœ

œ

œ

F.

(continued)

169

Example 19. (continued) 25

b &bb

œ

b œ &bb B b bb œ ? bb

œ . œ œjœ . œ œjœ . œ œ

œ œ

œ . œ œj œ . œ œjœ . œ œ œ

œ

œ

.. .. œJ

œ

œ œ

œ

.. .. œJ œ

œ

œ

29

b &bb

‰

œ

œ

œ

j œ œ

‰

bœ

œ

œ

.. .. œ J

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œœ

P.

‰

œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ nœ

œ

œ

˙

Æ Æ œ œ œ œ œ œÆ œ œ ‰

Ó

œ œ œ œ œjœ œ J

‰

œ œ œ œ œjœ œ J

œ J

j œ

œ

R.

j œ

œ

R.do

œ

˙

œ œnœ œ œnœ œ œ

œ œ

œ

œ œ œ bœ

P.

j œ œ nœ

P.

B b bb n œ b œ

œ œ œ œ œjœ œ J P.

œ œ œÆ œÆ œ n œ œÆ b œÆ œ Æ Æ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ

b &bb ‰

‰

j œ

Æ Æ

? bb œ b

œ

P.

B b bb œj

œ œ œ œ œjœ œ J

j œ

R.

Æ Æ b œ Æ Æ & b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ

Æ œ b œ œ œ œÆ œÆ

F.

27

b &bb œ

‰ œœ

Ó

R.

œ

œ

b œ

œ

.. .. ‰

œ œ

œ œœœœœœœœœœœœœœ œ ˙

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

D.

? bb n œ b œ b

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

170

œ

œ

œ

œ

Example 19. (continued)

b n œ œ œn œ œ œ œ b œ œ b œ œj b œ & b b œ bœ œ œ

nœ œ

31

œ œ œ œjœ n œ œ œ œjœ .

b & b b œ œ œœœœœœœœœœœ œœœ j œ bœ B bb b ˙ ? bb

œ œ œ œ

b œ

œ

F.

j œœ œ œ

œ J

œ nœ œ

œ

œ bœ

nœ

œ

œ nœ œ

œ œ bœ

nœ

œ œ œ œ

Œ

Æ Æ Æ Æ Æ Æ b œ œ n œÆ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œÆ œ n œ œÆ œ œ œ n œÆ œ œ œ œÆ œ œ œ œ œÆ œ œ œ b œ &bb 33

b &bb œ

œ

B bb b ‰

œ

œ nœ

b & b b bœ

bœ J

nœ nœ J

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

? bb ˙ b ˙ 35

œ.

œ œ nœ

œ.

œ

œ

‰

œ

œ

˙ ˙

bœ J

bœ

P.

œ nœ

Æ Æ nœ œ

œ.

œ nœ J

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ nœ

œ.

nœ œ F.

Æ Æ Æ Æ Æ Æ Æ Æ b & b b œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Æ œ œ n œÆ œÆ œ œ œÆ b œ œ œ œÆ œÆ œ œ œÆ b œÆ

B bb b ‰

‰

? bb

b ˙

œ

j œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

˙

œ

j œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ (continued)

171

Example 19. (continued)

Æ b œ œ œÆ œÆ œ œ œÆ b œ œ œ œÆ œÆ œ œ œÆ œÆ &bb

œ œ œÆ œÆ œ œ œÆ b œÆ œ œ œÆ œÆ œ œ n œÆ œÆ

37

b & b b bœ œ œ nœ B b bb ‰ œ ? bb

œ.

j bœ

j œ œ œ œ

b ˙

‰ œ

œ œ œ œ

j œ

œ.

bœ œ œ nœ

j œ œ œ œ

‰

œ œ œ

œ

˙

Æ Æ Æ œÆ œ œ œÆ œÆ œ Æ œÆ œ œ Æ œÆ œ œ œÆ œÆ œ œ œÆ œÆ b œœ nœ œ m & b b œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ n œ n œœ 39

&

b bb

bœ

B b bb ‰ ? b bb ˙

œ œ #œ œ

œ.

F.

j nœ

œ

œ œ œ #œ

j nœ nœ œ œ

j nœ nœ œ œ œ œ œœ m F.

‰ œ

œ œ œ œ

F.

œœ m nœ nœ œ

˙

œ

œ œ

41

œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ.œ œ q P. ‰

œ J

‰

‰

nœ ‰ J

œ

172

œ

j œ œ œ œ œ œ

D.

œ nœ œ œ œ œ J P.

Æ

j ‰ œ

œ œ

Æ Æ

b & b b œ œ œœ œ œ œ F. n œ n œœ P.œ œ œ œ F.œn œn œœ P. bb j ‰ ≈ r b j‰ ≈r & œ n œ n œœ œ œ œ œ œœ F. m B b b b œ ‰ ≈ œn œ œ œ œ ‰ ≈œ œ œœ J J R R F. m F. m nœ œ ? b b ‰ n œJ œ J ‰ b

‰

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ

œ

Example 19. (continued) 43

b &bb œ &

b bb

œ #œ

œ

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ

œ

F.

œ œ œ œ œjœ œ J

‰

nœ œ œ œ œ œ

œ ‰ J

j œ

Æ Æ Æ

j œ œ ‰ J œ œ

œ œ

j œ

R.

œ œ ‰ Jœ

œ œ

j œ œ œ œ œjœ œ

j œ

R.do

œ b œ

œœ Æ Æ ‰ œœœœ œ œ

Ó

‰ œj

œ œ

B b bb n œ œ œ œ œ ? bb

Œ

R.

Æ Æ b & b b œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ ‰

P.

œ œ œœ ‰ œœœœ

45

Æ Æ

œ

œ

œ nœ œ œ œ œ

B b bb Ó ? bb

b

œ

Æ

b &bb œ

Œ œ nœ bœ

‰

œ

œ

œ œ œœ œœ œ

b & b b œj œ

j œ œj œ

B bb b ‰

Æ œ

B bb b œJ

œ

œ

œ

œ

j œ

œ J

j œ

œ

œ

nœ

œ

œ

‰

œ J

œ J

Æœ œ

œ

œ

œ

j œ

œ

œ

j œ

œ

œ

j œ P.

œ œ J

œ J

œB œ . œ œ

œ

R.

œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ

œ

j œ œ

œ

œ

R.

R.

b bœ & b b nœ œ 47

Ó

j œ

j œ œ

œ

‰

œ J

œ J

Æœ œ

œ œ œ œ œœœœ j œ ‰ œ

œ. œ

n œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

‰

œ

‰

œ

‰

œœ

œ J

œœ œ

?œ

(continued)

173

Example 19. (continued)

F.

F.

P.

œ

œ œ œœ

F.

P.

Æ Æ

B b bb

œ œ œ œ œœœ œ

j

Æ Æ

j œ

P.

F.

P.

j œ œ œœ

F.

œ œœœ

œ fi œ œ œ œœ œ œ

P.

P.

j

F.

P.

F.

R.

j œ ‰

œ. œ

P.

∑

? b b œj ‰ b

œœ

P.

œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ

j j œ œ œF.œ œ œ œ œ

Æ Æ

j

Æ Æ

&

b bb

œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ

œ œ œœ

Æ Æ

b & b b œjœ

Æ Æ

49

∑ œ

j œ ‰

œ œ

j œ ‰

œ

œ

œ

P. 51

b & b b œ œ . œœ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~ R. bb

& b œj œ

j œ œ R.

B b bb ˙

œ œ œ œ œ œ . œœ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~ R. P.

P.

j œœœœ œ œ

j œ œ

P.

R.

j œœœœ œ œ

˙

˙

˙

œ

R.

P.

œ

œ œœ œ œ œ.œ œ œ œ F.

j œ œœœœœœœœ

P.

P.

˙

œ

œ

œ.

j œ

˙

œ

œ.

j œ

R.

œ

P.

P.

? bb œ b 54

&

b bb

œ

m j j œœ œ

P.

œ.

œ ‰

F.

b bb

œ œ œ œ œnœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . . B b bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J &

? bb

b œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ. œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ R.

P.

R.

˙

˙

P.

œ

ΠP.

174

P.

j œ œ

j œ. œ œ œ ‰

œœœœ

œ

˙ R.

œœœœ

Example 19. (continued) 56

b & b b œ œ. œ œ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ R. b j & b b œj œ œ œ

œœœœ œ P.

P.

B bb b ˙ b œ

58

b & b b œ. b &bb

˙

œ.

˙

œ

R.

P.

œ

P.

t

j œ œ œœ

j œ

F.

R.

œ

œ

œ

œ F.

? bb 60

b œ

b &bb

œ. œ

j ‰ œ œ œ œnœ œ œ œ œ

B bb b œ

œ

b œ &bb

œ

œ

œ

œ œ. œ œ

j œ ‰ œ F. œ

œ œ œœ

œ œ œœ

œ œ

F.

œ

? bb œ b œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ

..

œ

œ

œœ

œœ

..

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

..

175

j œ

œ.

j œ

œ œ . œ œjœ . œ œjœ . œ œœ œ . œ œ . œ œ j ‰ œ ‰ œ œ . œ œjœ . œ œjœ . n œ œj œ

..

œ . œ œjœ . œ œjœ . n œ œ

j œ œ. œ

œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ. œœ œ. œ œ

œ. œ œjœ . œ œjœ . œ œ

B bb b œ

œ

j œ œœœœœœœœ

j œœœœ œ œ

R.

? bb

œ. œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œœ

F.

œ. œ œ œ. œ œ œ œœ

176

a melancholy anatomy

has at least been logical, moving by fifths; but with the next chord change the helm of harmonic reason is entirely lost: the dominant of E b minor “resolves” 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 shift heralds 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, regained in bars 44–45, is scarcely a comfortable or rewarding place to return to (CD track 42). The lower voices of the quartet return to their “disturb’d repose” and the first violin resumes its litany of sighs. The whole concept of reprise in such a context takes on a dire quality, a helpless return to the main thread of an obsession. And yet regardless of the vividness with which he can evoke an obsession that seems veritably to consume itself, and regardless of how he allows morbid doubts to infect the conventional associations of form thereby, Boccherini frames these dark excursions, “quarantining” them in those formal situations where excess and alterity are most securely contained: in the modulating 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 quartets opp. 8 and 9 are especially rich in queer, obsessive trios, very often in flat keys, very often fixated upon a single idea to the exclusion of anything else. Op. 8, no. 5, contains a remarkable representation of melancholic excess (see example 20). It comes on gently enough: the first period’s successive imitations of a two-bar figure at the unison or octave seem merely a bit unimaginative (CD track 43). But the second period introduces a new point of imitation: it is an unexpected tonic minor, and this time only three beats long. It gasps and circles at the unison, and has plainly crossed the line from failure of imagination into obsession (CD track 44). Having crossed that invisible line, this trio cannot contain its own imploding bent within normal binary structure, and spawns its own trio-within-a-trio, an embedded section in the very unusual key of D b major. Here the violin lines swirl and cross one another scalewise, ever-subsiding downward, futile and with a slightly furtive affect—the result of the walking on technical eggshells entailed in playing in this key (CD track 45). The unusual, inward-spiraling construction of this piece recalls the 1776 Boccherini criticism of Carl Junker (1748–97), a Swiss critic of music and art. Unlike his French colleagues, Junker disliked Boccherini’s dark qualities; and he disliked them in a particular way. Boccherini is really not the man I listen to for long with heart’s delight, whose thread (when he even has one) I can follow tirelessly; whose product (on the whole) can excite sensory pleasure in me; really not my man, because to me he is too shadowed, too dark, too morose. Be it now a decision to be labyrinthine, in order to achieve merit through

Example 20. String Quartet in F Major, op. 8, no. 5, G. 169, iii (Tempo di minuetto), trio. Tempo di minuetto (Trio) vn. 1

b & b 43 œ . œ

37

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. œ ∑ Œ Œ

Dolce

vn. 2

vla.

b & b 43 Œ

Dol.

B bb 43 Œ

∑

∑

Dol. vc.

? bb 43 Œ

∑

∑ ˙.

41

b &b œ œ œ

∑

˙.

œ Œ

b & b œ. œ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ ;mœ œ œ B bb œ . œ œ œ ;œ œ œ œ . œ œ . œ œ œ œ Œ ? b b

Œ

∑

Œ

b .nœ ˙ & b œ bœ œ 46

b &b œ

œ

œ

œ

œ. œ œ. œœœ œ Œ p nœ

b œ bœ œ. œ œ œ

b œ œ . nœ ˙

nœ

∑ œ

.. œ . b œ

œ œ

.. Œ

Œ Œ œ . bœ p

.. Œ

∑

.. Œ

∑

œ

œ bœ œ. nœ

bœ bœ œ. œ œ

œ

œ

œ nœ bœ bœ œ. œ B bb Œ Œ œ . b œ n œ b œ œ b œ œ.n œ ˙ p œ nœ ? bb œ bœ œ.nœ ˙ Œ Œ B œ. b œ n œ œ ∑ p (continued)

177

Example 20. (continued) 51

&b

b ˙

œ œ œ œœ .. b bb bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœ œ

˙

nœ

b Œ .. b bb bb Œ & b œ bœ œ œ bœ œ B bb n œ œ œ œ œ ˙

P mo.

œ œœœœ œœœœœœ œ œ œ œœ œœ

P mo.

.. b bb b Πb

B bb b œ b œ œ œ œ n œ œ

? ..

b bb bb Œ

∑

∑

˙.

∑

˙.

˙.

Pmo.

b & b b bb b & b b bb

t œœœœœ œœœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ t œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

B b bb bb

Æ Æ Æ

56

∑

∑

? bb b b b ˙.

˙.

œ œ œ

.. .. Œ

˙

Œ

˙

.. .. Œ

œ

œ œ

˙

.. .. Œ

p œ Œ Œ

.. .. œ œ

œ œ œ. œ œ œ. ; . œ b œ nœ œ nœ œ œ œ œ. œ & b bb b œ œ œ n œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ 61

b & b bb b ˙ p

œ

B bb bb b ˙ . p ? bb b b b nœ p

œ

œ

˙

Œ

Œ

bœ

nœ

˙

Œ

˙

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ Œ

œ

œ bœ

œ

œ

nœ

œ

178

œ

Œ

Example 20. (continued)

œ

65

b & b b bb n œ œ

œ bœ œ . nœ ˙ œ

b & b b bb Œ Œ œ . œ n œ œ B b bb bb

∑

œ

b . nœ ˙ & b bb b œ b œ œ 71

nœ

˙

œ

œ œ œ

Dol.

B bb bb b b œ b œ œ . œ n œ œ œ œ œ ˙

.. n n n b b Œ

nœ

œ œ œ. nœ

.. n n n b b œ . œ œ . .. n n n b b Œ

nœ

bœ œ œ . œ

œ œ œ. nœ ˙

œ œ nœ œ œ ˙

B bb bb b ˙

nœ

Œ Œ B œ. œ nœ œ p

∑

œ b & b bb b n œ œ

Æ bœ bœ œ. œ nœ œ œ

œ œ œ. nœ ˙

Œ Œ œ.bœ nœ œ

∑

? bb b bb

nœ

∑ ˙. p

bœ bœ œ œ œ œ ? . n b Œ œ . n nb

∑

75

b & b :œ œ œ

œ. œ œ.

b &b Œ

Œ

œ. œ œ.

B bb œ

œ

? b b

p

œ ∑

˙.

j œ œ œ :œ œ ˙

œ œ

œ œ œ :œ œ œ œ. œ œ. œ œ Œ œ. œ. ∑

∑

œ

˙.

j œ œ œ :œ œ ˙ œ œ œ ;œ œ œ œ . œ ∑

Œ

Œ

œ. œ

(continued)

179

Example 20. (continued) 80

&b

b ˙.

œ

b &b œ œ

œ

œ. œ œ.

˙

Œ œ. œ œ. p

œ œ œ

œ œ œ ;œ œ œ œ . œ œ .

œ œ œ

∑

Œ Œ

B bb œ .

œ œ œ œ œ ˙

? bb œ .

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ.

œ œ

Œ

˙.

˙.

œ

œ œ œ :œ œ ˙

œ

œ

œ

Æ œÆ œ œ œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ;œ œ œ ;˙ œ œ œ œ œ œ œÆ œ œ œœœ œ p R. Æ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ;œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ b œ œ & :œ œœ œ œ œœœ œœ 3 œ œ œÆ F. 3 p 3 R. œ œ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ Œ B bb Œ Œ Œ ∑ p œœœœœ œ œ œ ? bb œ œ œ ∑ œ œ œ 85

Æ

Æ

b & b :œ

Æ

Æ

Æ b œÆ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ & œ

Œ

b œÆ &b œœœœœœœ œ œ 3

Œ

91

Æ

? bb

Æ

B bb

Æ

3

∑ ∑

p p

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 Smorz.

180

D.C. il M.

nb

T

nb

T

œ

œ

˙

nb

T

œ

œ

˙

nb

T

a melancholy anatomy

181

novelty . . . be it too much inclination toward his own favorite instrument, or irresistible natural impulse; how often he sacrifices all to art there! It is true that development is pleasing to the searching spirit, and therefore also its complicated course, a decline into the dark minor mode; but you really must not tangle things up unnecessarily; a knot should be nothing but contrast, and its untying, gradual transition. If the composer needlessly entangles himself in difficulties, he torments the ear without gratifying the heart, and he interrupts the course of the sentiments’ story. The connoisseur may decide how often this happens with Boccherini.16

In addition to the obligatory darkness and gloominess, Junker makes reference to the labyrinth, long a pictorial emblem of the melancholic’s tortured and tortuous redoublings of mind. This is a topos to which the temporal nature of music, and the ineluctably consequent nature of tonal music in particular, is well suited, and Boccherini was in good company in using it. Elaine Sisman has shown how in C. P. E. Bach’s 1781 rondo Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere (“Farewell to My Silbermann Clavier”) a winding trail of harmonies, a “descent within,” is accomplished through diminished-seventh-chord modulations and enharmonic progressions, wandering so far from the original key area that one begins to doubt the possibility of return (a “feeling that no Ariadne’s thread is to be found”).17 The skill and subtlety of Bach’s harmonic emergence from this labyrinth of regret 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 in which Boccherini extracts himself from his own flat-infested harmonic labyrinth in the trio of op. 8, no. 5. Having carefully retraced his steps from the nearly dissolved state of D b major, through B b minor and B b major (and their former points of imitation), in the last few bars before the da capo he introduces a rising-triplet cadential figure, taken from the minuet itself, a cheerful, 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 Boccherini/Junker calls forth not only the standard-issue melancholic “somberness, darkness, gloom” but a good many refinements upon it: death and the fear of death; fretfulness and extreme introversion; devotion; tiredness and tiresomeness; 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 and sorrow; futility—the catalog is endless, for endings are themselves anti-melancholic. These qualities are none of them peculiar to Boccherini; but his ability as a composer to combine them into nuanced “descriptions” of the melancholic condition might have been the envy of many a doctor. We may use his music quite as freely as any period medical text for a catalog of melancholic

182

a melancholy anatomy

symptoms. One of the finest fascinations of eighteenth-century studies is the way that music and critical discourse about music are sometimes the bearers of vital information and theory about very basic operations of human experience. Thus can the historian of eighteenth-century music happily dabble in realms of physiology and psychology now considered distant indeed from her rightful bailiwick.

from galen to descartes The eighteenth-century understanding of melancholy that Boccherini models for us had developed over many centuries and in his day was still undergoing a radical shift, from the ancient Greek humoric system summarized in the second century by Galen, toward a more mechanical and systematic understanding of bodies, initially marked well back in the seventeenth century by the work of William Harvey and René Descartes. The shift was ponderous and inconsistent. Galenic medicine had been in place for a very long time; its uniquely apt explanatory power was deeply woven into Western thought and language. (It remains so today: English is still full of Galenic idioms based on the four humors or cardinal fluids—blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile, and melancholer or black bile.) In the Galenic system an individual derives both physical nature and temperament from the relative endowment of each humor; to their excesses or deficiencies all disorders of mind and body can be traced. Joseph Roach gives a vivid summary of the humoric body: it “resembles a large bag containing juice-filled sponges of various shapes and sizes. Between sponges there is seepage, percolation, and general sloshing about, but not the regular cleansing action of continuous circulation. Equilibrium of these potentially stagnant juices defines health.”18 This was the ruling conception of the human organism until the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey in 1628; it remained a general or implicit model far longer, especially on the Continent. In Spain, for instance, an unadulterated humoric medicine was still taught to medical students in the universities well into the eighteenth century; one of Feijóo’s most impassioned missions was his campaign against this official sanctioning of a scientific system that he knew to have been superseded—and which, furthermore, was minimally based on empirical observation. The Galenic doctor spent precious little time in contact with bodies, living or dead, during his training; dissection as a way of teaching anatomy or physiology was considered not only abhorrent but methodologically unnecessary, as all possible categories of embodiment had been set forth long since by the ancients. For this same reason such a doctor was not much concerned with actually looking at his patients; a few symptoms, sketchily gathered by report, a little holding of the patient’s wrist in order to assess the pulse, and a diagnosis could confidently be prepared.19

a melancholy anatomy

183

Descartes offers the best-known model of the new physiology that was to result from the willingness of seventeenth-century English, Dutch, and French doctors to question Galen and get their hands bloody. I would like you to consider . . . that all the functions which I have attributed to this machine, such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and of the 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 impression of their ideas upon the organ of common sense and the imagination; the retention or the imprint of these ideas within the memory; the interior movements of the appetites and of the passions; and, finally, the exterior movements of all the members. . . . I would like you to consider, I say, that all these functions 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 occur one need not conceive in it any soul either vegetative or sensitive, nor any principle of movement and life, other than that of its blood and its spirits agitated by the heat of that fire which burns continually in its heart, and whose nature is 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 the Cartesian approach still informs my own inquiries into the musical functioning of this “machine.” Not, however, my conclusions; Descartes’s scrupulous separation of physical and mental functions is immensely and notoriously problematic. To be fair to Descartes, who has been demonized often enough for splitting up body and soul, he knew this; his theory of “animal spirits” is an attempt to resolve the logical problems that result. (It also goes some way toward giving his system the poetic richness that makes the humoric system so convincing.) According to this theory, reception, sensation, and their reactive impulses to the body’s members were conveyed and reconveyed through the body by the nerves. Nerves were “like little threads or little tubes, which all come from the brain and which like the brain contain a certain very subtle air or wind, which is called the animal spirits.”21 Animal 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 new metaphorical engagements. Chief among these metaphors were the twins refinement and sensitivity. Descartes tells us that only “the most active and finest parts” of the blood contribute to animal spirits,22 and this was echoed by a chorus of doctors in other countries of Europe. That animal spirits pervaded the organism down to its minutest part was demonstrated in 1672 by Francis Glisson, who reported that for some hours following the death and dissection of the creature from which they were taken, muscle fibers continued to respond to stimulation; he considered this property, which he called

184

a melancholy anatomy

“irritability,” innate and non-mechanical, since the mechanical system of the original organism had been so thoroughly interrupted and dispersed.23 Some vital, supra-mechanical principle seemed to reside in even the smallest parts of the whole. “Irritability” was called “sensitivity” by other scientists in France and the Netherlands; it seemed to be conducted by, or perhaps was resident in, the nerves. Théophile Bordeu, Diderot’s friend (and mouthpiece in the “Rêve de d’Alembert”), wrote that “each organic part of the living body has nerves which have a sensibilité, a kind or particular degree of sentiment.”24 Such fibrous, airy, refined, sensitive bodies lent themselves very readily to musical metaphors—in particular, the likening of nerve fibers to vibrating strings, and of the frame that housed them to the resonant cavity of a stringed instrument. This was scarcely a new fund of imagery, however. In the fourth century b.c.e. Plato had used the stringed instrument as a metaphor for human corporeal responsiveness to the divine in the “Phaedo”;25 Cassiodorus (born c. 490 c.e.) memorably depicted Christ’s crucified body as a psaltery, his agony embodied in the tension of its strings as they vibrate to God’s word,26 while in a happier vein, in Canto 15 of the Paradiso, Dante referred to the beatified body as “that sweet lyre . . . stretched and released by the right hand of Heaven.”27 The metaphor still resonates during Boccherini’s day: “Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find, that with regard 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; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays.”28 What is new in the eighteenth-century use of this metaphor, however, is its emphasis on the idea of bodies resonating, not only with God or with the organization of the universe, but in sympathy with one another. Examples are legion, and come from nearly every theater of eighteenth-century discourse on human nature. Boccherini too uses the metaphor—how could he not? since music represented a sensible selfhood simply by being sound, and as such was the metaphor’s source. On this level, the whole complex of acts and behaviors around music-making, -receiving, and -conceptualizing, the complex Christopher Small calls “musicking,” became itself an extended metaphor for a hypersensitized and self-conscious model of community.29 Yet Boccherini also composed toward a heightened awareness, among executants and listeners alike, of this vibrational community; and it seems that the members of that community recognized what he was doing. In his violin treatise of 1835 Pierre Baillot discusses the “Effect of Unisons and Simultaneous Octaves in Quintets” as a representation of sensibilité through the idea of sympathetic vibration; and he singles out Boccherini as especially adept at this special effect, remarking, “ We might consider the unison and even the octave as the most appropriate expression of sympathy, an expression in some way above harmony itself, since it is the result of a perfect concord. Music can express this

a melancholy anatomy

185

sympathy at any time; nothing must be neglected, therefore, in making all its beauty felt.”30 The metaphor likewise flooded the pages of sensible art, literature, and its criticism, and nowhere more than in England. Thus a 1754 account of an actor 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 is shaken. . . . We swelled and trembled as he did; like strings which are so perfectly 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 costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ’tis thou who lifts him up to heaven—eternal foundation of our feelings!—’tis here I trace thee—and this is thy divinity which stirs within me—not that, in some sad and sickening moments, my soul shrinks back upon herself, and startles at destruction—mere pomp of words!—but that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself—all comes from thee, great, great sensorium of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation.32

Sterne protests strenuously against the sad and shrinking elements of sensibilité, but his ravings are brought about by the story of Maria of Moulines, who personifies exactly those elements: an attractive young woman who has been unhinged by her grief at being abandoned, she has become a shepherdess 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 caused by her immense susceptibility, and this identifies her as a particular kind of melancholic. Not for her the coagulation and stagnation of black bile. In Galenic terms, hers is an “adust melancholy,” active, reactive, and especially pernicious, “caused by adustion and burning of choler [which] causes great illnesses such as madnesses, strange melancholies, depraved imaginings, and various furors and manic thoughts.”33 In Cartesian terms, her nerve fibers are fine indeed, and tuned to an exquisite pitch, which not only causes her affliction but causes Sterne to catch it from her by sympathetic vibration. With adust or sensible melancholy (to use, respectively, the ancient and the eighteenth-century terms for it) the notion of refinement—the refiner’s fire of adustion or the excitation of invisibly delicate animal spirits—inevitably parlayed itself into notions about the refinement of persons. This notion received an influential early articulation in Problem 30 of (pseudo-)Aristotle: “ Why is it that all the men who have been exceptional in philosophy, the science of government, poetry, or the arts are manifestly melancholic?”34 Boswell, writing to Rousseau in 1764, stated, “I do not regret that I am melancholy. It is the temperament of tender hearts, of noble souls.”35 And in 1733 the physician George Cheyne opined that melancholy

186

a melancholy anatomy

I think never happens or can happen, to any but those of the liveliest and quickest natural parts, whose faculties are the brightest and most spiritual, and whose Genius is most keen and penetrating, and particularly where there is the most delicate Sensation and Taste, both of Pleasure and Pain. So equally are the good and 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 or some even humbler part of the body, sensible melancholy was elevating, the badge of that impressionable nature that was the defining characteristic of upper-class late eighteenth-century selfhood. Thus it shared with consumption 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 ensured that it would be reliably diagnosed among their countrymen; and indeed French medical writers of the time called it “la consomption angloise,” a condition which proceeded “without fever, without cough, or any great difficulty in respiration, with loss of appetite, indigestion, and great weakness, the flesh becoming shrunken and consumed.”36 Here the equation of melancholy with consumption is strongly implied; but this “English consumption” is clearly not pulmonary tuberculosis. Rather, according to the author of the article, this is phtisie nerveuse, one of a complex of maladies characterized by phthisis, wasting. Pulmonary tuberculosis was included in this complex; but so were marasmus (weight loss), “vapors” (an overly lively imagination brought on by boredom and exacerbated by excess), and tabes dorsalis (what we now call syphilis). Today, we classify these illnesses in very different ways; but in the eighteenth century they were considered to be related, both as to symptom and as to cause. To use the term “consumption” in an eighteenth-century sense is to invoke any or all phthisic conditions, which, to varying degrees, were understood to cause one another; similarly, all had causal relationships with sensibilité and with melancholy. The concept of consumption as neither completely physical nor completely psychological recalls the Aristotelean/Galenic idea that humors, like virtues, 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 is neatly summed up in a word that has (tellingly) become rather archaic in English: affliction, “a passion of the soul which has much influence on the body. Affliction ordinarily produces chronic maladies; phthisis is often the result of great affliction.”38 Boccherini’s own affliction, pulmonary consumption, could thus have

a melancholy anatomy

187

been understood to derive from a number of things. It was most often deemed hereditary; it could also enter the lungs through a neglected cold or catarrh, or migrate upward, as it were, from venereal disease;39 or it could result from the oversensitivity and obsessiveness of melancholy. Sir Richard Blackmore, writing in 1724, tells us that when the Patient is thin and meagre, and liable to feverish Heats . . . the texture of whose Fibres and membranes is too fine and delicate, and whose Spirits are over keen and active, when they have many years labored under a sad Series of painful Symptoms, such as . . . great Inquietudes, wakeful Nights . . . besides many other Distempers; which, however, are attended by real and unfeigned Sufferings, that enfeeble the Body, and dissipate the Spirits; these Patients, I say, their Vigour and Blood being exhausted, do sometimes fall into a true Consumption.40

Too much study, too much solitude, indulgence in anxious thoughts— all weaken the nerves, depriving them of their “Strength, Swiftness, and Vivacity,” with potentially disastrous results. In these characterizations we see the moelleux, penetrable body, whose “disposition linked to weak organs, the result of a mobile diaphragm,”41 accounted for in terms partly Galenic— hypochondria and hysteria—and partly Cartesian—delicate fibers, overactive spirits. Sensible permeability is aptly epitomized in the lungs, whose very function 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 consumptive symptoms at all, or exhibited the personality traits associated with them, is something we cannot know. By recourse to the kind of interpretive freedom employed above in relation to Young’s poetry and Boccherini’s quartet, we might decide that Boccherini had for “many years labored under a sad Series of painful Symptoms.” Similarly, it is easy enough to suppose that pain, physical and emotional, must in later life have been his constant companion: we might point to the other physical conditions detailed in the 1993 autopsy (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; and more fancifully, perhaps, to the suppressed pain of the lifelong expatriate. We would be in good company in making these associations and using them to talk about Boccherini’s creative process; all his earliest biographers do it, and they present his final years as a sad story indeed. The idea that bodily constitution is, to some degree, destiny is at least as old as the humoric system itself. Any reluctance to generalize on this basis must itself be his-

188

a melancholy anatomy

toricized. In the period that is our concern, there was little such reluctance; it is a commonplace of Enlightenment philosophy that “every personal life can be broken down into factors that are common, homogenous, and compatible with each other, interchangeable between one individual and another.”42 We move very cautiously along these pathways now, for they have led to political situations that we do not care to repeat. As Georges Gusdorf notes, “the triumph of this smooth geometry is only possible through the neutralization 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 direct evidence we possess about the body that is the subject of this book—we postmoderns are forever constrained from making any handy “geometry” between this embodied condition and its sufferer’s behavior (much less his creative process). Essaying a freely melancholic interpretation of a piece of music and doing the same about its composer’s life must and should remain two very different things. In any case, even if we were to try, any proposed causality would also be hopelessly full of gaps and misfires. Speaking biographically, such materials as we possess tend to imply with some persuasiveness that Boccherini was just the opposite of sadly ailing. Or at least he was uncomplaining, itself an anti-melancholic trait. He refers to discomfort or incapacitation in only one or 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 and the obligation under which I find myself to compose at all times for the king of Prussia, whom I have the honor to serve, in no sense permit me to dedicate myself to commercial speculations, whatever they might be. [3 July 1797] Adieu, dear Pleyel, I can continue no further, for my health is not good and my nerves cause me to suffer a great deal.44

In general Boccherini was a man who exhibited an exemplary steadiness in every area of his life, the sort of steadiness that argues for good humoric balance. From a perusal of his business correspondence and his management of his financial situations we get a sense of a calm sobriety in his dealings with the world, a level-headedness quite antithetical to the extremes of melancholia.45 This is further borne out by his virtuosity, that manifest ability to balance exquisitely fine physical tolerances with the varied and demanding situations of performance. It is borne out by his sociability, his having entered into two marriages and raised seven children. It is perhaps most decisively borne out by his very large catalog of works, produced with remarkable 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

a melancholy anatomy

189

as either prostrated before or triumphing over the vicissitudes of his embodiment. In such a view, the realm of physical experience becomes something to which the creative spirit is merely subjected, a difficulty to be succumbed to, or an obstacle to be risen above: this may serve to locate and manage the problem of pain, but it inevitably coarsens any consideration of pleasure by ignoring the full geography of embodied experience itself. It is precisely this that Boccherini refused to do. His explorations of pain and melancholy excess are thorough, sometimes to the point of being very uncomfortable indeed; but in the end they are no more thorough than his explorations of sensuousness and pleasure. Consistently, copiously, minutely, right to the end of his life, Boccherini used his compositions to explore a range of relations to physical sensation far subtler than those of mere obsessiveness or transcendence; they evince the very finest grain of what Roy Porter calls the “this-worldness” of the Enlightenment.47 Boccherini’s work is a window onto his world, and in matters of the body it is a veritable lens. Whether or to what degree he ever experienced the night sweats, the “sueños turbulentes,” the spiraling fears of consumptive melancholy, Boccherini clearly knew what they were, what they meant, and how to evoke them for his listeners and his executants. Whether or not he was himself ever subject to sad disquietudes, his music could call them forth most expertly in his public. What is more, on occasion he goes some distance past a mimetic rendering of the embodied condition in order directly to contest the conditions of mimesis—of bodily representation at all—as they arise in the course of performance. Some of his most interesting contributions take place around the melancholy-consumption complex, which had 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 mind that involves much reflection will produce a certain dividedness against the self. Even scholarly works participated in this doubleness. Medical writers on melancholy often expressed considerable empathy with their subjects, leading one to suspect that they had first-hand knowledge of their condition. Robert Burton took this trope a good deal further, fictionalizing his own authorial presence as the arch-melancholic “Democritus,” and introducing his book with an “abstract” in verse which traverses the affectual range of melancholy over and over again, each swing of the pendulum of unbalanced humor a little wider than the last: he alternates between sweet and regretful imaginings, pastoral and discontented reverie, serene love and tortured longing, celestial and demonic phantasy, and finally manic hubris and suicidal torment, until we are so discomfited that we are half disposed to laugh.48

190

a melancholy anatomy

The very similar, and similarly disturbing, excesses of Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau 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 written admonitions to the performer as a sensible tactic, while in chapter 4 I considered the ways in which these admonitions can, on occasion, produce a divided or alienated state in the performer. Here I want to suggest that Boccherini actually acknowledges this dividedness in a satiric-melancholic vein, 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 he uses quite regularly—do not offer any immediate clues as to its “purely musical” meaning; they have no obvious commonalities as to melody, harmony, key, or tempo. Boccherini sometimes associates the wry face with extreme sweetness, dolcissimo, while at other times it seems to be linked to particular gestures, as in the passage shown in example 21 (CD track 47). We first hear the figure that opens bar 33 in bar 31, without chromatic alteration. In bar 33, B n becomes B #, a rising appoggiatura becomes a whine, and the first violin is instructed to employ the wry face, as if in a satirical double take. A further question of performance practice arises: only one member of the quartet is instructed to play smorfioso. This will naturally be visible to his companions; ought they to be “infected” and participate in the wryness, or should they remain a corps de ballet against whose serenity the grimaces, both sonic and visible, will likely seem the more peculiar? Smorfioso would seem to be wholly pantomimic in a way that specifically emphasizes the disjuncture between visual and aural modes of communication, encouraging the player to visually telegraph a certain alienation from the sounds he is making, and quite possibly from his fellow players as well. It may be indicative of unseemly effort, as are the wry faces among Angiolini’s comic dancers; it may poke fun 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 of nothing 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 period theatrical genres. In Spain, the satiric-melancholic muse had come into its own during the seventeenth century, the golden age of Spanish drama, where doubleness and alienation infected the melancholy lover in particular.51 Like the dolcissimo register in Boccherini’s music, love and love-making ought to be nothing but sweet, soft, and gratifying. Love-melancholy enters the picture when the beloved is unattainable, and the lover’s procession of symptoms furls itself around the beloved, or around her image: fixation to the exclusion of anything else; erratic behavior; neglect of responsibility, neglect of self; uncontrollable spasms of grief; and so on. This syndrome of the melan-

a melancholy anatomy

191

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

vn. 1

# & # c

32

; œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. # œ . œ œ

# œ œ œ œ.

Smorfioso vn. 2

vla.

&

##

c

œ # œ nœ ˙ w

B ## c

œ

#˙

˙ w

˙

˙

œ

˙!

˙!

w

#˙ ˙

œ

R. vc.

? ## c ! ˙

# & # #œ. 34

œ œ

# œ œ œ œ.

#œ.

œ œ

œ œ

œœœ F.

# & # ˙ w B ## œ

˙ ˙

#˙ ˙

œ

œ œ

œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ F.

œ œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

F.

? ##

w

œ

œ œ R.

œ F.

choly lover was still familiar to Boccherini’s audiences, for Calderón was still in 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 what opens love-melancholy up to questions about sincerity. What lover, faced with the possibility of rejection, would not indulge in at least a little affectation of this handy, well-known vocabulary of symptoms, as a way of emphasizing his own condition, and perhaps inducing sympathy? Thus becoming, in Diderot’s words, “not himself, but an actor playing a part.” A satirical atti-

192

a melancholy anatomy

tude follows not far behind, perhaps spurred by the bitterness of finding that love is, in fact, rarely ever “sweet, soft, and gratifying.” In some of these Spanish plays, the formulae of love-melancholy issue from the lips of a stock character, a servant or clown called a gracioso. These characters further enacted doubleness through the comic tradition of asides, satirical addresses made directly to the audience—made, we imagine, smorfioso. I would propose that Boccherini uses the violinist’s wry face gracioso -style, to signal that he knows very well that his yearning chromatic appoggiatura, his mooning moment in the midst of a busy Allegro, his reversion to lovesickness, 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 fact the diabolical terminus of the doubleness in love-melancholy. He may affect the late, consumptive stages of the condition—but believe him at your peril; he uses the familiar melancholic vocabulary as a tool, without any necessary subjection to it at all. (Da Ponte and Mozart’s brilliance in their treatment of this theme is the same as Tirso’s: it lies in the fact that even as we recognize this about the Don, we find ourselves half wanting to believe him.) Another eighteenth-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 harsh to be labeled mere satire; his mode becomes sarcasm, in the root meaning of that word, which is to tear flesh. Its apotheosis appears in Goya’s Black Painting of a gargantuan figure with a horrifying, horrified, haunted expression, tearing a bleeding human body with its teeth. Goya’s unforgiving vision of his contemporaries 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 doubleness doubles consumptively upon itself with a vengeance: Saturn, icon of melancholy from ancient times, was the god who ate his own children.

other consumptions If phtisie nerveuse was the national disease of the eighteenth-century English upper classes, then that of the French was phtisie dorsale, syphilis, “the familiar result and just punishment of excessive debauchery,”52 which could also be brought on by masturbation. A deadly imbalance was caused in the body by the immoderate loss of seminal fluid. Once the habit was established, by the usual unhappy conjunction of “vicious disposition” and excessive habits, the sufferer’s fate was sealed. The Encyclopédie supplies an account of the progress of this condition which recalls Young’s poetry in the way it displays the nether reaches of the melancholic-consumptive condition. After these ejaculations which interrupt his sleep, the sufferer is plunged into a kind of annihilation, his eyes grow dim, extreme languor takes possession of all his senses, it seems to him that he only half exists; that terrible idea which retraces ceaselessly his weakness and his nothingness, which often brings with

a melancholy anatomy

193

it the image of impending death, which represents to him the lifted arm, the scythe ready to reap his days, [that idea] plunges him into an overwhelming sadness, and little by little lays the foundations of a dreadful melancholy; sleep comes—it shuts his eyes anew, conceals him from himself, puts an end to his cruel reflections, but this only brings him new material; scarcely is he asleep when the most voluptuous dreams present lewd objects to his inflamed imagination, the machine [i.e., the body] follows its natural bent, feeble desires awake forthwith, but more promptly still the parts which must satisfy them yield to these impressions, and still more to the morbid disposition by which they are attacked; the new fire which is lit is not slow to bring about that evacuation which 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 has already experienced. In some, further sleep brings yet further ejaculations and further, even more terrible torments. After a number of similar nights, how must 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 vision is weak, a frightful thinness disfigures them, they lose their appetite, their digestion is disordered, almost all their functions are altered, their memory is no longer active . . . soon vague pains extend through different parts of the body, an interior fire devours them . . . a slow fever sets in, and finally phtisie dorsale, the grim result of excess in the evacuation of semen.53

All the engagements in the Encyclopédie with the topics of masturbation and nocturnal emission share this tone, nearly frantic with anxiety. The “just punishments,” so vividly presented here, are dreadful indeed, the more so perhaps for being so entirely imaginary. What is never actually admitted is that the excess involved is simply pleasure: pleasure that is in no way productive or constructive, pleasure in its purest, most egregious and socially irredeemable form, pleasure whose mere existence, socially speaking, is an excess. The mere consideration of the ready availability of such pleasure evidently provoked nothing short of panic among these highly educated, sophisticated writers, writers whose work in the Encyclopédie represents the very culmination of the Enlightenment. A limit makes itself apparent here, even as its exact location remains impossible to determine; within the condition of pleasure the danger of crossing from sensibilité into consumption remains ever present because the crossing is itself pleasant. Sensitivity, receptivity to sensation, has always this potential to vibrate itself into excess, the sufferer becoming a string out of tune with the larger social sounding body. Of all the arts, music—source of the sympathetic-vibration metaphor and of some very sensual pleasure indeed—walks this line with an exquisite balance; and within eighteenth-century music, Boccherini was at times a high-wire artist, for his frankly indulgent play with sensuality through repetition and gorgeous timbres. As the Encyclopédie emphasized so urgently, the central difficulty, the problem around which melancholic obsession and desire both circle, is whether

194

a melancholy anatomy

indulgence dissipates or intensifies the condition. Does the caress quiet or awaken pleasure? For all the quaintness of the above account of masturbation, the question is no idle one, for desire, like obsessive thought, can renew itself endlessly, and as such marks the place at which autonomous selfhood spins off into the abyss of solipsism. We do well to remember that the very generation of Frenchmen who wrote the Encyclopédie included one who earnestly, deliberately, and insistently personified this solipsism, and who remains notorious for doing so: Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Even as sensibilité informed cultural understanding as the type, the model of human embodiment, Sade (who was a passionate admirer of Richardson) was compulsively involved in exploring its ultimate potential, through the mechanisms of obsessive-consumptive desire, to move us beyond any possibility of doubleness, of acting or rhetoric, display or falsity— beyond all the existential problems inherent in representation. In this capacity Sade explored agony in particular as a desperate attempt to get beyond sympathetic vibration, to know the final, the real, the inarguable configuration of the self, the bottom of the bottomlessness of sensibilité. The torturer, Sade’s Monsieur Curval or Monsieur Dolmancé, does not feel the victim’s pain as pain; he feels it as domination, and it gives him pleasure. In so doing he demonstrates that, in the final analysis, there is nothing that physiologically compels him to share his victim’s agony; sympathetic vibration is a social construction, no more, and sensible identification proves, in the end, merest fiction. More than the sexualized imagery in which Sade habitually couches it, it is the moral detachment of this antisensibilité, the abominable possibleness of simply bypassing the absorptive maneuver, that we will tend to find most obscene. But to high-mindedly deny its possibility—indeed, its convenience, and the potential attractions thereof—is to deny that such detachment is practiced by a great many people a great deal of the time, as an integral component of their power over others. Denying this, and our complicity in it, is purest foolhardiness. It is with this fact that Sade’s work takes its power over those of us who would prefer to be immune to it. It can be protested that Sade’s works “explore” no issues, but are mere testaments to psychosis, mired in obsessive horribleness, inscribing and reinscribing the “moral stupidity” of torture.54 Perfectly understandable as this dismissal may be, it dismisses also Sade’s quintessentially melancholic ability to personify some of the primary anxieties of his age. His dreadful repetitiousness (beside which Boccherini’s repetitiousness pales into insignificance) bespeaks not only his personal pathology, but the extent and the urgency 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 draw the map? Sade makes it clear why, in the eighteenth century, one took the signs of

a melancholy anatomy

195

love-melancholy seriously. It endangered both the individual and the social fabric. Even when there were no signs, the danger was still grave: “Immoderate love does not always announce itself by evident signs, however; sometimes it keeps itself hidden in the heart, and the fire with which it burns it devours the substance of the one affected by this passion, causing him to fall into a real consumption. It is difficult to know the cause of all the bad effects which [the consumption] produces in silence.”55 The deadly spinning-off, the consequent consumption of selfhood and strength, takes place in and because of silence and solitude. Here the relation of melancholy to music becomes especially delicate. Melancholy’s metaphorical aspects, enacted mimetically, run up against the performative aspect, enacted through cadences, which are, after all, endings; and endings are inherently inimical to melancholy, just as satisfaction is inherently inimical to desire. In the musical-melancholic labyrinth of C. P. E. Bach’s Abschied, for instance, the skill and subtlety with which he untangles his modulations is attended by considerable reluctance: for conclusion, untying, must finally put a stop to the whole process, must accomplish the ending, the parting, that is being so exquisitely delayed through mourning about it in the first place. Similarly, if we continue our parallel reading of Edward Young’s poem and Boccherini’s Quartet op. 9, no. 1 (which, I wish to reemphasize, is entirely and deliberately conjectural: I have taken Boyé’s vague reference and run with it), we encounter the same difficulty. Both Young’s unwelcome return from sleep into waking, “severer for severe,” and Boccherini’s return to his mournful, futile opening idea are as short as they are bitter. But in the poem, waking is followed again by Night, the “sable goddess,” whose primary characteristic in Young’s poem is dead silence.56 Nor is this pulseless dead silence, this “awful pause,” a mere cesura. It is antithetical to music; its only possible mimetic representation is the end of the piece, which in this case can mean only death. Approached in such a way, a final cadence becomes a matter for apprehensive dread rather than any normal closure or resolution of tension. It is at this impossible juncture that Boccherini abruptly departs from the melancholic. The final gestures of the movement are loud, harsh, aggressively defiant, punctuated by full chords in all the parts and propelled by emphatic, almost martial dotted rhythms (CD track 48). This music makes a sudden and violent attempt at a cure; it would seem to be enacting Burton’s recommendation that the sufferer from love-melancholy be “diverted by some contrary passion.” These may be entirely fictional and quite brutal: Burton suggests telling the melancholic “that his house is on fire, his best friends dead, his money stolen.”57 The final chords of this movement do not participate in the melancholy tableau, but have become its frame, and in the peculiar mechanics of melancholy, to frame the condition is to become free of it at last. Another, gentler cure for love-melancholy is the simple diversion of ex-

196

a melancholy anatomy

pressive intercourse with others, Burton’s “continual business . . . [to] distract [his] cogitations.” Conviviality, galanterie, was thus potentially much more than idleness; it had a tonic and a prophylactic function. A circle of mideighteenth-century friends might well have invited an afflicted member to the distractions of music-making, as a way of helping in his cure. They would have known that they were taking the risk that music might intensify his obsession rather than interrupt it, and thus begin the consumptive cycle anew; accordingly they might be rather cautious about the minor mode and slow movements. 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 seemed particularly risky (CD track 49). Although marked “Grave,” it is in the major mode, it begins with dotted rhythms (possibly connoting discipline, or some degree of backbone), and in general it does not display Boccherini’s very deepest tints of blue; its orbit is more pathetic and familial, sensible in the consoling sense. The movement is notable for the way Boccherini voices many chords with a loving attention to where and how they will resonate among the various instruments. In rehearsing and playing such a passage, the members of the quartet 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, a dominant harmony with the seventh in the bass. In this case the seventh is an A b, on the cello a soft, full, unpenetrating note. The upper instruments must adjust to allow the harmonic urgency of the 4 voicing to interact with the throatiness of its timbre. The two opportunities to do this are slightly different. In bar 2 all four instruments are in a low tessitura, more or less automatically blending the chord into the bass (CD track 50). But at the end of bar 4 into bar 5, the first violin, now somewhat separated from the sonority, must take especial care with transparency of tone, so as not to distract from 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 in the 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 grateful and sonorous register; if he is the afflicted member of the group, then this elegantly reflective melody gives him a chance to voice intimate longing and sorrow over it—and yet do it in a measured, contained, anti-melancholic way; the tune is nicely defined in four phrases, the first two both four beats long and sequentially constructed, the third made up of two two-beat sequential modules, and the last a six-beat cadential phrase (CD track 52). It is only after this that it begins to appear that the melancholy cellist has managed to infect his companions. By the time of the part-crossings at the end of bar 13 into bar 14, consumption has entered the picture. It first consumes periodicity: 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

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

œ _…œ . œ œ b œ. œ. œ œœœœ J œ J & b b c œ . œ œœ . œœ œ œ œ ˙ œ ‰ J œ. 3 p mo f œ …œ . œ œ œ. œ. b j œ œœœœ ‰J œ & b b c œ . œ œœ . œœ J œ œ œ ˙ œ œ 3 R. f . p mo j Œ ‰ œ œ Œ ‰ œJ B b b b c œ . œ œ . œœ . œ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ p p R. f œ. œ œ œ ? bb c œ . œ œ . œ œ Œ Ó ‰ ˙ b . œ ˙ œ _ p f b ‰ œ …œ œ œ œ œ œ œj ‰ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ &bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. Ÿ Ÿ pmo 3 bb b j j œ j‰ ≈ œ œ œ & œ œ œj œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ . .. ... .. œœ œ œ œ œ .... .. . mœ Grave

vn. 1

vn. 2

vla.

vc.

4

B bb b œ œ œ œ ˙ ? bb œ œ œ œ b n˙

˙

j‰ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ

b˙

œ œ œ œ œ

œ

p

œ J

B œ. Solo

b & b b ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈ œ n œ œ œj 7

~~~~~~ ≈ œ œ œ

b &bb ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ B b bb œ

œ œ œ

… B b bb œ

œ

œ œ J

œ

œ œ œœ œ

œ œ …œ J

œ

‰

œ

œ

œ œ#œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ nœ œœ œ œ œ (continued)

197

Example 22. (continued)

Æ b & b b ≈ nœ

œ

b &bb j œ

9

B bb b

œ

‰

œ

‰

≈ œ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~~~ n œ

n œ.

œ

œ

œ

‰

j œ

œ

œ

B bb b œ œ n œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ ;œ

œ J œ œ

œ

œ. œ n œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

6

b &bb œ

‰

œ J

b &bb œ

‰

j œ

B bb b œ

‰

j œ

10

Ÿ œ

nœ J

‰

œ

œ

œœ

œ

j œ ‰

j œ B bb b œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ …œn œ œ œ œ œ S p j œ œ œ …œ # œ œ œ œ nœ p S j œ n œ # œj Œ œ S

œ œ nœ œ ? #œ f

nœ#œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ n œ # œ œ b Ÿœ . œ œ & b b œ œ œ nœ œ Ÿ pmo bb b Sn ˙ œ. œ œ & S p mo

? b #œ bb

‰ œ

œ J

œ

j bœ

œ.

œ p mo B nœ p

198

œ

p

œ nœ œ bœ œ œ œœœœ

œ œ œ.

œ

j œ

œ J

12

B b bb Œ

œ

œ J

J

œ œ œ

bœ œ œ œ œ J œœ œ nœ œ ‰

œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ

Example 22. (continued)

b &bb 14

œ. œ. œ. ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ . . . œ . . . n œ. œ. œ. œ nœ œ œ p

b &bb œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ~~~~~~~~~ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. B bb b ‰ œ œ œ œ œ B bb b œ n œ pœ J b & b b n ˙˙ 16

&

b bb

‰ œ œ

œ~~~~~ œ œ œ. œ. œ. j œ ‰ Œ

?

œ~~~~~~ œœ œ. œ. œ. œ ‰ J

j ‰ œ

œœœœœœœœœœœ ~~~~~ Æ œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ j œ ‰

œ

œ

œ

œ n œ. œ œ œ. œ œ

n ˙˙

Æ morendo œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ ®œœ œœ 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 œ Æ

smorz.

Æ œÆ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙

B b bb ˙

œ œœ œ œœ

p mo

? bb

œ

morendo

b ˙ ˙

œ œ œ œ œ

p

˙ ˙

œ œ

œ œ morendo

b & b b œ nœ. œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ

˙

Ó

..

b &bb œ œ

œ œ œ œ

˙

Ó

..

. . . B b bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

˙

Ó

..

? b œ bb œ

˙

Ó

..

18

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ mmmm

(continued)

199

Example 22. (continued)

b & b b œJ œ 20

b &bb ≈œ

œ

œ

œ

r œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

b œ

œ

œ

œ

˙

B b bb ˙ ? bb

œ

œ œ œ œrœ œ3 œ œ 3œ œÆ œ

œœ œ œ œ

œ œ œbœ œ

r œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ

œ

b˙

œ

œ

œ J

œ

œ J

œ

œ J

œ

œ

œ

b œ & b b b œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ n œ œ ˙˙ 22

b & b b ˙˙

œ bœ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

bœ B b bb J ? bb

œ

œ

b nœ

œ

b œ & b b b œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ b œ . œ œ b & b b ˙˙

? bb

b nœ

‰ œ

œ J œ

œ J

œ

23

B b bb b œJ

œ

œ

j œ n œ . œœ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ . œ œ œ œ nœ œ œœ bœœ ‰ œ œ œ nœ œ œ ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ j j j j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

bœ œ œ

œ bœ J œ œ

œ

œ

200

‰

‰ bœ œ

œ

‰

œ œ

œ

Example 22. (continued)

b œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ & b bœ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ 25

b &bb ‰ j B b bb œ

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ

j j œ œ œ

˙

˙

œ œ œ œÿ

œ œ œrœ . œ œ

r œ

œ œ .œ œ œ œ .

j œ

œ

bœ.

j œ

˙

R.

? bb ‰ b b &bb 27

j œ

b &bb

R.

˙

œ

œ

j bœ œ œjœ œ œrœ . œ j ‰ œ R. œ.

B b bb

œ

œ

j œ œ

Œ

œ J Pmo.

j œ

Pmo.

j œœ

œ

nœ

œ

œ

œ

t r j œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

r œ

r j œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ t

j œ w Pmo.

? bb

b nœ œ

œ b œœ œ œ

œœ

t

29

&

bb b

Œ

Ó

B

r j œœ 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 œ œ œ t

b & b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œr œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ t

t

B bb b œ b b Solo. w B b

‰ œJ

œ

‰ œj œ œ œ

œ

j œ

œ œ

œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œœœœœœ

œ bœœœœœœ

(continued)

201

Example 22. (continued)

b &bb œ 31

b &bb œ .

Œ œ.

œ.

≈

œ.

B bb b œ B

b˙ œÿ

œ

j œ

œ

œ

nœ œ

bb b n œ

b &bb œ

œ nœ

œ

œ

r œ

32

b &bb

œ.

j œ

œ

œ œ

œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œÆ

œ

nœ œ

j œ

œ.

B bb b œ

œ œ

œ

œ

t

œ

œ

œ

Æ b œ & b b ≈ œ œ œj ‰ 33

‰

B bb b œ

œ

‰

r œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œr œ œ œ œr œ n œ œ œ œ œ œ

bb œ œ œ œ œ B b

b & b b œj

œ

~~~~~~~~~~~ ≈ œ œ œ

Œ

˙

œ bœ

~~~~~~ ≈œ œ œ

œ œ bœ œ œ

œ

œ.

j œ

œ œ nœ bb b œr œ œ œ œr œ œ œ œr œœ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œ œœ œ œnœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ B œ

œ

œ

œœ

œ

mœ œ œ

j œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ œœœœ

œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ 3

202

b œ œ œr œ œ

j‰ œ nœ

3

?‰

nœœœ

Example 22. (continued)

b œ œ œ œ œ œ œrœ œ J J nœ

b œr œœ &bb œœœ 35

p

b &bb œœœœœ

œ J

p

? bb

b

œ

Œ

œ

œ œ œ

p

œ œ

R.

Pmo.

R.

b œ b œ bœ œ bœ &bb bœ œ œ n œ œ œ œ œ R.

bœ ? bb œ œ b

n œÿ œ œ œ B bb b œn œ œ œ ÿ ? bb b œ œ

j œ

œ œ œ bœ œ

œœœœœ œœ

œ

œ

j bœ bœ œ œ œ

bœ nœ œ œ œœ

p

. ~~~~~ . . ~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~ œ œ œ œ ≈ bœ.. œ.. œ. ≈ œ. œ. œ. ≈ p

b œ~~~~~~~~ œ œ œ ≈ œ œœ ≈ œ œ œ ≈ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~ p .œ œ. œ. b œ. œ. œ. ≈ ≈ b œ œ. œ. œ. œ

œ. œ. œ. œ~~~~~~ œ œ œ. œ. œ.

p

j œ ‰

p

R.

b &bb

t

œ.

‰ nœ œ

bœ J

œ . œ œ b œJ œ .

˙

b & b b b œ œ œ b œ œ œ n œ œ œ b œ œ œ bœ

b &bb œ

œ œœ

R.

B bb b b œ n œ œ ‰ ‰

œ bœ œ œ bœ J

Pmo.

37

39

œ .œ œ

r t œ

Pmo.

B bb b œ p

R.

œœ

œ

‰ ˙˙

j œ ‰ Œ

j œ ‰

j œ ‰

˙ ˙

œÿ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ®œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ ®œ œ œ œ œœ œ ÿ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ ÿ

œÿ œ œ œ ˙

œÿ œ œ œ œÿ œ œ œ ˙

œ œ ˙

œ œ œ œ ˙ (continued)

203

204

a melancholy anatomy

Example 22. (continued)

b œ &bb 41

&

bb b

œ. œ œ

œ. œ œ

œ. œ œ

œ. œ œ

œ œ œ ˙

..

morendo

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ morendo

B bb b j œ

j œ

œ

j œ

j œ

œ

œ

œ. œ. œ. ˙

œ œ œ œ ˙

.. ..

morendo

? bb

b œ morendo

œ

œ

œ

œ œ œ œ ˙

..

voiced diminished-seventh chord (CD track 53). In terms of conventional harmonic function, the chord is an ambiguous, anxious chord anyway; but its anxiety is sharpened by the way the cello pushes at the upper limit of its tenor range, while the violins simultaneously descend below it, into their darkest registers. Harmonic ambiguity is extended into ambiguous part-writing: the whole chord swirls through three different voicings of closed position in the first two beats of bar 14. Here the quartet members embody the very contradictoriness of melancholy, its impossible conjunctions of mania and gloom. With these remarks, the whole tenor of my commentary has changed. My critical eyes have left the score and, as it were, rolled back into my head: I am remembering the experience of having rehearsed and recorded this piece, and I use these tactile memories as my source of information on what the piece is about, what I think it expresses: a different sort of “score.” Of course such memories are present in all music criticism, as the inevitable element of corporeal subvocalization. Even my silent score-reader, she who chooses not to listen to the recorded examples, makes reference, in seeing that diminished-seventh chord spun out upon the page, to some prior physical experience of diminished-seventh chords: their complex, conflicted density of timbre in closed position upon a keyboard, perhaps. This is the sensible at work in music criticism. In a Sternian vein, the listener will identify with the instruments as fellow sounding bodies, her nerves set vibrating as are their fibrous strings; she might further identify both herself and them with the great, vibrating universal sensorium. So, indeed, might the player of an instrument consciously use it as a particularly apt “sounding body,” an instrument not only of sounds but of explicit connection with his listeners. Identification, the absorptive maneuver, is central

a melancholy anatomy

205

here. The ideally sensible listener is always a participant, by virtue of these half-involuntary, bodily, sympathetic responses; an ideally sensible composer like Boccherini knows them well, and writes directly toward exciting them in his audience. Extreme subjectivity and volatility are of the essence in this sort of criticism. 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 fanciful, the more hypersensitive, the more intimately, hypochondriacally fantastical our reading of musical passages like this, the more in tune with them we have become; our “most active and finest parts” have been engaged in the music’s “most delicate Sensation and Taste.” Such criticism obviously has little to do with rational structures of proof or even of demonstration, and everything to do with the listener’s willingness to submit to the sensible genius, to become herself a body whose every fluctuation of the animal spirits in the heart and breath is instantly communicated throughout its members, if not beyond them to other bodies entirely, by an excruciatingly active, resonant nervous system. This is not an activity without risk. There is obvious epistemological danger in such deliberate immersions in experience; but the risk of which I wish to speak here is a medical one. Bodies so finely attuned can become martyrs to their own sympathies; exquisite sensitivity to pleasure is necessarily defenseless against pain. In submission to pleasure lies dormant the labyrinth of melancholy. Boccherini points directly into the abyss in the way he ends each 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 into dark-timbred, much-repeated chords that finally subside into silence, birthplace of melancholy and resting place of its unchecked course (CD track 54). Lest the performers miss the reference, at the anti-cadence at the end of the first half (bars 17–19) Boccherini has marked three of the parts morendo, and a fourth smorzando. The silence that follows is actually notated by a half-bar rest, which in this Grave tempo feels and sounds almost unbearably 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 desolation would be crass; only the hypothetical, fictional vein will do, the dream of what might happen after we cease to be, arrived at by the dream-logic of a third-related progression (CD track 55). This A b major gives way gradually to more diminished-seventh anxieties over the next few bars, but it does not spiral off endlessly: the progression returns us in a reasonably timely manner to the home key of E b major. Harmonically, we might interpret the piece’s conventional reprise to its home key as another example of Boccherini’s strategic ability to disentangle himself (and us) from melancholy; but of course, melodically and tex-

206

a melancholy anatomy

turally it is something else again, refusing to be direct or affirmative in the face of unspeakable loss, and by a means peculiar to its composer: the cello sings again. I have already discussed this reprise in chapter 3 (CD track 16). By a lovely timbral and orchestrational sleight of hand, the cello emerges out 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 as bass it executed the conventional falling-fifth gesture that returned us to the tonic—and marked as unearthly, disembodied, by being this time in the soprano 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 associations to European ears: mourning for the dead, or endless complaint over lost love.” Now, writing and hearing from a protracted engagement with melancholy, I hear the mourning and the complaint more acutely. How the afflicted performer or listener reads such a passage, the values with which we invest it, whether we find in it the possibility of redemption or only of an exquisite heightening of torment, will have a good deal to do with our condition at the time of listening. Music can “make such melancholy persons mad,” or it can save them from themselves. In its inherent susceptibility the melancholy body is dangerously vulnerable. The hardy postmodernist reader, inoculated against a cultural variety that would have stunned Burton or Boccherini, may smile at such quaint warnings, but in so doing betray the extent to which her own culture has divorced soul and body—an extent undreamed of by Descartes himself. We simply can no longer believe that too fine an attention to a melancholic piece of music might result in physical illness; and in this inability we see the gulf of our difference from the culture that produced and consumed such music. To attempt to cross the gulf is, at least in theory, to lay ourselves open to the 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 how did it lose it, and how does the conscience of a whole result from all these losses? Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse: It seems to me that contact suffices. denis diderot, “Le Rêve d’Alembert,” 1769

In August 1804, Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published an article on the performance of string quartets, signed “Cambini in Paris.” After a series of musings in an early Romantic vein on the technical and spiritual obligations of the four musicians came the following passage: Three great masters—Manfredi, the foremost violinist in all Italy with respect to orchestral and quartet playing, Nardini, who has become so famous as a virtuoso through the perfection of his playing, and Boccherini, whose merits are well enough known, did me the honor of accepting me as a violist among them. In this manner we studied quartets by Haydn (those which now make up opp. 9, 17, and 21 [sic] ), and some by Boccherini which he had just written and which one still hears with such pleasure.1

The happy time recalled by Cambini took place in 1765, in Milan. His constellation of luminaries formed the first professional string quartet of which we have any record, though that record consists in Cambini’s word alone, not being verified by any other source.2 We cannot accept Cambini’s brave claim that the group played some of Haydn’s opp. 9, 17, and 20 quartets; it is a claim ill-served by his mistaking the last of the three opus numbers, and in any case none of the works listed had been composed by 1765! The Divertimenti opp. 1 and 2, written in the previous decade and published in Paris, would have been available; presumably they are what Cambini meant. The quartets by Boccherini himself are the only repertory that we can 207

208

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

solidly identify with that 1765 meeting of masters: these would have been op. 2, Boccherini’s first six string quartets, written, according to the composer, between 1760 and 1762, and first published in Paris in 1767. Boccherini followed the six of op. 2 with no fewer than eighty-five more works in the same genre. His string quartets span his entire creative life in twenty opus numbers; one of his very last manuscripts is the unfinished Quartet in D Major, op. 64, no. 2, G. 249. The string quartets are outnumbered—though scarcely out-diversified—only by the quintets. Slightly over half Boccherini’s works in the string quartet medium are called quartettini. This is Boccherini’s own usage, perhaps even his own coinage.3 The diminutive indicates a shorter piece, often but not always in two movements. He also calls them opere piccole; other works with a more conventional three- or four-movement plan are opere grandi.4 The composer mentions this distinction, which he also employed among his trios, quintets, and symphonies, in a letter to Don Carlo Andreoli of 22 September 1780: “I divide the works into small and large, because the large ones consist of four pieces [i.e., movements] in each quintet, and the small of two and no more. From these they [the publishers, in this case Artaria] will be able to select as they please, as it is all cloth of the same piece.”5 This is an interesting claim. One might assume that in restricting himself to a shorter format, and often to shorter movements within that format, Boccherini also employed a lighter, more inconsequential style. But, just as he implies, this is not the case; the reduced length of the quartettini does not have a consistent relationship with level of invention or seriousness of tone. The only feature of the opere grandi that is somewhat rarer in the quartettini is the fully developed slow movement.6 The short format lends itself to concision and immediacy, and is a great friend of the whole esthetic of the tableau. Some of the most affecting and characteristic music in the quartets can be found among the quartettini. Boccherini’s own typically diffident acknowledgment of this complex and distinctive unity in his work—“it is all cloth of the same piece”—might not be made either by or on behalf of many other composers.

style periodization In view of the homogeneity that Boccherini himself asserts, any attempt at style periodization must be a peculiarly frustrating task. An interesting stylistic division of the quartets has been proposed by Christian Speck. He gives op. 2 solitary pride of place as an extraordinary youthful effort (an estimation with which I tend to agree); he groups together op. 8 of 1769 through op. 33 of 1781 for their interpretations and approximations of Viennese Classical style, especially as regards their forays into motivic and thematic development; he connects op. 39 of 1787 through op. 53 of 1796, all initially

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

209

written for the king of Prussia (with some later published by Pleyel), by their “pleasant and brilliant style” and relative absence of motivic processes; and the late opp. 58 and 64 he finds to be quasi-orchestral and very much dominated by the first violin.7 Any periodization serves to clarify certain features of an artist’s work at the expense of others. By accepting Boccherini’s own pronouncement I pursue a different particularity than Speck. I do this not because I think it essential to take Boccherini literally (composers are, after all, notoriously unreliable when speaking about their own work) but simply because upon examination of the quartets I agree with him: they are indeed remarkably similar to one another in style. Throughout the forty years of their composition Boccherini returns again and again to certain questions, frequently reuses favorite “solutions,” recasts the same situations over and over with infinite variation of characters but very little change in fundamental purpose. The stylistic developments that Speck descries in the quartets are certainly verifiable; but they are, I think, much less interesting than the remarkable samenesses. The homogeneity observed among a large group of Boccherini’s works is paralleled by his repetitiveness within individual works. Either feature can be used as a way of characterizing his production as artistically stunted, with Boccherini as a sort of ancien-régime fly in amber—someone whom the march of stylistic progress had no choice but to leave behind. Such a point of view is nascent even in sympathetic evaluations like Fétis’s: “His works [are] so remarkable in every respect, that one is tempted to believe that he knew no other music than his own.”8 It should be obvious by now that I emphasize the peculiar samenesses of Boccherini’s work as an exhortation to rethink these still current nineteenth-century notions of what style and artistic development mean. To say that [he] was forgotten because of a change in taste has the effect of placing him in a certain light—[composer] to a dying class, coming at the end of a tradition in art, a bit decadent. . . . Today, praise of [him] tends to be tinged with apology along such lines. . . . Surely, the plea is made, the . . . works of his old age reveal a greater seriousness and more depth. But the style, public at every stage, is the man; and in [his] case it was to an extraordinary degree through his style that he was able to see, to think, to perform. It was not a disguise he hid behind, and it was never outgrown.9

It is further in Boccherini’s nature that his engagements with the quartet genre—indeed with any genre—are only rarely what we would call, from a style-historical perspective, innovative. One can scarcely imagine Boccherini as the founder of a “school” of composition, and he had no imitators. And yet neither could we deny that he is original, often profoundly so; certainly

210

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

he was widely acknowledged to be so in his own day. Few composers so aptly demonstrate the gulf between originality and innovation. In this chapter I will draw on examples from three early opere, 8, 9, and 15, the first quartets written after Boccherini’s visit to Paris, and (importantly in terms of his intended audience) after his establishment of firm relations with publishers there. In so doing I will presume to let my conclusions speak, however generally, for all ninety-one of Boccherini’s quartets, and occasionally for his work in other ensemble media. Moreover, I will make no attempt to be comprehensive, but will again follow the composer’s lead, and focus where he focuses: that is, on characteristic ideas to which he returns often, on the simple presumption that they are what interested him most. As well as best representing Boccherini’s marked stylistic centeredness, I think this approach is consonant with eighteenth-century ideas of artistic voice and its development. As the art historian and philosopher Richard Wollheim puts it, “ We should be extremely reluctant, without evidence of massive psychological disturbance, to multiply styles by departing from the maxim, One artist, one style. . . . Surely an artist’s style should be no more thought of as susceptible to fragmentation or fission than his personality.”10

woven music Boccherini’s cloth metaphor works on more than one level. In chapter 3 I discussed his penchant for forsaking or exploding any singable melodic line in favor of a kind of textural, textile-like approach to ensemble sound. This is beyond doubt one of Boccherini’s most consistent preoccupations in the quartets, indeed in all his ensemble music, and it is often allied to a marked degree of repetitiveness. I have offered several related readings of these textural passages: as sonic lacunae, inviting reverie rather than directing attention; as foregrounding the performers’ bodies; as evocation of landscape. Here I will confine myself to proposing their genesis. It seems possible that Boccherini developed this distinctive kind of writing out of his notably soloistic use of the cello in the earliest opus of quartets, op. 2. There, the SSAB registral roles of the conventional sonata a quattro were periodically disrupted by the virtuosity of the cello part; what had been “the bass” could abruptly assume any one of the four roles in the ensemble. If, for instance, the cello suddenly behaves like a second violin, playing melody in thirds with the first, the viola perforce becomes a bass, with the second violin doubling that bass as 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 for his own instrument. While he continues to experiment with crossing ranges within the quartet, Boccherini writes only one prominent cello solo in the second opus of quartets (in the slow movement of op. 8, no. 4, of 1770, discussed at the end of the last chapter), and there are none at all in the next

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

211

two opere, 9 and 15. In these works the impulse to sing is exercised much more conventionally through the violin parts. Thus Boccherini seems to be moving away from any concertante identity for his own instrument within the quartet medium; one has only to compare these early works with the obbligato quartets of Boccherini’s fellow virtuoso Giambattista Cirri, published in London from 1766, or with examples of the flashy Parisian quatuor concertant style exemplified by Cambini’s works, to see the extent to which Boccherini 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 quartets, and becomes yet more subtle and complex in the quintets (even as he maintains the concertante cello writing there): the more parts, the more possibilities Boccherini uncovers for crossing, mixing, and blending them. Thus it is not surprising that some of the finest examples of his textural genius come not from the realm of chamber music, but from the expanded resources of a symphony—which Boccherini had a fascinating penchant for “breaking down” into temporary concertante, chamber-musical subgroupings.12 The huge range of the cello as Boccherini used it encompasses that of an entire quartet, or even a symphonic group, for in ensemble music of the period violins rarely played higher than the highest passages in his cello sonatas. Thus, speaking kinetically, one might conceive this solo-cello-to-mixed-ensembletexture process as the evolution of a meta-cello, an all-encompassing Leviathan Instrument, a sonic and simultaneous Proteus, its capacity for individual expression sacrificed in exchange for the capacity to become many others at once. From an idea that may have been conceived kinetically, in the matrix of a composer’s own half-articulated relationship to his body’s ability to execute music, an ensemble treatment metamorphoses neither as simple continuation nor as more complex genealogy. Instead, the whole framework of idea-making—what originates in what, how sensation might be supposed to transform into concept—calls itself in question. This is nowhere so clear as around the phenomena of repetition and reminiscence.

recycling the idea of recycling In chapter 4 I discussed Boccherini’s related tendencies to repeat himself and to recycle his own ideas in light of the concept of idiom, as a process of kinetic self-confirmation. The deliberate or half-deliberate recycling of a passage seems to model that temporally constructed notion of the self proposed by Condillac. Consciousness not only gives us a knowledge of our perceptions; but moreover, if those perceptions be repeated, it frequently informs us that we had them

212

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

before, and represents them as belonging to us, and as affecting, notwithstanding their variety and succession, a being that is always the same self. . . . Without [these functions] every moment of our life would seem the first of our existence, and our knowledge would never extend beyond a first perception. 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 in the ensemble? If there is a bodily center upon which this process converges, it is profoundly compromised through the fact of its social enactment: the corporate 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 imitatively at the unison (see example 20; CD track 43). The passage offers a beautiful enactment of the problem of “repetition” in ensembles. Any supposed identity disintegrates in performance: for all the hours or years the quartet may have lavished on unifying their individual styles, even an untrained ear will have little trouble hearing the minute differences of tone and articulation between the two violinists. Enter the viola, and the difference becomes marked, since although the figure is still at the unison, it lies in a different tessitura on that instrument: it will have an urgency of timbre on the viola that is absent on the violins. Enter the cello and any lingering conceit of sameness becomes untenable: the figure is down an octave, its identity utterly changed. At this point, if not before, the listener-observer will most likely interpret the sequence of utterances as dialogue. Dialogue is a broad field indeed; 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, reduction, or “correction” of the original statement. Which of these very different options it becomes is almost entirely a matter of how the figure is executed. The reader need only imagine the minute adjustments it would take facially, in body posture, and in articulation and nuances of tone to make the second violin’s “echo” an unkind comment upon the first violin’s proposal. Intrinsic though such performed adjustments may be to the passage’s meaning, none of them are notated, nor can they be. As in the sonatas, so in the quartets Boccherini sometimes offers us “reminiscences” between movements accomplished through tertiary ideas. Examples 23a and 23b hail from the second and third movements respectively of op. 8, no. 5 (CD tracks 56 and 57). In each case the passage comes from the modulating section in the second half of the movement, and has no obvious relationship to the movement’s main or secondary ideas. Beyond this rough commonality, what the passages share is harmonic (a diminished seventh secondary dominant in both cases, and both arriving suddenly out of much blander harmonies), melodic-gestural (chains of falling minor thirds),

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

Allegro

vn. 1

&b C

vn. 2

&b C

vla.

vc.

b œ . œœ f

nœ bœ

˙

˙

∑

b œ . œœ

nœ bœ

b œ . œœ

nœ bœ

˙ ˙ f bœ œ œ bœ œ œ bœ œ œ B b C nœ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œœ p p f f n w w w ?b C w w w f 90

bœ . & b œ œ œn œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ n œ b œ Œ Ó & b bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ B b bœ ˙

œ

˙

˙

bœ . œœ

nœ bœ

˙

˙

b œ . œœ

nœ bœ

œb œ œ œ n œ œ bœ œ n œb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ w f w w n˙. œ bœ. œ

˙

œ nœ bœ ˙

˙ b œ . œœ

˙ nœ bœ

œb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

? b œ œ œ œ nw w f

nw w

nw w

95

& b b œ œ œ bœ œ œ n œ b œ œb œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ &b

b œ œ œb œ œ œn œb œ

œ œŸ. œœ‰ œ œŸ. œœ J

bœ ≤œ n œ b œ B b œbœ œ œ œ bœ Œ

Ó

? n˙. b

b˙

w

œ

˙

213

nw w

214

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

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

#œ œ œ

œ œ œ #˙

& b 43 œ œ # œ b ˙ 8

vn. 1

f

R.

vn. 2

vla.

vc.

bœ œ œ #œ

& b 43 Œ

3

R.

B b 43 Π? b 43

bœ ∑

bœ

œ

œ

˙

˙.

f n˙.

#œ

bœ

f Ÿ œœœ œœ #˙ & b œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ b ˙ p f f œœœ #œ b œ Œ &b ˙ ˙. R. œ ˙. Œ Bb ∑ œ

œ

bœ

œ

f

R.

œ

#œ

œ

nœ #œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

p œ œ œ Ÿ œ # œ. œ œ œ b œ œ œ

11

œ

œ œ #œ

R.

#œ

cresc.

?b œ œ

œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

˙

œ

œ

œœœ

œ

#˙

œ

œ p ( )

œ

and textural (imitation at the unison between the violins). However, they share neither pitches, nor meter, nor periodic structure. The first, Allegro passage is in common time with a six-bar phrase structure, while the passage from the Tempo di minuetto is in triple meter and four-bar phrases. These reminiscences are not consistently corporeal. They are not at all so in the cello or viola, which play entirely different lines in the two extracts, and a corporeal reminiscence can be teased out only through melodic transposition and a somewhat Procrustean rhythmic adaptation in the violin parts. It is clearly no longer 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 expert hands, or to any sort of comforting or confirmatory kinetic impulse. Thus does Boccherini go Condillac one better: he reminds us that in real life, the life that necessarily involves others, reminiscence is not always or only confirmatory. It can be perceptual destabilization, the uncontrollable

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

215

permeability of current experience by the past. Through the glass of repetitiveness he forces us to watch not only the progress but the inevitable slippage of the “same” thought—and thus the “same” self—as a direct result of its socialization. In ensemble settings in particular, Boccherini’s handling of repetition, thematic reminiscence, and cyclicity shows his sensitivity to the paradox that lies at the heart of the notion of “repetition.” His penchant for evasive, transmutational games around reprises similarly calls in question any notion of psychological or musical “structure” accomplished through memory. In the preceding chapters we encountered a number of examples: between movements in the Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, and similarly within the slow movement of the Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, reprise is transformed into an unearthly, unfamiliar, but consoling “substitute.” More markedly, over the course of the Sonata in C Major, G. 17 reminiscences are transformed from piercing nostalgia into bitter sarcasm. We cannot step in the same river twice; nor does the da capo (even should we elect not to ornament it), or the main theme, or yet the motive, ever really make the same impression upon us the second time around. Should we begin to imagine that we can do these things, it takes only the presence of others, executing themes and motives and da capos with all the inevitable or deliberate inconsistency of live performance, to disabuse us of our fond notion.

sublimated caresses Characteristic melodic devices which Boccherini had developed in the sonatas often carry over to his melody writing in the quartets, regardless of the instrument playing that melody. This is the simplest and yet the most opaque solo-to-quartet “translation”: a favorite type of physical-melodic gesture is used primarily for its sound and its affectual associations, since its tactility will have been profoundly altered through being executed on another instrument. I suggested in chapter 3, for instance, that in the passage from the Quartet in A Major, op. 8, no. 6, G. 170, shown in example 5 (CD track 10) sonic and affectual resonances are in some measure determined by the way 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, tender associations remain, reinforced by its resemblance to the vocalistic trope of the sigh; but its gestural associations have the potential to work across this grain. In the fourth bar of example 24, the entire quartet executes a throbbing rinforzando that emphasizes the harmonic tension in Boccherini’s favorite 4 voicing, where the most urgent tone in an urgent harmony, the seventh 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 dissolves as well; all this is as expected. But meanwhile the first violin has executed its

Example 24. String Quartet in E b Major, op. 9, no. 4, G. 174, i (Adagio), bars 13–18. 14

vn. 1

vn. 2

Adagio

b & b b 43 œ

Œ

b 3 &bb 4

œ bœ

œ

Œ

œ j œ

vla.

B b b b 43 œ

vc.

? b 3 bb 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ

˙

17

b n˙. &bb

b˙

cresc.

b & b b œJ œ cresc.

˙. B bbb R.

œ

p

œ J ˙. p œ p

œ œ

j œ

b˙

œ œ bœ

b˙

œ

œ

˙

œ

œ Œ Œ

œœœœœœ p œ.

œœœœœœ

j œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ 3

3

3

œ œ œ œœœ œ œ j œ œ œœ œ œ ‰

j ? b b b œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ Œ cresc. p

216

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

217

own half-step descent, moving from E n to E b. In so paralleling the bass’s descent, it becomes the seventh of a new dominant harmony. Thus the first violin mimes the expected tenderness of release through melody and volume, even as he incrementally resists release through harmony and gesture: the violinist’s hand has not “pulled in” but expanded ever so slightly out from his torso, while “release” is further complicated by the addition of a subito piano, which sounds like release, but requires increased restraint. A more complete release comes in the next bar. Voice-leading decrees that the first violin’s E b seventh should resolve downward in another half-step descent, and thus, on the violin, a little further still from the center of the body; but Boccherini has the first violin take the resolution down an octave. In this register, the resolving D is best executed with an open string—that is, by briefly releasing the left hand from its duties altogether. So central is the half-step descending gesture to Boccherini’s thinking that it becomes at times a mere ideal, strongly implied but not executed. In example 25, two successive perfect cadences are linked by two possible pathways of half-step descent (CD track 59). The first cadence confirms a modulation to G minor, and has a slightly “hard” quality due to its predominance of open strings. The second cadence, only a bar later, makes a curious, characteristically Boccherinian “sideways” approach to a reprise of the movement’s opening idea, in the much “softer,” more muted E b major, by means of a sort of third relation that is very characteristic of the composer.14 In the world 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 another example of this in the beginning of the second half of the Grave of the quartet op. 8, no. 4, discussed in chapter 5. He uses this convention here to suggest a set of delicately subliminal tensions. Descending-half-step motion is implied between the two dominant harmonies: the D-major dominant’s A and F # are respectively supplanted by A b and F n in the B b -major dominant. But these trajectories are interrupted by three intervening beats which contain a series of other pitch events (including the complete resolution of the first dominant). They are further interrupted by the physical space between bodies, as well as by the immeasurable abyss between persons: for the first violin’s A only becomes an A b in the hands of the second violin, whose urgent F #, meanwhile, has been melted into an F n and dropped an octave by the viola. (See the reduction in example 24.) It is a stretch to maintain that these are coherent gestures in any way, subjected as they are to temporal deferral, potent distraction and interpersonal displacement. Yet the stretch is precisely the point: how better to explain this reprise’s immense gentleness, its lingering affect of longing? These last examples come from slow movements, the sensible hearts of their respective quartets. Further foregrounding their sensibilité, Boccherini frequently associates the half-step descent with a distinctive bowing style: a

218

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

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

j b œ œ œ #œ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ. &bb c œ 22

vn. 1

vn. 2

b j &bb c œ

vla.

B bb b c œ

vc.

‰

? bb c b œ

nœ

t

œœ

œœ œ

‰

j œ

œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. # œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ

œ J

‰

œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ

6

6

6

œ

œ

œ œ # œ n œ œ œ œ n œj œ œ œ ‰

‰ œ

œ œ

6

œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. 6

6

nœ

œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

24

b &bb œ

˙

œ 6

6

˙

b j & b b œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. b œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ

‰

Œ

B bb b œ

j œ

‰

Œ

? bb œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ b

œ

œ

œ

? b bb

Bar 23

ww w

w

œ •

œ

œ

œ

6

6

b &bb

œ

# n www w

Bar 24

ww

bw w

ww

n ww

right-hand tremolando, variously notated by slurred staccati (as in example 25) or by a wavy line over the note heads. The tremolando bowing and the half-step descent have affectual kinship—both vocalistically evoke the softly palpitating viscera toward which the original cellistic withdrawing gesture moved—but there is also a kinetic resemblance that is perceptible on the violin or viola every bit as much as on the cello: both these usages, the one in the right hand and involving articulation, the other in the left and involving pitch, share the kinesthetic profile of the caress.

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

219

rococo These musical caresses epitomize the hedonistic quality in Boccherini’s work, a quality which resonates with certain values of the rococo. The word rococo comes from rocaille, “shellwork,” meaning the architectural and painterly cultivation of the decorative curlicue for its own sake. It seems to have had an odor of dismissal to it almost from the beginning; critics of every age are fond of attacking what they feel to be excessively ornamental.15 I use the term here with particular reference to Norman Bryson’s characterization of Boucher, Natoire, and several other French rococo painters as presenting a different kind of space from the perspectival, a space that arises from the focus on erotic objects, especially nudes or trysts. The existence of perspectival space as the space in which interaction, drama, change, discourse—in a word, “uneasiness”—arise is abandoned by these artists, in favor of a presentation of bodilyness “uniquely made to gratify and to be consumed in the moment of the glance.”16 Overly accurate location creates distance, relativity, 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, its exquisitely modulated transitions of color, the bewitching para-luminosity of tones that can come only from the patient application of layer upon layer of oil pigment. But we must also admit that this apotheosis of materiality is representational. There is no nervous modernist distancing from signification: all this sensual delight is served to the eye through the conventional signifier of a woman’s naked body. This makes it explicit that frankly erotic gazing is intended and appropriate; yet what is enjoyed here is only peripherally “a woman.” Just as present and far more physical are the facts of the exquisitely handled act of painting itself, and of the painter’s and viewer’s own bodies summoned toward one another through a lambent Venus. Bryson suggests that this happy, unproblematized doubleness, this “interest in the duplicity of the image,”17 is one of the most deeply characteristic attitudes of the French painterly rococo. It inhabits certain kinds of music as well. Boccherini invites and plays with the listener’s attention through the static passages in his music, which through their repetitiveness efface any sense of aural “perspective” or “location” within a phrase or period; the temporal structuration of listening is dissolved, the listener’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—in eighteenth-century analytical terms, any strong “idea”—hearing itself could be said to be “visualized” through this maneuver. Our ears’ attention readily settles upon the immediacy of sound, what we now call timbre. The word is French; but in the French of Boccherini’s day its meaning was only sec-

220

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

ondarily a musical one. Its primary meanings were visual: “imprint” or “impression,” watermarks on legal paper, the maker’s mark attached to pieces of lace.18 The momentary rich “darkness” of a dissonance, the “luminous” properties of a particular consonance, the “silky luster” of a certain violinist’s mid-range tone—we routinely use visualistic terminology to get at certain aspects of musical sensuousness. We are well accustomed to doing so; in English we use the even more frankly visualistic term tone color interchangeably with timbre. Rousseau scrappily contested this synesthetic maneuver, 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 one is enchanted; one has only to admire and contemplate ceaselessly. It is not so with sound; nature does not analyze it nor separate out its harmonics; she is hidden, on the contrary, within the appearance of the unison. . . . She inspires songs, not chords; she dictates melody, not harmony. Colors are the ornament of inanimate beings; all matter is colored; but sounds announce movement; the voice announces a feeling being.19

For Rousseau the atemporal immediacy of sensory impression, represented in this passage by color, is not just absolute or untranslatable: it is “inanimate,” inexpressive. Although he maintains with some correctness that we do not as a rule distinguish the individual harmonics within a tone, he evades the fact that everything about the nature of that tone—everything that enables us to distinguish by ear a violin from a flute, or a mechanical flutist from a living one, or indeed one living flutist from another—is contained in those harmonics; only with reference to timbre are we able to determine the rather crucial matter of which “feeling being” has announced itself to us. For all that we seem to accomplish this instantaneously, within a perception of singleness, the multiplicitous physics of the harmonic series were well understood at the time Rousseau was writing, thanks largely to the work of his nemesis Rameau: an apparently single tone contains any number of harmonics, 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 of the sonically immediate, is to invite the ear to what Rousseau calls the eye’s behavior: “All the riches of color are displayed simultaneously on the face of the earth; everything is [heard] with the first [sounds]. But the longer one [listens] the more one is enchanted; one has only to admire and contemplate 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 even more 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

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

221

thinks about the landscape in which she finds herself, and the company she keeps—including the strangers who gaze at her so raptly. Describing this music experientially, “getting at it” with a detail and finegrainedness that will even begin to gesture at the experience of hearing or playing it (no question of capturing or securing it: should I begin to dream of such success, there is Diderot’s despair to remind me of my hubris), is a constant struggle, yet one I feel is required by the very presence of the music; every single time I play Boccherini I am moved to try anew. How do I execute the tone notated on the score before me? How did Boccherini execute the F he is forever about to play in his Italian portrait? Leopold Mozart tells us how he began it: “Even the most strongly begun tone has a small, if scarcely perceptible delicacy at its beginning: without which it would not be a tone, but rather only a disagreeable and unintelligible noise. And this delicacy is also to be heard at the end of every tone.”20 Even in the apparently straightforward agency, the acting-upon represented by causing a string to vibrate, the player is a supplicant, the player asks of the string in courtesy, the player feels for the cooperative métier of the string’s very substance, which is as fibrous and as visceral as Sterne could ever have wished: the purified and stretched intestine of a sheep. Taken to heart (or more properly, to hand), this sensible receptivity parlays itself into almost infinite detail: how do we distinguish the rinforzando, sforzando, minute crescendo, and decrescendo (or are they accent marks? What actually is the difference?), the strategically placed forte, the unnotated forte implied by a subsequent piano, the tenuto, and all those especially beloved terms for playing softly—dolce, dolcissimo, soave, sotto voce —so liberally salted into Boccherini’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 conflicts with the meaning of the ensuing word, here intensifies it: sforzare, then, is to make a strong effort. But immediately a question arises: to what extent is this a direction to simply play a note more loudly, or with a sharper attack, than its fellows? Very little, I submit: for in playing a stringed instrument, one finds that increased sound bears at best a complex relationship to increased effort, which very readily becomes sonically counterproductive. (The corollary, of course, is the phenomenon discussed in chapter 4: extremely soft dynamics require a surprising amount of muscular tension). Perhaps, then, this sforzando requires me to resist the impulse to set the string violently vibrating through sheer 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 unintelligible noise.” Instead I must employ an infinitesimally brief restraint in the ini-

222

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

tial speed of contact between bow hair and string. Such a literalistic sforzando is indeed far more effortful to execute than one created by merely releasing kinetic energy. It will sound as well as look that way; and of course the resistance, the physical constraint in the sound production, has meaning of its own. Neither brash nor harsh, this is a strong emphasis that is, for all its strength, carefully considered and fully controlled. The design of a bow such as Boccherini used, with the stick curved slightly outward from the hair, and much lighter at the tip than at the frog, lends itself well to these tiny expressive withholdings and mitigated releases of energy. With a bow of later design, built to make a more direct attack and projected sustain, the player is apt to find herself further entangled in resistance to her very equipment. And then, in the ensemble context in which this sforzando perforce appears (this marking is not to be found in the solo music), how further to account for the element in its sound that is so important to good chambermusic making in general, and particularly essential to playing Boccherini’s music—that is, the making of a sound that is transparent enough to allow other parts to emerge more clearly? I must take account of the difference between making that sound in D major and making it in E b major, since stringed instruments resonate so differently in sharp and flat keys, and between 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, four or five musicians crammed in together—that is, a room such as those in which Boccherini lived and probably did some of his rehearsing; in an enormously resonant chapel with fifty-foot ceilings, faced in marble, where one might perform instrumental music between parts of a Mass, as Boccherini did in his early years in Lucca; in a fine large sitting room with draped windows on one wall and tapestries on the other three, half full of gentlemen in capes and ladies in petticoated, sound-absorbing skirts and mantles—like rooms in the Spanish palaces in which Boccherini worked in the second half of his life; and on the stage of the Burgtheater in Vienna, where Boccherini played several times between 1757 and 1764, a space purpose-built to project sound outward and enhance its clarity. The character of the sforzando conceived and executed in isolation alters as soon as others are in the room; as Diderot tells us in the “Paradoxe,” if it is conceived and executed with express reference to those others, it is altered at the root. Obviously, Boccherini wrote all of his music with the intention that it be performed; so others are present at the heart of even his most deeply introverted moments. His lifelong gravitation toward chamber music, which forms the great bulk of his output, bespeaks his concern with it as an extended metaphor for what the sforzando so microscopically embodies: social interaction, the negotiations between urgency and decorum, the mechanics of getting along. This is the sense in which we still understand and valorize chamber music today. The very term chamber music—musica da camera—

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

223

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 became a more detailed mimesis of social behavior, a site of that period’s anxiety over what happened to selfhood when it encountered society: the Social Contract in tones, as it were. This partial and still abstract address to a single sforzando took an hour and a half to write, and a further hour to revise. Any more extended such account, any that deals with Boccherini’s large vocabulary of articulational terms, each one unique by virtue of its peculiar tactile configuration in the context of a specific piece, will, while being the only true bearing-out of the critical apparatus that I have assembled over the preceding chapters, run into insuperable problems around the incommensurability of act and description. 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 extended reveries over a single act, a single word. It requires real leisure, and as such it bespeaks the very social class for which most of Boccherini’s chamber music was published. Being able to spend such time on a small and delicate thing was, and is, the most delicious luxury. And in the matter of really understanding 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 Don Luis de Borbón, were published in Paris the following year by Vénier. These pieces form Boccherini’s first opus of quartettini, the shorter works that were ultimately to comprise over half of his quartet output; and they are entitled “Divertimenti” in the first edition. I have already mentioned that in Boccherini’s case brevity does not consistently imply lightness or inconsequentiality; neither should the published title be taken to mean that they are less serious or personal works.21 On occasion these little pieces present some of their composer’s most characteristic musical thinking in a kind of strippeddown 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, nor indeed in the first movement at all, but tucked away in an episode in the second movement. This movement exhibits a typical Boccherinian “exploded” melodic line for much of its duration; but unlike most examples of this effacement of the melodic impulse it is marked “Prestissimo” and is far from dreamy (see example 26). While it is easy enough to describe the movement in 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 especially taxed by passages such as bars 25–48 (CD track 60). How are we to interpret this strange, awkward chunk of perpetuum mobile? Can it be a dead-

224

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

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 and use those sophisticated interactions between periodicity, line, and listenermemory that form one of the highest achievements of the so-called Classical style? Such readings scarcely acknowledge the high-mindedness and subtlety that I have been at pains to demonstrate in Boccherini. The passage in question is only one of a number of difficulties and contradictions with which this little quartet confronts us; it happens to be the one that first caught my attention in the course of reading through op.15. My initial reaction was amusement at its oddity and opacity; then bemusement, for I was convinced that its peculiarity was not anomalous, but some kind of Boccherinian essence. Analysis, as I propose to practice it here, is the attempt to distill this essence by description, comparison, and interpretation.

Analysis 1 To the extent that I will begin not with what I find most interesting, but with the beginning—the first movement of the quartet, reproduced in its entirety in example 26—I will practice analysis conventionally. (For the reader who is using the CD, it will work best to listen to the entire first movement at this point, track 61, before reading my discussion of it.) The movement is a striking exercise in certain samenesses. Out of its ninety-eight bars, fifty-three are voiced with the violins playing a tune in octaves, and the viola consistently above the second violin, in parallel thirds or sixths with the tune. In a 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 with the second violin or cello; but its tessitura remains above that of the second violin. In a handful of bars the violins play in octaves, with the viola moving more conventionally below the second violin. The only extended passage in which the violins do not carry the tune is the eight bars at the beginning of the second half (bars 45–52), where the prevalent texture is essentially reversed: the viola and cello play a tune in parallel sixths to the accompaniment of drones and arpeggios from the violins (CD track 62). There is no four-part writing proper in this entire movement; it is all in the “extended two-part texture” remarked upon by Speck and Amsterdam.22 The tune flows along unhindered, reinforcing its textural and timbral continuity on multiple levels: the dynamic (all but twelve of its ninety-eight bars are piano, pianissimo, sotto voce, or soave), the melodic and rhythmic (it is largely in conjunct sixteenth-note motion), and the articulational (almost all of it falls under four-note or eight-note slurs). The piece is even continuous on the most basic level of all, that of making sound as opposed to silence. Breathing places at the ends of the tune’s phrases, such as at bars 16 and 36, tend

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

sotto voce

pp 7

13

(continued)

225

Example 26. (continued) 19

25

Dolce

Dolce

Dolce

Dolce 31

39

226

Example 26. (continued) 46

52

rf

59

65

soave

soave

(continued)

227

Example 26. (continued) 72

78

Dolce

Dolce

Dolce

84

sf

92

228

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

229

to be filled in by melodic figures from lower voices, or, in the case of bars 28 and 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 interruptions of sound or gesture in the entire movement; we are alerted to them by the way the respective preceding bars, 55 and 57, disrupt the prevalent harmonic rhythm, rousing it from sleepy halves and quarters to move, in the second half of each bar, in decisive cadential eighth-notes (CD track 63). Within the framework of the general seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understanding of music as speechlike, musical silences are equivalent to punctuation in speech; and, as in speech, tiny gradations carry a good deal of meaning. One has only to speak the next sentence aloud to demonstrate this. “The pause and falling of pitch for a comma, as for the ones punctuating this clause, may be only a fraction of a second shorter than the pause and fall for the semicolon at its end; but in speech the difference between the two is perfectly clear to the listener, and both are distinct from the longer pause and fall occasioned by a full stop such as the one with which this statement closes.” A piece as sonically continuous as this movement of Boccherini’s has moved far from any speechlikeness, toward something really unrhetorical. The four bars punctuated by silences, 55–58, are the movement’s only foray into a demonstrativeness that might be taken as speechlike. This can be interpreted as the pathetic rhetoric of the unanswered question or entreaty, as follows: the statement in bars 55–561 meets silence; is repeated in bars 57–581 at a lower pitch and level of conviction (the harmonies being less tense), with another answering silence. With the resumption of continuous sound in bar 59 begins a retransition to the reprise, accomplished through a two-bar 5 /V→V formula, repeated once, and followed by a sad little 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 they were the site of some contention over interpretation. The pathetic reading proposed above was not accepted by all quartet members. Another interpretation 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 answer to the first, resulting in a very different rhetoric of satisfaction and fulfillment, and further confirmed by the subsequent retransition. These small areas of contest aside, this is a single-minded piece. There is essentially only one object of interest here—the tune—but its very smoothness, its insistence on continuousness, effaces it affectually and even perceptually. It does not change its countenance, nor move us anywhere new (save to the dominant key area and back, a motion so utterly conventional as to barely qualify as motion at all). With the brief exception of the interruptions described above, this tune fails to tell much of a story about any-

230

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

thing except its own small, momentary vicissitudes. The effect is a tableau vivant, 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’s opening gesture—loud (see example 27). (As before, the listening reader will do well to listen to the entire piece, CD track 64, before engaging with my discussion 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 first movement phrasing is maximally smoothed and elided, here it is sharply distinguished; the entire piece parses into unambiguous eight-bar phrases defined by clear cadences and sharp articulations. Most of these phrases are further divided into one-, two-, or four-bar blocks in the proto-architectural manner described by Speck (see chapter 3 above). These smaller chunks communicate with one another in various ways. There is exact repetition (as between 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 governing eight-bar level, however, communication or interrelation between sections is kept to a minimum. There is a return of the opening idea at the upbeat to bar 49, and one other return of a device (the second violin triplets at bar 25 reappear, though less prominently, from bar 73 to the end); a crescendo links the section at bars 65–72 with that at bars 73–80; but that is all. The ruling principle, then, is one of simple succession. For all its noisiness, it is the quiet sections of this piece that prove most memorable. The piano that marks the upbeat to bar 65 serves as a classic subito beginning for a crescendo, and makes the only really forceful connection 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 rarity.) As for the passage that begins in bar 25, the one that originally recommended this quartet to my closer attention (CD track 62), the second violin line, though it dominates the texture, can scarcely be called a melody, even by the somewhat relaxed standards of melodic interest and engagingness set by the movement to this point. The first violin’s bird-like comments are hopelessly snarled in the second’s triplets, by virtue of sitting exactly in the middle of them, both rhythmically and registrally. What direction the passage has comes through the harmonies outlined in the cello and viola parts. They are unremarkable harmonies indeed: two two-bar antecedent-consequent pairs, 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

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

10

17

24

(continued)

231

Example 27. (continued) 31

37

43

49

232

Example 27. (continued)

58

cres. 67

cres.

cres.

cres.

75

82

233

234

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

of miniature tableaux joined by little save rhythmic propulsiveness and a prevailing atmosphere of slightly wild gaiety—a hurried visit to a fair or circus. Our topical progress through this little carnival has an unpredictable quality; we several times round a corner onto a scene of unexplained celebration, and in the passage at bars 25–48 are granted one extended peek at the hushed, frenetic workings of a mysterious piece of musical clockwork. As in a 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 examples printed within this chapter, and its main points audible through the performance of the quartet included on the CD. The suggestions I have made as to the work’s structure and expressive purposes are verifiable (or deniable) chiefly through the reader’s reference to these examples. For the musically educated reader who elects to read the score and not to listen, the visual, silently subvocalizing cooperation in this project produces a strange “performance,” heard only in the mind’s ear, visually constituted and confirmed, and temporally unbound: it is obliged neither to proceed in order, nor to begin at the beginning, nor to finish. The score-reader can “fast-forward” through the parts already understood or considered uninteresting; she can repeat other sections obsessively; she can juxtapose widely separated sections of the piece as though they were adjacent. The analytical listener to the enclosed recording exists in a curious, liminal relationship to the score-reader. By virtue of the tracking of my examples on the CD, he can in fact mimic many of the score-reader’s atemporal habits; and although his being able to hear this music brings it a giant step closer on the corporeal plane, he too is cut off from the living, breathing experience of the bodies that perform the quartet, since they are forever, and increasingly, distanced in time and place (the recording was made in San Francisco in 1996). There is ultimately very little of the necessarily time- and gesture-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 them to people. That’s how they come in real life, you know. Author: You’re right. Perhaps I should introduce you all to the reader. 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?

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

235

Cellist/Author: Well, um . . . I must say it’s quite uncomfortable to do it this 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 foremost works 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 would include the quartet as a unit, and various subsets and temporary alliances within it; mathematically, this breaks down to six potential pairs and four trios. First Violinist: Then there’s Boccherini, or is it his ghost? I mean his virtual presence, the one you propose in chapter 1? Cellist/Author: Yes, he’s here too, and very important, though he can only 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 right now! 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 our rehearsals. 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 this conversation is going to have came from that, though. Second Violinist: (to the Violist) Don’t be too hard on her. There’s just no way 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 my note taking was that the two main sources of information on which I had relied in examining the sonatas had shifted 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. “Eyesclosed” information—passages oriented to my body-sense, and essentially inward-turned—the places where what I

236

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

First Violinist: Cellist/Author: Violist: Cellist/Author:

First Violinist:

Cellist/Author:

Violist: Second Violinist: Cellist/Author: Violist: Cellist/Author:

surmise to have been Boccherini’s own technical comfort or enjoyment was the clearest motivation for a gesture or passage: well, this was still to be found, but it was always mitigated in some way by the, the, um—group situations. You mean, by our being there with you. Yes. Certainly closing one’s eyes in a room with others is quite a different matter from doing it while alone. “Eyes-open” information came, obviously, from looking and was confirmed by asking. However, looking at the three of you play, I was never “simply observing,” but was constantly projecting myself into your actions, making a kind of cellistic subvocalization or translation all the while. I can see how you’d do that. The cello and the violins sound and are held very differently, but their tuning, fingering, and tone production are all part of the same system. One sort of knows roughly how it’s done: I can “get around” on your instrument, or you on mine. And so while playing, in your presence, my comfort or pleasure was no longer entirely of my own creation; what each of you did, the sounds you made, and even, I think, the feelings you had in making them, all figured in my resulting experience. That sounds exactly like the sensible permeability you keep talking about. Yes, and I think I see arising from it a third class of information: interaction, communication, cooperation. Diderot is so eloquent on just this point, and since he is the presiding genius of this dialogue, I can’t resist . . . (to the reader, resignedly) She does this all the time. Diderot’s image is of the corporate entity of the hive, arising from the several and specific actions of individual bees. Here’s Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse. She’s giving us an account of her friend d’Alembert’s strange spoken dream, and her waking responses to it. (reads) He began to shout: “Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse! Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse!—What do you want?—Have you ever seen a swarm of bees leave their hive? . . . The World, or the general mass of matter, that’s the hive. . . . Have

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

237

you seen them go and form, at the tip of a branch of a tree, a long cluster of little winged animals, all linked to one another by their feet? This cluster is a being, an individual, some form of animal. . . . If one of these bees decides to somehow sting one of the bees to which it is linked, what do you believe will happen? Tell me.—I’ve no idea. . . . —That bee will sting the next one; it will arouse as many sensations in the cluster as there are little animals. . . . The whole will become agitated, will move about, change situation and form; a noise will arise, little cries. . . . Anyone who had never seen such a swarm arranging itself would be tempted to take it for a single animal with five or six hundred heads and a thousand or twelve hundred wings.”24

First Violinist: So an account of “a quartet,” which is really a group activity, will end up being an account of the minute actions 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 go overboard? I mean, is the reader really going to want to know that I played out of tune just here because my nose was itching fiercely—I wanted to scratch it, oh, how I wanted to scratch it—I lost my concentration and some bad notes popped out—and then you played flat all that next phrase, something you often do in reaction, it seems to me— Cellist/Author: (laughing) Yes, it becomes clear right away that there have to be some guidelines. I’ve spent a goodly amount of time working out what those might be. Violist: That’s right—let me see: pleasure/unpleasantness, and ease/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

238

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

Violist: Cellist/Author:

Second Violinist: Cellist/Author: First Violinist:

continua in mind as we work. I’ll take notes the whole time— Just kindly remember you have some notes to play, too! And then at the end, I’d like to do one complete playthrough 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 those continua, and we’ll continue this discussion from there. So this analysis will not be temporally unbound at all, but specific to that one performance of the piece. Yes; but within the context of our long association, and our having learned it together previously. This sounds fine, but I’m getting worried about learning all this music. Let’s begin straight away.

(There follow three days of rehearsal, interspersed by tea and coffee breaks, at the end of which the quartet gathers, a little nervously, for the “analysis.”) Cellist/Author: So I have written down a series of questions. Really, it came out a sort of questionnaire. I want us to direct our attention to them before we play through, and then try to answer them specifically right after we play each movement. (Hands out sheets of paper with the following questions on them; the quartet spends some 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 to another instrumental part? 2b. Which part in each case? 2c. With which element in your body do you most strongly feel that connection in each case? 2d. To what element in the body of that other part’s player do you feel the strongest 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 other parts? What does this feel like physically in each case? 4a. If the quartet as a whole is a metaphorical “body,” what part of or element in it is your part? 4b. Is this different for Boccherini than for other composers? How?

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

239

5a. What is the most physically pleasant moment for you in each movement? 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 scarcely meant 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 member spends fifteen minutes writing down some responses to the questionnaire.) First Violinist: Well! What a hard piece. And thinking about all that stuff tied 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 always tense up and sound scratchy at that sudden forte in bar 43: I hold my breath in my chest. Did anyone else feel this was a 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,

240

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

First Violinist:

Cellist/Author: Second Violinist:

First Violinist:

Violist: First Violinist:

Cellist/Author: Second Violinist: First Violinist:

Cellist/Author:

Violist: Cellist/Author: Violist:

to know how to balance with the other parts. Not only is this the hardest and worst-sounding place, it’s also the most unpleasant for me. (CD track 66) Good heavens, I had no idea you were experiencing that! In fact it’s just before that—let’s see, bars 15–17—that I felt especially connected with the group—and it was really quite pleasant. One of my favorite passages. (to the Second Violinist) So where was it most difficult for you? Oh, that would have to be in bars 25 to 27. All those trills, too many sharps, I have to keep shifting position to play any of it—it’s really awkward writing. I experience it as the most unpleasant place too, and I suspect it’s where I sound worst. (CD track 67) I noticed I sound bad there too—my E string feels so strident. But since we’re in octaves, maybe it’s not me at all. (to the Second Violinist) You’re fluffing around there in an unresonant part of your violin, and not helping support my tone, the way the lower octave ought to do. This seems as if you two are feeling connected through something that feels bad. Yes . . . I guess I’m pretty aware that he’s struggling over there. It doesn’t help me out. Sort of a negative connection, a misconnection, as it were. Is the feeling of misconnection mutual? Not at all. I’m so caught up in my part right there, I wasn’t the least bit aware of her. That’s an interesting distinction, isn’t it: no connection at all, versus misconnection. And I suspect that the one plays some part in causing the other. I’m struck by how our discussion immediately gravitated to the things that went badly. It’s what musicians always do. Well, we’re trained to, aren’t we? It’s how we know what to improve. Yes, but you know we go well beyond that into being obsessive about it. I’m also struck by how things going badly was so welded to unpleasantness for each of us.

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

241

Second Violinist: Well, it would be a strange player who enjoyed it when things went wrong! Cellist/Author: True enough. But I’m wondering if those experiences are always necessarily connected. Did anyone experience unpleasantness on any other basis? Violist: Well—there are a few places in this piece where I’m finding 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 the harmonies and the voice-leading are tricky—no, I’ll be frank, I think they’re inept. Passages like these just don’t feel good, even when we play them well. Cellist/Author: You’re saying that the one who’s doing badly in those places is old Luigi himself, with his non-textbook handling 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 these criteria 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 my sense 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 experienced a long stretch—bars 5–12—in which I was feeling quite disconnected from all of you, frankly. Solid, independent, marching to my own drummer. I was taking considerable pleasure in the fact. Violist: And you stopped feeling “independent” shortly before the first violin felt particularly connected to you? Cellist/Author: Yes. . . . Could it be, I wonder, that she picked up my “rejoining the group” subliminally?

242

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

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 you feel it? Second Violinist: I felt it all over my upper body. Just, well, relief. A breathing place. First Violinist: Oh, how strange. Because that’s really a very unpleasant place 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 most of this piece, so I feel I’m contributing something of my own 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 body changed 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’ve been playing above you there, and syncopated and suspended against your line; and then we finish together with that nice little lockstep gesture in bar 90. Cellist/Author: Where before you felt a general independence, a separateness, 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 Second Violinist) Just out of curiosity—did you feel any reciprocal sense 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.

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

243

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 body parts, it’s as if my ear were glued to her voice, or her left hand. 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 resonance between 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 and sounding bad, though for slightly different reasons. So there’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 my stomach. . . . But you said you were taking pleasure in your 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 of connection in the agreement to pursue separate pleasures at certain times. Cellist/Author: It’s ironic that so many of our most similar experiences cluster around those rare places where the music’s texture or character becomes less “similar”—that is, less homogenous. This induces the suspicion that we felt at least as much constrained as enabled because of the samenesses between our parts: the plentiful octaves between the violins, for instance, which take real vigilance to balance and to tune. A certain level of tension between individuality and cooperation seems to become a theme of this piece as—and only as—expressed in performance. First Violinist: What about at the cadences at the end of each half ? Had we any simple unity of feeling there? I, for one, felt I sounded bad and felt unpleasant in bar 43. In my torso again. (This can be heard in CD track 62.)

244

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

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 seems that there was no one place where all of us felt the same thing. Cellist/Author: You’re right, alas. The heterogeneity of our responses is striking, and pretty dismaying to my analytic compulsion for order! Furthermore, it is sobering to put my own sensible assumptions about the nature of making chamber music next to this evidence of the profound extent to which a single “piece” of ensemble music can be an experiential patchwork of tenuously related impressions, assumptions, and failed connections. Violist: It is only one short piece, after all; it can’t be a microcosm of all chamber music, or even of all of Boccherini. Second Violinist: And even as detailed as they are, there is a certain crudity to these questions. They focus only on the poles of each continuum, and so our accounts consist of isolated points and episodes—the most pleasurable moment, the worstsounding passage, and so on. Transitions between experiences are not represented, nor are subsidiary states of being. Cellist/Author: I’m thinking of my friend Tiepolo again. He paints those big, active crowd scenes, but no one in them is looking at anyone else. Violist: Are you saying they’re alienated from each other? And that we are too? Cellist/Author: No. Not necessarily anyway. In their effort to make sense of this tendency in Tiepolo’s paintings, Baxandall and Alpers 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 are made between levels of attention and address. . . . They make for a particular kind of performance which is theatrical but anti-dramatic.25

Doesn’t that sound like us?

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

245

Violist: I suppose the comic finale, as much as anything, does get at all those broken lines of questioning, the doublings and treblings of intention and response, the webwork of thought 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 myriad contradictions, shadings, and sub-narratives of actual performing experience. But we haven’t time, ever, to articulate it all. First Violinist: Nevertheless, your questions did clarify some other tendencies you haven’t mentioned. Each one of us seems to favor very personal sites for our sensations, and different “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 you two seem to locate a lot of your experiences in your ears and hands. That brings me to my question 4a, an attempt to elicit some sense of a unitary quartet “body” from its members. 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 of balance 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 these responses, along the lines of the traditional metaphorical use of “high” and “low,” which seem to indicate not only range, but bodily proximity to the ground. I identified below the waist, and you violinists well above it. (to the Violist) And your self-identification as “connective tissue” makes sense because in this movement your part is so thoroughly intricated between the violins’. Here, and also in that place in bars 18 and 19 where you so disliked

246

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

Violist: Cellist/Author:

Second Violinist: Violist:

Boccherini’s part-writing, you take what I would have called a “structural feature of the music” as a bodily experience. Yes, I suppose I do. This degree of identification, in which the piece becomes an articulation of the performer’s own body—its learned responses and its physical quiddity—marks a difficult boundary in the framing of my questions: it is the edge of the deep woods of irreducible subjectivity. Hm. Well, on that note: what about the second movement? 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” has changed for this piece. I, for one, felt quite similar— if not a seat, I was a leg, but a rider’s leg: maintaining balance and support, but not actually providing locomotion. 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 this movement. Instead of being welded to the violins, you’re in octaves with me much of the time. So I can see that instead of being “connective tissue,” metaphorically you’d be something, well, lower down. As indeed you were: “feet and knees” to my “leg.” So—did you experience this as connection with me? And was it pleasant or otherwise? Violist: Well, it varied. But I’d say that the most extended passage of connection, which would be bars 25 through 48, were an experience of connection all right. I felt enslaved to you. (CD track 60) Cellist/Author: Enslaved! That’s a radical form of connection. That goes well beyond the chamber music ideal of blended individuality, and into self-obliteration.

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

247

Violist: (to me) What did you feel through there? I do hope it wasn’t mastery! Cellist/Author: Well, I felt those bars were one of the easiest places for me to 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 even enjoy it! Cellist/Author: I’ll just say that the passage suggests to me that there’s a particular kind of disconnection from others that comes from feeling in control, and that during it I sounded particularly 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 involve strategic amounts of both connection and disconnection—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 on during bars 25–48 with the violins. First Violinist: Well, I feel I sound good through there too. It’s easy to play, lies well on the instrument. So for me it’s a site of pleasure 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 over there.

248

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

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 more awkward for having to be contained and suppressed within piano, makes it really unpleasant to play. And I get so wrapped up in just trying to get through this—this minefield, that I end up feeling completely disconnected from 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 it apprehensive connection. You’re afraid of having a bad effect on us. Second Violinist: Yes, I am. In its way, it’s a motivation to make it through the passage. But what about all of you? From all you’ve been saying about control and mastery and feeling connected to each other, you seem mightily unconcerned about 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, you know. That’s just so basic to this kind of music-making that 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 you automatically adjust to his part. Cellist/Author: I’m tempted to continue both his and your analogies, and say that any sane driver, while in a minefield, will attempt to drive around the mines. Violist: Hmmm. . . . I’m thinking that this passage suggests yet another analytic continuum. What about experiential consonance/dissonance?

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

249

Second Violinist: How so? Violist: Well, during this peculiar passage, these bars 25–48, we’re each having pretty vivid experiences, but radically different ones. I’d call that experiential dissonance. The cellist and First Violinist each enjoy experiences of ease and of sounding good to themselves—experiences that seem rather solipsistic and insensible, given the simultaneous physical and social struggles of the Second Violinist: Meanwhile, I enter into a helplessly mechanical relation to the cellist— Cellist/Author: Interesting that you’d call it “mechanical,” since in my preliminary analysis of this piece I suggested a mechanical-clock topos for this passage. Second Violinist: That’s a pretty problematic mechanism. (to the Violist) Neither your “enslavement,” nor my difficulty and unpleasantness are generally recognized features of mechanism—to the contrary, in fact: a mechanism is something 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 so awkwardly? He is so sensitive to the capabilities of stringed instruments. Cellist/Author: For that very reason I think we must suppose that this cruel piece of writing is not composerly carelessness but a finely calculated effect. And if we do so, a further range of meanings becomes available to us. Some potential incompatibilities of the mechanism topos with fallible human nature are rather heavily underlined; the carnival topos is enriched by the addition of a clown or grotesque— 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 disconnection within 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!

250

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

Cellist/Author: But perhaps we can recollect ourselves enough to agree that 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, and structural ordinariness, even banality. My initial analysis was intended to show how attention to the piece’s textures, affects, and topoi can suggest a more adequate explanatory language. But in referring to performed physical experience, we find a mode of interpretation that has something like the complexity and conflictedness of the puzzling little piece itself. With care and refinement, I think such a method can begin to articulate the elusive qualities in Boccherini’s genius. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that there are many hitherto elusive qualities in eighteenth-century music in general that can find new articulation through such an approach.

Suite de la Conversation (Several weeks later. The quartet has now recorded the piece discussed above, and, in company with L———, the producer, has just finished listening to playbacks of the first 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 my questionnaire. Violist: Ease/difficulty, good/bad, all that stuff ? Cellist/Author: Yes. You remember. Violist: Well we just finished making a long series of decisions about what sounded good or bad; that’s what editing is. Cellist/Author: True enough; I suppose in the end the recording itself is the clearest testimony to that process. But what about the other parameters? Second Violinist: Well, surely we all noticed that there were some very clear sites of difficulty in the recording process. And it seems to me that L——— is in the perfect position to point them

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

Producer:

First Violinist: Producer:

Violist: Cellist/Author:

Producer:

Violist:

Producer:

Cellist/Author:

251

out, since she was taking notes in the score every time we played. Well, there’s a very simple level on which I can address that: my list here shows how many “takes,” that is, times through, you all needed in order to record each passage adequately. That should be a pretty direct indicator of ease and difficulty! (shuffling through her notes) Let’s talk about the first movement. The most takes and retakes happened around the double-bar repeat signs. That was true whether they repeated, or went on to the following section. Well, that certainly reinforces my unhappy experience of bars 43 and 44. (This can be heard in CD track 62.) Yes; there were persistent intonation and tone quality issues. But I think it was more than that—the worst problem at those places was ensemble. Really! Right where we all come together in the same cadential gestures! Well, exactly. If our prior experience with these questions has taught us anything, it’s that an executional “coming together” isn’t a particularly inevitable or natural process, despite our tendency to idealistically assume so. Yes, just look at the last sixteen bars of the piece, bar 83 to the end. You did seven takes of that the first time around—in order to take the repeat, I mean—and eleven takes for the second time, in order to end the movement. And six of those last eleven were simply in order to get the last bar’s final cadence right. Ouch . . . But I seem to remember that one of the problems we were dealing with in recording that final cadence was the difficulty of coming up with an ending that sounded emphatic and demonstrative enough, when in fact we hadn’t actually played the whole movement prior to it. Yes, that’s true. That’s a fact of modern studio recording: things are usually stitched together out of many different shorter takes, and so sometimes you have to sort of re-create coherence and momentum. (peering over L———’s shoulder at the list of takes) Nevertheless, it’s interesting to me how in stitching together our first edit, we chose so many passages from

252

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

Producer: First Violinist:

Second Violinist:

Violist: Cellist/Author:

Producer:

Second Violinist: Producer:

First Violinist: Violist:

Second Violinist:

Producer: Second Violinist: Producer: Second Violinist: Producer:

the longer takes, takes where we’d played an entire half of a movement at a stretch. Yes, I’d say about two thirds of this whole first edit came from the same four or five longer takes. (likewise peering at the producer’s notes) I notice that that gnarly passage that begins in bar 25, where the second violin and I experienced so much unpleasantness and difficulty in rehearsal, wasn’t so problematic in recording. (CD track 67) We used the longer, earlier takes in our edit. That suggests to me that continuity of execution can, at least sometimes, “carry” us through quite a lot of a piece’s difficulties. Isn’t that exactly what we practice for? I mean, that the “flow” of a piece not be broken by its difficulties? Well, yes, it is. What I’m noticing here is that this seems to go two ways. When the piece stops flowing, it creates difficulties: hence our problems recording the cadences. Yes, and that bears out in the difficulties you had with bars 55–58, the passage with the silences. Six takes to get that right. (CD track 63) This is making me curious about the second movement, of course, since it’s anything but flowing and continuous. Well now, that was interesting. The piece is a choppy one with a lot of internal cadences, but the cadence at the end of the movement was still much the most problematic. Five takes for the repeat, six for the ending. So it’s not just continuity-versus-cadences that’s the issue here, I guess. It’s endings. It’s occurring to me that cadences may be “where we all come together,” but they’re also inevitably where energy disperses. No wonder they’re problematic. Dare I suppose that the cadence issue was more problematic in recording than was my “minefield” passage? Oh, no, I’m afraid not . . . All right, give me the bad news. How many takes? Well . . . All told, thirteen. Not all of them complete. And how many of those did we end up using in the edit? Well, that’s interesting too. In the end, we pretty much

“it is all cloth of the same piece”

First Violinist: Second Violinist:

Violist:

Producer:

Cellist/Author: Second Violinist:

253

stuck with just one take, your fourth time through the passage. (in exasperation) Then why ever did we record nine further takes? There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns in dependably executing passagework of that kind, and it just took us a while to realize that I’d passed that point. (to the Second Violinist) The funny part was how, when you hit the neurological wall and started messing up, we all went with you. 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 begin together. There’s a down side, I guess, to the metaphor of the bees. One bee loses it, and there goes the whole hive . . . You better be careful about insulting me any more, or you’ll be the one stung . . . “a noise will arise, little cries . . . ”

(The group moves into the kitchen for tea, and the conversation turns to gossip.)

Chapter 7

The Perfect Listener A Recreation

In 1781 Boccherini sent the following inquiry through the Viennese publishing house Artaria, with whom he had just established a working relationship: February 1781 I hope you will do me a favor, which I will value greatly, and it is that if one of you gentlemen (as is probable) should be acquainted with Signor Joseph Haydn, writer, who is held in the highest regard by me and by all others, you might offer him my respects, saying that I am one of the most passionate connoisseurs and admirers both of his genius and of his musical compositions, which here receive all the acclaim that in strict justice they deserve.1

Haydn tried more than once to follow through by writing back to Artaria but, as far as we know, to no avail. [27 May 1781] I send herewith the letter from Herr Boccherini; please give my most dutiful compliments to him in return. No one here can tell me where this place Arenas is. It must not be far from Madrid; but please let me know this, so that I can write to Herr Boccherini myself.2 [late July 1782] Accordingly I send both letters, regretting only that I cannot write to Herr Boccherini with my own hand at this time; if you will pay my most devoted respects to his honorable self at a convenient time, I shall be obliged to you.3

Despite assertions of their subsequent enduring friendship in the obituary for Boccherini that appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and elsewhere, we can be fairly sure that the two men never made direct contact.4 But Haydn would have had plenty of opportunities to become acquainted with Boccherini’s music. Boccherini first made his name in Aus254

the perfect listener

255

tria through his early appearances in Vienna, and his reputation was maintained there by means of scores in Parisian editions, made available through Viennese music-sellers. As early as 1769, Boccherini’s trios and quartets (these must have been opp.1 and 2, respectively) were being sold at the Viennese establishment of the copyist Simon Haschke; from 1771 to 1776, trios, quartets, the sonatas for violin and keyboard, and some symphonies were purveyed by the bookseller Hermann Joseph Krüchten; and from 1776 Artaria itself offered for sale the Parisian prints of “an entire series of Boccherini’s compositions.”5 Once Boccherini began to be printed in Vienna in the mid-1780s, his music, especially the string quartets, sold extremely well there, putting him “in the first rank of quartet composers.”6 Not just in Vienna, but in London too: by the time of Haydn’s first visit to the English capital in 1791–92 he would scarcely have been able to avoid Boccherini’s presence there in editions both legitimate and pirated.7 That Boccherini’s music had been popular in London as early as 1781 is attested by the exchange between Burney and Twining regarding its merits, which began in that year. The opportunities were there, then; in the end, however, we do not know the extent to which Haydn was acquainted with Boccherini’s music. We can be more sure of the other side of the equation. Cambini tells us that Boccherini had performed Haydn’s music as early as 1765 in northern Italy; more speculatively, we can assume that he would have had opportunities to hear Haydn’s symphonies and chamber music in Paris in 1769. But his most extended contact with Haydn’s works undoubtedly came in Spain. By 1781, the year of Boccherini’s first attempt to communicate with him, Haydn’s music was known and esteemed in Spain (“his musical compositions . . . here receive all the acclaim that in strict justice they deserve”). The channels of its arrival and distribution in that country have been thoroughly documented.8 Haydn was a pet of the afrancesados, and this more than anything else would have put his work in Boccherini’s path—and not casually either; a few years later, when Boccherini assumed the duties of music director for the Benavente-Osuna household, he became responsible for choosing, copying, rehearsing, and performing the numerous works by Haydn held in their library, which formed the most complete Haydn collection in Spain. Although we cannot be sure of the precise extent of their knowledge of each other’s work, in their virtual, printed embodiments the two composers were fellow guests in countless musical establishments large and small, professional and amateur, there savored, admired, and inevitably compared with each other. Late-century music-lovers variously represent the HaydnBoccherini polarity as light-dark, comic-tragic, male-female, intellect-sensibility, introverted-extraverted. I have examined a few of these comparisons above; they have varying degrees of subtlety, and naturally the more thoughtful writers tend to be more nuanced about it. Thus Burney takes Twining to

256

the perfect listener

task for his underestimation of Haydn, and Twining Burney for his failure to acknowledge Boccherini’s strengths. Cambini, as we have seen in chapter 3, associates Boccherini with tragedy, and Haydn’s instrumental music not just with comedy but with the comédie-larmoyante, and a specific one at that: Rousseau’s Le Devin du village. In 1799 an anonymous reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung denied Boccherini’s quartets “that greatness of bold genius in layout, scope, and strikingness” that was to be found in Haydn’s;9 and in 1809 Johann Baptist Schaul allowed Haydn’s quartets “a satisfaction of the intellect, of willful construction,” while Boccherini’s works, “in contrast, set [one] aquiver, agitated, cast into restless motion.”10 The 1805 obituary of Boccherini in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung implied that Haydn’s music was “difficult, artificial, and learned,” as against “the melodic element” in Boccherini;11 Pierre Baillot continued this vein of comparison somewhat more poetically by telling us that Haydn “embraces all creation in one glance” while Boccherini “seeks to return us to our primitive innocence.”12 Others were more poetic still, or downright aphoristic. Charles Chênedollé wrote in 1808 that Boccherini “is more intoxicating than Haydn”;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 played to him”; and finally, most famously and most lamentably, there is the remark of the Italian violinist Giovanni Puppo: “Boccherini is the wife of Haydn.”14 Puppo’s reductio ad absurdum (and its regrettable repetition in Boccherini criticism ever since) emphasizes the limited usefulness and interest of critical polarities. At its most bald and least useful, we have Haydn as comic, witty, and cleverly structured at the expense of depth, and Boccherini as introverted, soft, and morbid at the expense of plan and design. By engaging in a more detailed and experientially grounded consideration in this book, I have tried to give empiricism a chance to do what it does so well: to muddy the pristine waters of stereotype. What then of the Haydn end of this much-inscribed polarity? It works well to look at Haydn’s music through the Boccherinian lens I have been grinding: that is, to treat his music as evidence of, and meaningful engagement with, the physical processes of execution and performance. His delight in performative play (pauses, double entendres, an endless vocabulary of surprises) 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 fascinating pair of linked statements, quoted by his early biographer Griesinger, Haydn made it clear that he incorporated the idiom of his main instrument into his inventio, and that he regarded first-hand experience of vocal idiom as essential to compositional mastery. One could even read him as implying that

the perfect listener

257

the coherence of his ideas was due in some measure to their executional genesis and working-through. Haydn always composed (dichtete [the same word as that used for composing poetry]) 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 I got hold of an idea, my whole endeavor went into executing and sustaining it according to the rules of art. Thus did I seek to help myself; and it is this which so many of our new composers lack; they string one bit after another, they break off when they have scarcely begun: but when one has heard [their work], nothing rests in the heart.” He also disapproved that these days so many musicians compose who have never learned to sing. “Singing,” he said, “is almost to be counted among the lost 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 inventio 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 stringed instrument. 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 for the instrument make it plain that Haydn was also no mean violinist. More surprisingly, perhaps, his writing for the cello—which he did not play—shows a really extraordinary sensitivity to matters of sonority and technique. It would not be difficult at all to show how Haydn’s cello writing from different periods constitutes a series of executional “portraits” of the cellists with whom he worked: Joseph Weigl’s virtuosity, as represented in the “Times of Day” symphonies of 1761 (Hob. I:6, 7, and 8), differed in many telling particulars from that of Anton Kraft, memorialized in the Cello Concerto in D Major, Hob. VIIb:2, of 1783.17 I leave such tempting projects for another time or place, however, since I hope that I have by now sufficiently adumbrated a methodology. It is instead the position of the listener, the kinesthetic outsider, that I wish to develop at this point—that “outsider” who is no outsider at all, being in fact intrinsic to the whole performative equation, whether as that coolly evaluative, Diderotic part of the executant’s mind that hears and judges even as she plays, or as that separate person who sits and listens to another’s efforts (and whose separateness is utterly compromised by sensible absorption). The listener has also her processes of execution, after all: she executes reception, evaluation, and identification, and does so in her body.

258

the perfect listener

the perfect listener As we adjust our speech to the one spoken to, as I write to a particular imagined reader, so the composer-performer of Boccherini’s generation shaped sound and action to the tastes of a more or less precisely imagined audience. The age of an “absolute” music created with explicit disregard for matters of listeners’ taste (even as that disregard simply implied other tastes, tastes for abstraction and disinterestedness) was yet to come. Just as the composerperformer’s embodied experience informed musical choices on every level, so did that of the listeners, and every bit as constantly and essentially. In this sense, the whole affair of performance is one of repeated mutual confirmation, negation, and refinement of the hypothesis: This is a body and this is what it means to have one. The bodies of eighteenth-century listeners have frequented this book with some consistency. What I wish to do here is to bring them into a more active dialogue with their living counterparts. This is, then, a form of historical performance practice; I theorize and perform the Perfect Listener with the express understanding that my reader (you who are, of course, the Perfect Reader!) will make some attempt to accommodate her, adapt to her, absorptively engage with her: in the last degree, become her. In effect, I make here the same demand of my reader as did Condillac in the preface to his Traité des sensations. The following passage stands as a gateway to all that follows, 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 the place of the statue which we are going to observe. You must begin to exist with her, having but one sole sense when she has but one; acquiring only those ideas which she acquires, contracting only those habits that she contracts: in a word, you must be only what she is. She will judge things as we do only when she has all our senses and all our experience; and we will judge as she does only when we suppose ourselves deprived of all that she lacks. I believe that those readers who put themselves exactly in her place will have no difficulty in understanding this work; others will confront me with innumerable difficulties.18

The Perfect Listener is, however, hydra-headed. At even a moderate level of detail, the differences between her faces become as significant as the commonalities. We have a bewildering range of choice: shall we take the Parisian, or British, or Viennese sensible amateur as our model? The Madrilenian tertulista with populist affectations? Is she melancholy? consumptive? Has she some proficiency on the instruments involved or is she innocent of it? Is she a habituée of the opera, or of “lower” kinds of theater—or does she prefer private venues? The honorific “Perfect” is of course ironic; if anything has

the perfect listener

259

emerged clearly in this book so far it is that acts of trans-historical identification 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 read thus far you would seem to be a willing participant in extended thoughtexperiments about musical meaning; I would dare infer from this (and certainly hope!) that you value speculation as an intellectual tool. Our experiment begins with walking into the performance space, an act which has its sonic reenactment a few minutes later when the sonata begins. Let us posit an intimate but still public concert. Other people are probably here already, some of whom we know and some of whom we don’t. We are faintly and immediately self-conscious at their presence, and this persists for the duration of the event. The fact is that they can see us, as we them, and this has a good deal to do with the next level of physical framing. Very much as for the players, for us listeners many, in fact most, physical possibilities are excluded. We are not free to wander about; “a certain basic position is mandated.”19 We are seated on chairs, quite close to other listeners. We are not free to vocalize; although we may respond physically to what we hear, the range of acceptable response is very circumscribed indeed, being pretty much confined to shifting within that seated position; a discreet amount of rhythmic response (we may twitch our toes, perhaps, but not tap our feet; bob our heads, but not regularly or too often); restrained facial expressions; and applause, 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 restriction on looking directly at the other listeners, which would disrupt our tacit contract of mutual peripherality. The only places to which it is entirely acceptable to direct our gaze are the floor, the ceiling (though there is an aura of affectation to this), the insides of our eyelids, or the executant. All this amounts to a severe containment of our listening bodies’ exteriority, making them nearly (but, crucially, not completely) invisible and inaudible to others. We listeners cooperate in doing this to one another. It can be vexing and taxing to do, as any young person can attest; it must be painstakingly learned. It resembles a style of engaging with paintings which arose along with the development of perspectival illusion. The picture in this tradition is bossy. As viewers, we are accustomed to stop and stand still, immobilized, in front of it. The axis on which we stand is determined. . . . 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 listening performance has its own complex satisfactions. The requisite de-

260

the perfect listener

emphasis of exteriority forces our focus willy-nilly toward interiority. This may be the “interior” of a sonata, that hierarchy of pitch relationships both heard and implied, the conceptualization of which was brought to a pinnacle by Heinrich Schenker; or it may be the interior of our listening bodies, delineated by a sensible hyper-consciousness of the breath, the heart rate, and the delicate sensations that follow upon changes in these semi-autonomic functions. What I wish to emphasize here is that both these musical experiences arise out of already established traditions of embodied gesture. A vigilant, hyper-alert, physically immobilized listener will tend to produce minutely selfconscious, intellectualized musical experiences. What would an alternative be? What would it be like if looking at a painting took place, instead, in the ordinary conditions of our moving about in the world? Can we imagine a painting as part of the environment, in which the depicted objects and figures appear to move and change, sculpture-like, as we move by?21

In listening, of course we can! Since the advent of sound recording, and of the concept of the soundtrack, we can and do do just this, all of us, almost every day, and in so doing we reconceive what “pieces” are, radically and effortlessly. I think of my father happily making bread of a Sunday morning to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts—Meistersinger, Turandot, and other works one might not at first associate with culinary domesticity. I think of myself driving on the freeways of Los Angeles, letting a CD of a Boccherini quintet provide me with a transparent, gracious reality through which the warehouses, skyscrapers, and maniac drivers slip by. Lacking radios, our eighteenth-century counterparts had still their own mobile and environmental modes of reception; and evidence suggests that they were, by and large, rather freer than we are to engage in them at live performances. My fond thesis is that these modes allowed a vividness of embodied experience beyond the reach of the strait-laced modern concertgoer, made accessible through a diversity of internal metaphors for interpreting a performance—painterly, dramatic, danced-kinesthetic, a Diderotic synesthetic freedom—and a ready fluency in bringing them to bear upon what was heard and seen. Richardson’s example points further, into intellectually and emotionally promiscuous experiments with transposing listeners’ reactions into the mind of the composer-performer. In re-creating my eighteenthcentury counterpart, I find I am free to spend a fair amount of time looking about at the accoutrements of the room, researching the possibility of food or drink, and above all the attire, the postures, the facial expressions of my fellow guests (“to see whether Mr. So and So was accompanying Miss So and So, and whether her dress was in better taste than the one she had worn the previous day . . . ”).22 I am as much a creature of eyes as of ears. My attention flits here and there among various attractive objects.

the perfect listener

261

Whether I speak during the music, or gesture in response to it, seems, in a small gathering like this one, to be a matter of social rank—something I will probably have in common with the other guests at this salon, since attendance 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 unlucky performer at this tertulia or salon can pretty well expect us “to take advantage of the opportunity to chat with friends . . . [and to] make signs and gestures to the [players] during the performance.”23 Barbara Hanning has argued persuasively that paintings and engravings of apparently talkative audiences in eighteenth-century salons represent the range of possible behaviors at the gatherings, rather than simultaneous ones.24 There is an assumption here, however, that talking during the sonata is not a form of listening to it; I would like to broaden out from this. There can be no doubt that talking to a friend while music is being played is very different than doing so without that sonic and visual accompaniment. I want to acknowledge this activity as another mode of listening, albeit a complex and problematic one. In salons the Perfect Listener has considerable freedom to get up and move about. We might choose to sit attentively for one sonata or for one movement of a sonata, and not for others, and our choices would probably have to do with our own prior familiarity with the selections offered, or with the immediacy of their presentation of ideas that are of value to us or to our community. In the Parisian salon a favorite movement, treasured for its sentiment, would occasion an attention every bit as absorbed as Diderot could wish. In the tertulia it might be the minuet that attracts us, though our attention to it might be less “absorbed” than physically galvanized; we might be “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 movement might bore, or ask something of us that we are not interested in exploring, or remind us that we are hungry—and off we would go, mentally if not physically, in search of more relevant fare. We are preeminently mobile in 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 situations there are insuperable constraints on this kind of behavior. Inevitably, perhaps, a Perfect Concert begins to suggest itself: really, given the type of music that is my concern here, a Perfect Salon, one which the audience is as fully cognizant of performing as are the instrumentalists. Where is such a handy, savvy, willing group of people to be found? A second problem is that I would seem to be moving toward an account of a Perfect Listening that simply vacates the premises, attentionally speaking, whenever concentration slips: “During the third movement, I began to think about asparagus with mayonnaise for lunch . . . “ Surely this sort of thing is not useful to include in my account. Not, that is, unless such an at-

262

the perfect listener

tentional ellipsis were to occur consistently at a certain juncture or type of juncture: this is a very different class of event, one deserving of careful assessment. Opera seria audiences, for instance, tended to converse during recitatives and to be silent during arias, especially those sung by popular principals. Martha Feldman has characterized this intermittent style of engagement with music as no mere inattentiveness, but attention strategically, even ritually distributed.26 In a performance of instrumental music, which paints from a more restricted palette than opera, inattention tends to arise around moments of insufficient information within a performance. A skilled performer will instantly sense when he is “losing” his audience, and has a repertory of information he can supply to regain them: enhanced physical gesture, enhanced sonic contrasts (dynamics, attack), ornamentation, or crude but occasionally necessary measures like omitting repeats. As we have seen, Boccherini at times pushed this envelope rather hard by resorting to “laconic imagery” in his music, deliberately withholding information in order to prompt a response from his listener. He will get one: attentional nature abhors such vacuums, and rushes in with whatever may be available. But should that listener be somewhat less than Perfect, what rushes in may be a plate of asparagus. It is not ideal, not theatrical or poetic, but its presence as a potential response underlines the tendency of embodied beings to gravitate directly toward pleasure and the fulfillment of desires: and in performance this is what the composer-performer has to work with. In re-creating a Perfect Listener who better incorporates visualized responses to what she hears, an interesting problem arises with regard to the presentation of this book. The recent availability of supportive visual media has made revolutionary immediacies possible. It is a sorely tempting business: the non-linear playfulness, the spark of thought and association arcing across the suggestive gaps of a multi-media presentation—hyper-text, sound example, illustration, film clip. By hugely expanding the reader’s agency, such presentation reconfigures and electrifies the whole literary relationship, making real the very performativity I seek to reconstitute here. Much of the music discussed in this book is included on a bound-in CD of sound examples—a wonderful luxury, and yet for all that, utterly inadequate to address the visual component. In regard to the visual, we are thrown back into precisely the relation of Diderot and the far-flung subscribers to his “Salons,” who could not see the paintings described, but must needs envision them through his prose. This is the literary practice of ekphrasis, the descriptive mode, and I want to suggest that in the end it is no mere stopgap on the way to a hypothetical future “interactive edition.” I would even suggest that ekphrasis is capable of reconstituting embodied musical relationships in a specifically eighteenth-century way, through modeling the reflective, receptive “descent within”; and that such a descent is quite difficult to attain through interactive media. The computer-user’s impatience with

the perfect listener

263

reflection, seeking after stimulation, and fidgetiness might or might not approximate the Perfect Listener’s attentional mobility; but the identities possibly contained in such an approximation are matter for another exploration than this one. For the present, while I do not presume to Diderot’s virtuosity, 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, nor is it included on the accompanying CD. Numerous eighteenth-century accounts of listening to instrumental music show us that the Perfect Listener’s visualistic responses will tend to refer to the stage; and in so doing they will be as specific as possible. Here another difficulty presents itself. Angiolini warns of “the indifference of spectators to unknown personages.”27 But if familiarity with a dramatic character is of primary importance, as Angiolini suggests, then I am at a distinct disadvantage. I have seen some classical tragedy, and some of its eighteenth-century derivatives, but my experience is pitifully tiny as compared to the experience of my historical counterpart. On the other hand, thanks to television and the cinema, my imagination is populated with quite a host of classical tragedy’s great-grandchildren. What will happen to this exercise if, instead of painstakingly reconstructing Dido, I visualize Bessie Smith? What if my Galatea looks and acts like Audrey Hepburn? Surely the relative immediacy of these transposed associations will outweigh their anachronism? This is, of course, the slippery slope on which any historical re-creation inevitably finds itself. Lastly, in re-creating my counterpart I must achieve great descriptive detail in my accounts of my listening, not only as to visual but as to kinesthetic response; this is clearly mandated by any number of eighteenth-century models. The ideal here is, ultimately, absurd: to “relate exactly every Change of my 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 Boccherini’s music in order to end, looking outward toward only the most obvious of many other pastures, with Haydn’s. The piece I have chosen is Haydn’s G-major keyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39, of 1780. It was performed for me by a colleague as a private event, that I might the more freely experiment 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 making throughout the writing of this book, and distilling into this chapter—to collapse distances historical and epistemological, to refine the absorptive maneuver, to find ways for musical performance to perform itself anew through

264

the perfect listener

prose: all this means that now, in the end, I may no longer use the narrative nor reflective forms of address. They are too distanced. To talk of musicmaking as if it were in any way a thing, even the thinghood of an event, is no longer an option. If music-making is an interaction among persons, as such it demands direct address. November 2001 Dear Colleague/Dear Haydn, To which of you shall I address this letter? In the end it must be each, I think—or rather both, the composer-performer, a corporate being enscripted by the one and embodied by the other, but not coterminous with either of you. The indistinguishability in English of the second person singular and plural permits me to play with this ambiguity. You are well known to me, each and both; I have worked quite a bit with each of you independently, and have considerable experience of your united being as well. Furthermore, crucially, I seem to be well known to the both of you. Ordinary enough with a living colleague, less easy to explain with a longdead 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: extremely attentive and responsive. You seem to have a good, indeed sometimes uncanny, idea of the ways in which certain of my expectations for a performance can be most worthily played out. Using the accoutrements of this space host-fashion, things like consonance and dissonance, basic tonal functionality, periodicity, the character and countenance of themes, you make it your express duty to anticipate me; to enlarge upon me in the most complementary way possible, making my desires and responses, and their consequence (in both senses of that word: their procession one to the next, and their importance), seem the most natural things in the world. All this I know and expect already from my acquaintance with the Haydn-side of your incorporation. From my acquaintance with the performer-side I know and expect a fiercely delicate precision, presenting not only every tone but every expressive gesture with great clarity. You have refined long and hard, using all the resources of a formidable intellect and musicianship, to achieve a superb marriage of virtuosity with sensible transparency in Haydn’s work; it is in some measure an inspiration to my own efforts in prose. And yet, of course, you have not achieved it: for it is unachievable. The very virtuosities, intellectual and physical, which you have brought to play in this endeavor ultimately make you opaque to it, make you your own man, performing nothing more than yourself in a state of heightened presence and concentration. “Voice, tone, gesture, action—these are the things that belong to you, their actor; and it is these that strike us. . . . It is you who give the discourse all its energy; you who convey to our ears the force and the verity of its accent.”29 Here I borrow once again, paraphrasing, from Diderot,

the perfect listener

265

who theorized the dualities of performance long ago and unsurpassably. Not only do his fine words facilitate my own, but I find myself resorting to them at those times when the situation arouses more discursive intimacy than I can support. For what I seek to capture here, what I am bound to by the nature of my whole project, is nothing less than your doubly embodied presences as they act within and upon my own; and I could scarcely be said to be entering fully into this experiment if this prospect did not make me tremble at my own temerity. “ When my ear is struck, I will become the sensation which I experience. I will be like the echo of which Ovid says, sonus est qui vivit in illa; it is the sound which lives in her. . . . Hearing does not give me any sense of an object situated at a certain distance.”30 Thus I reserve the right to a doubleness of my own: to let Diderot and his compatriots be my voice betimes, their eloquence serving as my screen, my fan, that display of elegance behind which I may summon my composure.31 Perhaps in order to reinforce decorum, I have asked you to play me this particular sonata, a piece more pastoral than impassioned. It would be so conventionally, by virtue of some of its topoi and its key alone; it is doubly so by virtue of its position within a series of six sonatas, published together and possibly conceived as a cycle.32 Within the cycle, which proceeds ineluctably from carefreeness 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 almost a blank slate perceptually. This is a particular sort of laconicism created by the utterly conventional. “Let us—by its means—enter into the naive and tender sentiment experienced by a pretty village girl, still a virgin, in reproaching her lover for the infidelity which she has so little merited. Give her a character even more naive than that of Colette in Le Devin du village. She knows nothing 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 of the 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 know what poetry like this will say without really having to read it, I do not need to hear this first phrase even once to know how it will end. The invitation presented by this opening is the gentlest possible: the advent of the familiar.34 But why, in fact, do I know it as well as I do? Why this sense of rediscovery? The experience is akin to hearing a language learned in childhood and not spoken since. My own competence within it is faintly unnerving. Mine, but not mine; familiar, yet mysterious.

266

the perfect listener

The tune’s very familiarity proves an ideal canvas, upon which the lines and arabesques of variations can be drawn with due clarity; because I “already know” the tune there is no confusion as to what constitutes it, and what now emerges as decoration. Indeed there is some small satisfaction in the exercise of comparing the variations to the original that is so effortlessly held in my mind’s ear as a sort of template. This is a simple form of an activity for which I, like a great many others, have so often found Haydn’s music the ideal theater: the play with a listener’s memory and expectation. For all that I am actively trying not to devolve into an ahistorical “structural hearing,” I find that you do irresistibly invite that particular comparison of past and present event, so crucial to this style of receptive engagement. As it is a kind of listening, so is it a kind of self-constitution. “The more frequently the memory is used, the better it works. It is in this way that I form the habit of recalling without effort the changes through which I have passed, and of dividing my attention between what I am, and what I have been. For a habit is nothing more than facility acquired through the reiteration of actions.”35 Physically this invitation to compare past and present produces an almost breathlessly attentive stance: I tend to hold my breath when something unexpected and challenging is happening (which with you, Haydn, is quite often). I also sit (or stand) very still, rather rigidly in fact, so as better to focus on this rapid, constant dialogue between events, recollections, and expectations. These are classic physical enactments of concentrated consciousness, and they are tiring if maintained for long. You pay off the exhaustingness of listening at this level very handsomely, of course; and at those pay-offs, when you resolve a challenge cleverly or unexpectedly, my physical fixity can be quite abruptly and pleasantly broken—the diaphragm, tense before, releases with a snort (surprise, amusement) or a sigh (gratification), or a soft, short intake of breath (sensual heightening). The periodic phrase structure and the building-up of phrases through identifiable, discrete sections, hallmarks of late-century Viennese music and exceptionally clear in this simplistic tune, also serve an important function in providing relief from this diaphragmatic intensity: frankly, they keep the listening experience from becoming too anaerobic. I shift position and breathe at “structural” breaks. These moments, whether they are short cesurasilences, or clear-cut changes of texture, tune, or harmonic rhythm, serve to return me briefly “to myself,” out of the piece altogether; and my attention is incrementally renewed thereafter. The variations also produce another sort of canvas-painting, backgroundforeground relationship: your performing embodiment steps discreetly forward through the formal procedure. For one thing, within the conventions of variations, there is no certain way (short of recourse to the score, which I have eschewed) that I can know which of you is responsible for which decorative nicety. For another, though the variations are scarcely virtuosic, they

the perfect listener

267

are significantly more active than what has gone before; I am drawn to notice your gestures, the interestingly fluid motions of your right hand out away from the center of your body (a muted, stylized, but unmistakable version of the expository gestures of the orator); the slight leaning forward; your own gaze, directed now for a few moments at the keyboard, and so directing my own as if to say, “This is no soundtrack to your reminiscences: this is being performed, and I am the one performing it.” Toward the end of the movement there is an episode in E minor in which your tender accents become insistent, ostentatious. The village virgin appears to have donned a tragic mantle, and stepped before us in a manner more staged than candid. What does this mean? At just the point where my puzzlement has grown acute, you strike a severely earnest pose on a long, low B, becoming at once a tableau of Ariadne’s wounded incredulity and the personification of my question. And as the question stretches anxiously into the sound’s decay, I guess the answer—remembering, only just in time (perhaps tipped off by the wry tilt of your head as you move your arm across space to begin the next phrase), that B is the pitch with which the movement began. On the axis of that one tone, the scene shifts neatly back to the village green 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, for all its urgency, did not receive an answer: rather an evasion, a sidestepping of the issue through the fortuitous commonality of a single pitch. Perhaps there was not much choice: how could such innocence even begin to address Ariadne’s anguish? But then, where did Ariadne come from, and why? You invite me to forget such troubling questions for the bucolic remainder of the movement. And indeed I am disposed to do so. Now the slow movement, the key relaxed into C major, the tempo relaxed into an Adagio. “It is the season where the Earth is covered with the gifts that she bestows upon the travail and sweat of men.”36 I am reminded that adagiarsi means “to lie down, to stretch out.” I am entirely ready to relax myself back, as well, to simply leave behind the little disquiets which the first movement, 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 suggested to me by the spaciousness of opening gestures, the regular opportunities they provide to breathe; the better to allow Night to steal over me. But not that I may sleep. Rather that, “following the attraction of my heart, I may mingle my tears with the crystal of a fountain; tread light-footed upon the tender grass of the meadow; traverse fertile fields with slow steps . . . flee into the depths of forests.”38 I hesitate among these delicious choices; the hesitation is itself delicious; “I abandon myself to the spectacle of nature. My chest is raised. I breathe with force . . . I am under a spell.”39 And as I stand in this enchanted suspension, unmoving save for the breaths that buoy along my fantasy, an unforeseen new tune reveals itself to me. The

268

the perfect listener

spell is dissipated; I shift; I sigh. The tune has an unbroken accompaniment against which unfold sweetly fantastical peals of song. “Have you, Philomel, through this tender song—has a lurking woodland god awakened me, or a nymph, that rustles shyly through the bushes?”40 Unforeseen but not unfamiliar. There is again in this second tune that specter of an unbidden familiarity. Why, how can I know it as if I had known it before?—So might her former companions inquire before the laurel that was Daphne. The countenance metamorphosed from former life, the lineaments of a dear face translated into wood and foliage, might, with time and reference to a score, be proven to be a motivic relationship. Or this might merely be a type of reflective second theme of which I have heard a great many, the resemblance of one laurel tree to all laurels, the familiarity of species.41 In the end, I submit, the nature of this hearkening does not matter, but rather its effect: the slight dislocation, the refraction of perception and memory it has caused in me. So meditating on the strangeness of familiarity, I continue toward the resting place you now offer me, in the form of gentle, registrally descending cadential preparations. I prepare to seat myself on this mossy bank: and as my weight gives way into its verdure, I am brought up hard! There is a stone, an edge, 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 ensuing cesura) do I identify it: a deceptive cadence, voiced low and dark so that its pitch content is obscure, and further obscured by a grinding double appoggiatura. It is only here that I think to wonder where you had been while I had my eyes shut, trained upon such delectable interior vistas. At that deceptive cadence, my eyes flew open: I wanted to see if this could possibly have been right, 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 posture, enacting its painfulness, the way pain suspends the desire to move. “So long as the objects we touch do not hurt us, we will continue to stretch out our arms without fear; but at the first pinprick, this confidence will desert us and we will remain motionless.”42 Although you promptly soften the pain with the proper resolution and cadence formulaically delivered, this does not erase the memory of rudeness, the brief, harsh refusal of a repose you had given me every reason to expect. Doubt has entered the idyll, and with it, alas, vigilance; no longer can I wander trackless, unmindful of where I go. This is the dark side of those processes of memory by which we come to a sense of ourselves. Not all memories are happy ones; not all hurts can be forgotten. We walk around the world nursing and shielding our wounds. At the equivalent cadential preparations in the second half of the move-

the perfect listener

269

ment, therefore, I am tensed against the possible arrival of another such deceptive cadence. It comes; that it was expected this time does not make it welcome. It only confirms that the pastoral illusion has been corrupted, and that it has been corrupted in your person, by your execution of a painful event. So again your performing embodiment has stepped forward, but not so discreetly now; this reminder has something in it of reproach: This is being performed, I am the one performing it—and you, listener, forget my embodiment, 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 feelings 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 was reminded of your presence in the room, before I forgot all propriety. But why then lead me thither? Why invite me to tarry in such loveliness, and yet further 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 every means possible the talent of deceiving people, and of practicing habits which, being innocent only in the context of performance, cause nothing but harm elsewhere. Such men as you, so well got up, so well practiced in the tone of galanterie and in the accents of passion, do you never abuse your art in the seduction 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 person, target of my question and disrupter of my reverie, is very much in the foreground now: the movement is a Prestissimo, and filled with disjunct, manic hopping gestures, visually attention-getting to the point of obtrusiveness. Yet as I watch and listen, my earlier mobility is curtailed by fascination with yours, my resentment abates by degrees; or rather it is caught up and transformed in my kinetic response to the infectiousness of the implied dance. The fast, precise, complex gestures of your hands, my gradually elevated heart rate, become through sheer momentum their own reverie. I am summoned to a dancerly embodiment; my pacing becomes lightly rhythmicized. As it does for the rustics who have been politely waiting in the wings of this pastoral, dance permits me to forget. This kind of embodiment achieves its resolutions of doubt and of doubleness through my willing surrender of memory and anticipation into immediacy of sensation, the hurrying-on from one beat to the next. Given the betrayal I have recently suffered at your hands—indeed, now that I think of it, given your unexpected transformations in the first movement—is this really a desirable resolution? I have not time to reflect on this possibility: the movement is simply too fast. At the end of each half I am checked in my surrender by a curious little maneuver, a short cadential phrase, a neatly arpeggiated, quiet, legato utter-

270

the perfect listener

ance enunciated in octaves between your two hands. So the piece ends. I am left between one breath and the next, not yet believing it, clutching my questions unspent, wondering if you intended this final gesture as the evasion I hear in it: the evasion of any sort of honest, emphatic ending, an ending in which I could feel resolution. Rather I have been dealt a comic slyness, my doubts inevitably renewed at the very point where you, in your now-concluded double embodiment, have no longer any obligation to answer them. I must contend with my lingering questions, then, on my own. I reflect afterward, and I think: This piece has in it a severe problematization of cadences. Tension to release, departure to return, what we nowadays call dominant to tonic, at crucial moments this relationship does not proceed normally. Then, at the very end, it proceeds far too easily, slipping past with sardonic ease. What does such conflictedness about closure bespeak? It is not, I think, some tortuous melancholic evasion of ending, but a more general problematization. This sonata will end, it must do so; each internal cadence is a little acknowledgment, a prefiguration of that eventual fact. And after it will come—what? As it happens, if we conceive these sonatas as a cycle, what comes after is certifiably dire, that tormented piece in C minor. But even without that knowledge, this difficulty with cadences reminds me that there 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 have dallied will disperse, will be very nearly as if it never was. Our vicissitudes within it, our moments of enthusiasm, the surprises, indignations, softenings, the fine resolves and new vistas, all will be but faint memories. And furthermore this is a pastoral piece; there is that face of the pastoral that knows itself already irrecoverable. Much more than in other media, the pastoral in music encourages such reflections upon the evanescence of experience and the knowledge gained thereby. Its vistas are toward a forsaken past; its innocence is recalled rather than uncritically embodied. And this sonata resists 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 at the end of my experiment, and so of this book. “And when the weight of the day has fallen away we’ll continue on our way, and in a more distant time we’ll still recall this enchanted spot, and the delicious hour we’ve passed here.”45 Thanking you each and both, I remain Your humble servant, Elisabeth

appendix

Chronological Table of String Quartets

Date of Composition

Opus and Gérard No.

First Edition

1760–62 1768–70 1770 1772 1775

op. 2 (G. 159–64): 6 quartets op. 8 (G. 165–70): 6 quartets op. 9 (G. 171–76): 6 quartets op. 15 (G. 177–82): 6 quartettini op. 22 (G. 183–88): 6 quartettini

1776 1778

op. 24 (G. 189–94): 6 quartets op. 26 (G.195–200): 6 quartettini

1780 1781 1787 1788

op. 32 (G. 201–6): 6 quartets op. 33 (G. 207–12): 6 quartettini (part of ) op. 39 (G. 213): 1 quartet1 (part of ) op. 41 (G. 214, 215): 2 quartets op. 42 (G. 216, 217): 2 quartettini op. 43 (G. 218, 219): 2 quartettini op. 44 (G. 220–25): 6 quartettini op. 48 (G. 226–31): 6 quartettini op. 52 (G. 232–35): 4 quartets op. 53 (G. 236–41): 6 quartettini op. 58 (G. 242–47): 6 quartets op. 64 (G. 248, 249): 2 quartets (second unfinished)

1789 1790 1792 1794 1795 1796 1799 1804

271

1767, Paris, Vénier (as op. 1) 1769, Paris, Vénier (as op. 6) 1772, Paris, Vénier (as op. 10) 1773, Paris, Vénier (as op. 11) 1776, Paris, La Chevardière (as op. 26) 1778, Paris, Sieber (as op. 27) 1781, Vienna, Artaria (as op. 32) (see also note to op. 39) 1782, Vienna, Artaria (as op. 33) unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as part of op. 39)2 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as part of op. 39) unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as part of op. 39) 1798, Paris, Pleyel (as op. 40) 1803, Paris, Sieber (as op. 58) unpublished in Boccherini’s lifetime

notes

introduction Epigraph: “Nulla ottiene il compositore senza gl’esecutori: questi è necessario che siano ben affetti all’autore, poi devono sentire nel cuore tutto ciò che questi à notato; unirsi, provare, indagare, studiar finalmente la mente dell’autore, poi eseguirne le opere. Allora che si arrivano quasi a togliere l’applauso al compositore, o almeno a 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, Bonnie Hampton, that I never did learn “the” Boccherini Concerto in B b Major, a Frankensteinian pastiche by the nineteenth-century cellist Friedrich Grützmacher (1832–1903). This work has merits all its own; what is inexcusable is that it is still regularly taught, performed, and even recorded as Boccherini’s composition. For an interesting contextualization of Grützmacher’s life and work, see Ludolf Lützen, Die Violoncell-Transkriptionen Friedrich Grützmachers: Untersuchungen zur Transkription 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 original record label, the Artaria Quartet Boccherini recordings are only now (ten years later) in the process of commercial release. With the help of the Asociación Luigi Boccherini (Madrid), six quartets, op. 9, will appear in summer 2005 on the label of the Festival de Aranjuez. It is hoped that the other two opere will appear in the next couple of years. 3. The most useful to an English speaker is Christian Speck’s summary in the New Grove, which is accurate and up to date, but not book length. Christian Speck and Stanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online (London: Macmillan, 2000–), www.grovemusic.com. 273

274

notes to pages 3–8

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, because acuity or sharpness are greater away from the centre.” Baxandall, Patterns of 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 Méthode théorique 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’un effet 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 and translated in Jean Starobinski, “A Short History of Bodily Sensation,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (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 et sur 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 sens de toucher, existe d’abord par le sentiment qu’elle a de l’action des parties de son 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’appellerai sentiment fondamental; parce que c’est à ce jeu de la machine que commence la vie de l’animal: elle en dépend uniquement. . . . Ce sentiment et son moi ne sont par conséquent dans l’origine qu’une même chose.” Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations (1754; reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1984), pt. 2, chap. 1, “Du moindre degré de sentiment où l’on peut réduire un homme borné au sens du toucher,” sec. 1, “Sentiment fondamental de la statue”; sec. 2, “Il est susceptible de 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.” Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur les éléments de philosophie (1795), ed. Richard N. Schwab (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1965). Quoted in Gusdorf, Naissance de la conscience romantique, 301. 14. “Je ferai de ces sensations une classe particulière, sous le nom de tact intérieur ou sixième sens, & j’y rangerai les douleurs qu’on ressent quelquefois dans l’intérieur 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 accompagne 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 rendent toûjours présent, & que par cette raison quelques metaphysiciens ont appellées

notes to pages 8–11

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

275

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 conscience romantique, 300, dates this article 1756. “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 vit en elle.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 1, chap. 8, “D’un homme borné au sens de l’ouïe,” sec. 1, “La statue bornée au sens de l’ouïe est tout ce qu’elle entend,” 59. “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. “Si [la Nature] lui donne une sensation agréable, on conçoit que la statue en pourra jouir, en conservant toutes les parties de son corps dans la situation où elles se trouvent, et une pareille paroit tendre à maintenir le repos plutôt qu’à produir 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 apprend qu’il y a quelque chose hors de lui,” 101. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “comfort,” http://dictionary.oed.com. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52. 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 mastectomy, performed in 1811 without benefit of anesthesia. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84), 6:612–13. Quoted in Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 68–70. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is the classic presentation and analysis of this topic. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Charles Emil Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1932), 111. “Parce qu’elle rencontre tour-à-tour de la solidité et de la fluidité, de la dureté et de la mollesse, de la chaleur et du froid; elle donne son attention à ces différences, elle les compare, elle en juge, et ce son autant d’idées par où elle apprend à distinguer les corps. Plus elle exercera ses jugemens à ce sujet, plus son tact acquerra de finesse; et elle se rendra peu-à-peu capable de discerner dans une même 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 dit en traitant de la vue,” sec. 4, “Premières idées qu’elle acquiert,” 120–21. We find a precursor to this acknowledgment of embodied refinement in the writings of the extraordinary Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo: “There are a great many

276

notes to pages 12–22

more stars, which being of very inferior size, are only discovered thanks to the ingenious 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 display, there are many others which by their delicacy can only be discovered with a very reflective perspective.” (“Hay muchísimos mas [Astros], que por ser de muy inferior tamaño, solo se descubren á favor de la ingeniosa, ò feliz invencion del telescopio: del mismo modo en nuestro cuerpo, fuera de aquellas señales de los afectos del ánimo, que aun al vulgo se ponen de manifiesto, hay otras muchas, que por su delicadeza solo se dexan descubrir á una perspectiva muy reflexiva.”) Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo, “Nuevo arte physiognomico,” in Theatro 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 our recording of op. 15, no. 3, since I consider the producer’s experiences to be fully 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 produced and executed the sonata was at fault. . . . Had it been otherwise, that man of wit would not have had the time to take exception; he would instead have cried out, sonata, you touch me . . . you move me!” (“J’ai toujours pensé que celui qui disoit, sonate, que me veux tu? n’avoit raison que parce que la musicien producteur 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 tu m’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 sempre meglio 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 fingers refers to string-playing and not keyboard-playing custom: thus thumb = unnumbered, index = 1, middle = 2, ring = 3, pinky = 4. 3. Along with his countryman Francischello (Francesco Alborea), Boccherini has an informal reputation among cellists as the inventor of thumb-position on the cello. This is not strictly true; there is plentiful evidence in the works of Boccherini’s Parisian contemporaries Jansson, Bréval, and especially the Duports that the use of the left thumb in the upper register was already a familiar technique. What is true is that Boccherini exploited, expanded, and emphasized thumb-position to an exceptional degree. He uses it more than anyone else; it is 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, bey einer langen Note zierlich kann angebracht werden. Die Natur selbst ist die Lehrmeisterin hiervon. Denn wenn wir eine schlaffe Seyte oder eine Glocke stark anschlagen; so hören wir nach dem Schlage eine gewisse wellenweise Schwebung

notes to pages 23–34

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

277

(ondeggiamento) des angeschlagenen Tones: Und diesen zitterenden Nachklang nennet man Tremolo, oder Tremoleto.” Leopold Mozart, Gründliche Violinschule (1787; facsimile reprint, Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1966), chap. 11, sec. 1, 243. David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 153. “Commencez donc par bien connoître le caractère du chant que vous avez à rendre, son rapport au sens des paroles, la distinction de ses phrases, l’Accent qu’il a par lui-même, celui qu’il suppose dans la voix de l’Exécutant, l’énergie que le Compositeur a donnée au Poëte, & celle que vous pouvez donnez à votre tour au Compositeur. Alors livrez vos organes à toute la chaleur que ces considérations vous auront inspirée; faites ce que vous feriez si vous étiez à la fois le Poëte, le Compositeur, l’Acteur & le Chanteur.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Exécution,” in Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: veuve Duchesne, 1768), trans. William Waring, “Execution,” in A Dictionary of Music (London: J. French, 1779). “Recevoir quelque impression par le moyen des sens. . . . Il ne se dit point des simples perceptions de la vue & de l’ouie.” François d’Alberti de Villeneuve, Grand Dictionnaire français-italien (Bassano: Remondini, 1811), s.v. “sentir.” “Termine generico, col quale si esprime communemente il soffrire, o ricevere tutte quelle impressioni. . . . Si dice più particolarmente d’alcuni sensi. E prima, e più frequentemente, dell’udire.” Francesco Alberti di Villanuova, Nuovo dizionario italiano-francese (Nice: Gabriele Floteront, 1780), s.v. “sentire.” 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 in English: what is now sharpness and keenness to the emotions derives from a physical action, the Latin pungere, to pierce. While the manuscript does not show a slur over the top line, the whole-note E b below it indicates that the bar should be played with a single bow stroke. “La soavità delle melodie di Boccherini . . . assume talvolta la forma “aperta” di messaggio celestiale annunciato al centro di un’opera, indipendente dal contesto e in ogni caso non inserito in un sistema preordinato di proposta, replica e ripetizione, come è d’uso nella musica del periodo classico. Sono frasi ad un tempo elaborate e semplici, ogni nota, ogni valore ritmico tocca la corda giusta, avviando un discorso che trova un’immediata eco nell’anima.” Luigi Della Croce, Le trenta-tre sinfonie di Boccherini: guida e analisi critica, introduction by Pina Carmirelli (Turin: Eda, 1979), 237. Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). The “Chronological Table of Compositions” begins on 671. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 51. A rare glimpse into composerly engagement with these processes is provided to us 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, immediately writing down those fleeting inspirations that may come to you. For

278

notes to pages 36–38 this a small table belongs near the keyboard. By this means not only is the imagination strengthened, but also one learns how to instantly secure the most remote ideas. It is also necessary to write without a keyboard, and sometimes to develop a simple choral melody, with simple, or again with various figures according to counterpoint, and even beyond that, will surely give Y.I.H. no headache, but rather, when one finds oneself so absorbed in the midst 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 Einfälle flüchtig kurz niederzuschreiben. Hiezu gehört ein kleines Tischchen ans Clavier. Durch dergleichen wird die Phantasie nicht allein gestärkt, sondern man lernt auch die entlegensten Ideen augenblicklich festhalten. Ohne Clavier zu schreiben ist ebenfalls nöthig und manchmal eine einfache Melodie Choral mit einfachen und wieder mit verschiedenen Figuren nach den Contrapuncten und auch darüber hinaus durchführen, wird J.K.H. sicher kein Kopfweh verursachen, ja eher, wenn man sich so selbst mitten in 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 in toward 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 works that he received are discussed at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini, and in Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of 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 scritto come voi mi consigliate, né voi sareste Pleyel, e quel Pleyel che siete. . . . Tenete presente che non vi è cosa peggio che legare le mani ad un povero autore, cioè metter limite all’idea e immaginazione di questo.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 270. Boccherini’s use of the term “scrittore,” the word for a writer or poet, is a measure of the seriousness with which he approached his work. 3. “Tous ceux qui me connaissent et qui ont des rapports avec moi, me font l’honneur de me juger homme probe, honnête, sensible, doux, aimant, tel que mes oeuvres de musique me révèlent; il serait vraiment drôle que pour le seul Pleyel j’eusse changé ma nature! Non, mon ami, je suis le même pour tous.” Quoted in 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, the Italian originals of this and certain other letters, once contained in the Pleyel archive, have been lost; the most authoritative text we have for them is this,

notes to pages 39–43

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

279

Germaine de Rothschild’s 1962 French translation. Della Croce, Il divino Boccherini, 243. 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 to Spanish archives, and Jaime Tortella’s work has since gone some way toward redressing the situation; but as of 2004, we still have no reliable first-hand personal accounts. See Jaime Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano en la España ilustrada (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2002). See note 28 below. “Ein trefflicher Violoncellist, der besonders durch unvergleichlichen Ton und ausdrucksvollen Gesang auf seinem Instrument bezauberte.” Obituary, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 21 August 1805. For the full text, see http://epub.library .ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini. “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. “Le 2 Avril 1768. Le sieur Boccherini a joué du violoncelle avec aussi peu d’applaudissements, 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 Boccherini: His Life and Work, 33. The disparity between Boccherini’s and Batoni’s fame and status at that time makes the attribution unlikely. Charles Burney met and socialized with Batoni in Rome during his Italian tour of 1770; he writes, “ We went together to the celebrated painter Il Cavalier Battoni, who is always visited by the great. . . . He has a very large house and lives in a great way.” Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy (1770), ed. H. Edmund Poole (London: Folio Society, 1969), 149. 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 instrument to new heights.” Daniel Heartz, “The Young Boccherini: Lucca, Vienna, and the Electoral Courts,” Journal of Musicology 13, no. 1 (March 1995): 104. Liotard’s contemporary prestige rivaled that of Batoni; but here the attribution is firm. The quality of both these portraits is very high, and their having been commissioned at all bespeaks Boccherini’s standing among his contemporaries— or (and this may be more likely) his and his father’s considerable ambition. Dr. Christmann’s process of identifying Boccherini as the sitter for the portrait was a fascinating one, involving police forensic experts who compared the face in the portrait to the bone structure of Boccherini’s exhumed skull. Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini, 2nd ed. (Milan: Zanibon, 1992), 25. A useful compendium of Luccan musical activities can be found in Amachilde Pellegrini, Spettacoli lucchesi nei secoli xvii–xix (Lucca: Regia Accademia Lucchese, 1914). See Jaime Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano, chapters 1–4. 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 (Florence: Olschki, 1989).

280

notes to pages 43–44

17. Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini, foreword Emilio Maggini (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1988), 29. See also Pellegrini, Spettacoli lucchesi, 451 ff. 18. Zechmeister tells us that “a Ludwig Boccherini was already engaged from 1759 to 1764 as a figurant [i.e., a member of the corps de ballet]” (“ein Ludwig Boccherini war schon von 1759 bis 1764 als Figurant tätig”). Quoted in Gustav Zechmeister, Die Wiener Theater nächst der Burg und nächst dem Kärntnerthor von 1747 bis 1776 (Vienna: Böhlau im Komm, 1971), 331, but this can nowhere be corroborated. Bruce Brown has remarked that “Zechmeister was probably conflating various entries in the Hofzahlamtsbücher (HZAB), housed in the Viennese Hofkammerarchiv,” in which, he adds, “ [salary] info. is lumped together so that it’s impossible to tell who [among the Boccherinis] got how much.” Brown, personal communication, 22 November 2001. 19. See Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 103. Much of the following section draws upon this concise and thoughtful reconsideration of the composer’s early biography. 20. “A dì 4 di Agosto 1756 Messa, e Vespro in Musica al Monastero di San Domenico per la Festa di detto Santo . . . Luigi Boccherini, per fare un Concerto di Violoncello che Lo fece il giorno dopo il Primo Salmo e suonò ancora per favorir me, a Messa e Vespro.” Giacomo Puccini, “Libro delle Musiche Annue ed Avventizie fatte da me Giacomo Puccini M.ro di Cappla della Seren.a Repubblica di Lucca . . . dal Anno 1748,” 3 vols., Archivio di Stato di Lucca. Quoted in BiagiRavenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” 39. Daniel Heartz has pointed out Puccini’s interesting use of the word “fare,” which could be translated as either “compose” or “perform,” and in this case probably meant both. Heartz, personal communication, 3 December 2001. 21. There is as yet no firm evidence for this. Coli mentions a record from November 1753, which states that Leopoldo has been granted a seven-month leave of absence by his employers, the Signoria of Lucca, “per essere a Roma, avendo ivi accompagnato il figlio a studio,” but this could just as easily refer to Luigi’s elder 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 make no 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’ earned much applause for a concert of music by himself, its mode of composition being 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 New Grove 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 opposite Francesco Turchi, and in 1763 she married Onorato Viganò. Both ballerini had appeared at Lucca some years previously, which makes one wonder about the extent to which the eldest Boccherini child’s professional troc with the dance

notes to pages 44–46

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

281

elite of her day may have been responsible for that first, surely risky, familial journey to Vienna. Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” 51–52. Salieri set Don Chisciotte, divertimento teatrale, 1770; Le donne letterate, commedia per musica, 1770; La secchia rapita, dramma eroicomico, 1772, presented in Mannheim as Der geraubte Eymer, heroischkomische Oper, in 1774; and La fiera di Venezia, dramma giocoso, 1775. I rovinati, commedia per musica, was set by Gassmann in 1772, Il tamburo notturno, dramma giocoso, by Paisiello in 1774, and an azione sacra, Il ritorno di Tobia, by Joseph Haydn in 1774–75. See Gino Arrighi, “Giovan Gastone Boccherini,” Lucca: Rassegna del comune 6 (1962): 13–23; and Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” app. 2, 60–71. “Il suo figlio che suona il Bassetto nelli Concerti nel Teatro della Corte è molto applaudito.” Biagi-Ravenni, “Calzabigi e dintorni,” 44. Heartz comments, “To win applause at these concerts, which were performed at the Burgtheater, Luigi must have been performing as a soloist.” Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 106. The two records of 1763 are contained in an account of activities at the court theaters from 1758 to 1763 written by Philipp Gumpenhuber. On 15 April, “Concerts ont joué . . . le Sr Boccherini sur le violoncel, pour le 1.ere fois après son retour.” (“Concerts . . . in which Signor Boccherini played upon the violoncello, for the first time since his return.”) and on 21 October, “Concert a joué le Sr Boccherini le fils sur le violoncel.” (“Concert in which Boccherini the son played upon the violoncello.”) Philippe [sic] Gumpenhuber, “Répertoire de tous les spectacles qui ont été donnés au Théâtre près de la Cour” (1761–63), Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Mus. Hs. 34580a–c. Quoted in Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 96. Finally, in 1764, the accounts of the Viennese Hofkammerarchiv mention payment “dem Bocherini [sic] Ludwig Violoncellisten für gespielte Concerts, by denen Music Academien und 1. hierzu auf 2. Violoncelli componiertes Concert, mit Inbegriff.” (made to “Boccherini, Ludwig, violoncellist, for concerts played at the Music Academies, and for one concerto for two violoncelli, composed for this.”) Quoted in Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 109. This was his surname until 1773, when he received the patent of nobility, becoming Ditters von Dittersdorf. See Thomas Bauman, “Ditters von Dittersdorf, Carl,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online. “E chiamato per due volte a Vienna passò in seguito presso tutte le altre Corti Eletorali [sic] dell’Impero, dove ha riportato tutto il compatimento nel suono del Violoncello.” MS. Register of the deliberations of the Council, 1764, Lucca, Archivio di Stato. Quoted and translated in Heartz, “The Young Boccherini,” 109. Ibid., 115. 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. Performers with complimentary tickets sat in this section of the hall. Brown, “Maria Theresa’s Vienna,” 99, 102. “On exécute régulièrement deux Ballets chaque jour de Spectacle, sur les deux Théâtres.” Gumpenhuber, “Répertoire de tous les spectacles” (1761–63). Quoted in Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre, 96.

282

notes to pages 47–49

37. “As a cellist at the Kärntnertortheater Boccherini played almost exclusively ballet music. Gassmann, Gluck, and above all, quantitatively speaking, Starzer served as composers of ballet music. The influence of ballet music on Boccherini’s work seems to me . . . to be of great importance.” (“Boccherini spielte als Violoncellist am Kärntnertortheater fast ausschließlich Ballettmusik. Als Komponisten der Ballettmusik fungierten Gassmann, Gluck, vor allem aber, quantitativ überwiegend, Joseph Starzer. Der Einfluß der Ballettmusik auf Boccherinis kompositorische Schaffen scheint mir eine wichtige . . . Große zu sein.”) Christian Speck, “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik in europäische Musikzentren 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 eighteenthcentury MS copy in Milan) as ‘Chaconne qui représente l’enfer et qui a été faite à 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. Bruce Brown, personal communications, 22 November 2001 and 15 August 2003. 42. Some of these descriptions may have been prescriptive material supplied by the choreographers to the composers, or to Durazzo (general director of productions at both the Burg- and Kärntnertortheaters) for vetting before a production 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 Angiolini 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 analyses of Boccherini’s phrase structure acknowledge the influence of dance. See his Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen 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,’” appeared in vol. 29, no. 4). 46. The different census methods employed at this time make such statements perpetually arguable. The other candidate for largest-city status was Naples. 47. That the two young men first visited Genoa has been established by Coli. See Luigi Boccherini (1992), 39–40. 48. In response to the endless series of restrictions placed upon them by the royally sanctioned institutions, the popular theaters “displayed amazing ingenuity in forging a tortuous path around repression.” Robert Isherwood, “Popular Musical Entertainment in Eighteenth-century Paris,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 9 (1978): 295. 49. See Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Marie Evans and Gwynne Lewis (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987).

notes to pages 49–52

283

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 ton lamentable qui règne perpétuellement dans notre opéra, mettent presque tous les monologues françois sur un mouvement lent; et comme la mesure ne s’y fait sentir ni dans le chant, ni dans le basse, ni dans l’accompagnement, rien n’est si traînant, si lâche, si languissant, que ces beaux monologues que tout le monde admire en bâillant: ils voudroient être tristes, et ne sont qu’ennuyeux; ils voudroient toucher le coeur, et ne font qu’affliger les oreilles.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Lettre sur la musique française” (1753), in Oeuvres complètes de JeanJacques Rousseau (Paris: Hachette, 1891), 6:190. 53. “[Il porte] le violoncel à un tel degré du supériorité qu’il étonne toujours et charme à la fois.” Avant-coureur, 1767, 716. Quoted in Constant Pierre, Histoire du Concert spirituel 1725–1790 (Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 1975), 149. 54. “M. Duport a fait entendre tous les jours sur le violoncelle de nouveaux produits et a mérité une nouvelle admiration. Cet instrument n’est plus reconnaissable entre ses mains: il parle, exprime, il rend tout au-delà de ce charme qu’on croyait exclusivement réservé au violon.” Mercure de France, April 1762, 189. Quoted in 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 destiné à l’étude. Il a été entendu avec l’admiration par les connaisseurs.” Mercure de France, February 1768, 214. Quoted in Pierre, Histoire du Concert spirituel, 148. For a helpful summary of the careers of the Duport brothers, see Valerie Walden, One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 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 de France, 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 personnages de son regne (Ville-Franche: Chez la veuve Liberté, 1783). Quoted and translated in Herbert Turrentine, “The Prince de Conti: A Royal Patron of Music,” 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 artists as for his incredible pretensions as a violinist.” (“L’éditeur de musique, Lachevardière les présenta au fameux baron de Bagge, aussi célèbre par la protection qu’il accordait aux artistes, que par ses incroyables prétentions comme violoniste.”) Louis Picquot, Notice sur la 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), 56. 59. “Baage (Baron de) Amateur, tient tous les Vendredis en son hôtel, pendant l’hiver un des plus beaux Concerto particulier de cette Capitalle. Il s’y fait un plaisir d’admettre tous les Virtuoses étrangers & amateurs qui désirent débuter en cette Capitale, ou s’y faire connoître par leurs talens.” Tablettes de renommée des musi-

284

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

notes to pages 52–56 ciens, auteurs, compositeurs, virtuoses . . . pour servir à L’Almanach-Dauphin (Paris: Cailleau, Duchesne, et al., 1785), n.p. Quoted and translated in Jean Mongrédien, “Paris: The End of the Ancien Regime,” in The Classical Era, 71. Georges Cucuel, “Le Baron de Bagge et son temps,” L’Année musicale 1 (1911): 145. “He had learned to play the violin, and although he played badly, believed himself to be of the first rank. . . . This ridiculousness [i.e., paying professionals to take lessons with him] earned him the name of ‘the Francaleu [see below] of the violin.’ Emperor Joseph II once said to him, ‘Baron, I have never heard anyone 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 nom de Francaleu du violon. L’empereur Joseph II lui dit un jour: Baron, je n’ai jamais entendu 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 Encyclopédie boasts no fewer than six articles by Boucher d’Argis, discussing different 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 metaphor for laying claim to a title one has done nothing to earn. Boucher d’Argis, “Francaleu,” 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). Searchable online at the University of Chicago ARTFL Project, www.lib.uchicago.edu/ efts/ARTFL/projects/ency. This similarity has also been noted by Aldo Pais, editor of the commendable Zanibon edition of Boccherini’s works. “Note introduttive,” in Boccherini: concerto n. 11 in do maggiore, G. 573 (Padua: Zanibon, 1995). Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, G. 25–30. Burney, Music, Men, and Manners, 19–20. As “op. 1”; they are op. 2 in Boccherini’s personal catalog, and G. 159–64 in Gérard. As “op. 2”; they are op. 1 in Boccherini’s catalog, and G. 77–82 in Gérard. Boccherini does not list this work in his catalog; it is G. 500 in Gérard. 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 virtuoso cellists around 1730: “The elder Cervetto . . . with Abaco, Lanzetti, Pasqualini and Caporale, about this time [the 1730s] brought the violoncello into favour, and made us nice judges of the instrument.” Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 2 vols. (1776–89; reprint, New York: Dover, 1957), vol. 2, 1005. Closer to Boccherini’s own age would have been Giovanni Battista Cirri (1724–1808), who debuted in London in 1764. 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 of the Manzanares, returning after a few weeks. At Easter they traveled to Aranjuez, which, like El Pardo, was heavily wooded; on 28 July they departed Aranjuez for the mountains and the castle of San Ildefonso de la Granja; and in October they removed to El Escorial, returning to Madrid only by December.

notes to page 57

285

70. See Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 28–29. The libretto of this work tells us that “the final aria of the second act was composed and accompanied on solo cello by Signor Luigi Boccherini of Lucca” (“el aria final del acto segundo es compuesta y acompañada con el violoncello a solo del Sr. Luis Boccherini, luqués”). Emilio Cotarelo y Morí, Orígenes y establecimiento de la ópera en España hasta 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—of this sequence of events in the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, who recounts a meeting in Valencia in September 1768 with a María Teresa Pelliccia—also a singer in the Compañía—her husband, her younger sister (whom Casanova does not name but who was in fact Clementina), and “a famous first violin who was to marry her some time afterward” (“un celebre primo violon che la sposerà qualche 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 that Casanova was acknowledging the virtuosity, without being very particular as to the instrument involved. See Remigio Coli, “Casanova incontra Boccherini: i primi anni del musicista in Spagna (1768–1771),” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 4 (1993): 557–62. In 1769 the city of Valencia contracted Marescalchi and Creus to establish a season of comic theater there, the two partners offering “to adorn the plays with costly dancers and even with stage decorations, giving a number of 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 comedias con bailarines costosos y mejor con decoraciones del teatro, dando algunos intermedios de [la] mejor música [y sirviendo] ‘con las óperas y entera compañía que trabajaba en los Sitios Reales.’”) Antonio Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III: ensayo sobre el pensamiento musical ilustrado (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988), 74. 72. Tortella has established that the formal contract between the Infante and Boccherini postdates the beginning of their relationship by some months. “ With regard to the beginning of Boccherini’s employment by the Infante, it must be dated to the spring of 1770, and not 8 November, which is no more than the date contained in His Highness’s decree.” (“En cuanto al inicio de la relación de servicio de Boccherini con el infante, hay que situarlo en la primavera de 1770, no el 8 de noviembre, que no es más que la fecha contenida en un decreto de S. A.”) Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 34. 73. “It is . . . understood that one who enters into the service of a nobleman stays there, even if unable to work, until his death. Almost as rigorous is the rule which holds that the children of a servant may always find livelihood and shelter in the lord’s house.” (“Il est . . . entendu que [celui] qui est entré au service d’un grand y demeure, même impotent, jusqu’à sa mort. Presque aussi rigoureuse est la règle qui veut que les enfants d’un serviteur trouvent toujours vivre et couvert dans la maison seigneuriale.”) Jacques Chastenet, La Vie quotidienne en Espagne au temps de Goya (Paris: Hachette, 1966), 52. See also Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 46: “[Whether he was] conscious or not of the future, in entering into

286

74. 75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

notes to pages 57–58 the service of Don Luis it is probable that he had begun to conceive a long stay there.” (“Consciente o no del futuro, al entrar el servicio de don Luis, es probable que empezara a concebir una estancia prolongada.”) Tortella considers these places and the fortunes of Luis’s court among them in some detail. Boccherini, un músico italiano, chaps. 3, 4, and 5. “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 there exist a [single] Spanish specificity.” (“À la fin du xviiie siècle comme au début du xixe, il y a, avons-nous dit, plutôt des Espagnes qu’une Espagne: il n’en existe pas moins une spécificité espagnole.”) Chastenet, La Vie quotidienne, 35. “The choice of a few determined genres of music, as well as concrete manners of singing and playing them, is, as much as are costume and vocabulary, a way of distinguishing classes—but with one peculiarity: with rare exceptions, there are no special complexes about that choice, rather instead pride and continual desires for reaffirmation.” (“La elección de unos determinados géneros de música, así como de maneras concretas de cantarlas y tañerlas es, al igual que el traje y el vocabulario, un modo de distinción de clases, pero con una particularidad: no hay, salvo raras excepciones, especiales complejos ante esa elección, sino más bien orgullo y continuos deseos de reafirmación.”) Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III, 111. “Madrid was one of the most important European courts as far as the cultivation of Italian opera.” (“[Madrid era] una de las más importantes cortes europeas 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 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985), 364. 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 liner notes to a recording of it by Christoph Coin and the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges (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 text for G. 542 is “Larve pallide e funeste.” “Niccolò Piccinni’s La buona figliuola was given in Aranjuez in the spring of 1769 with Boccherini’s overture G. 527, based on the Symphony G. 490.” Christian Speck and Stanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online. “Con el gusto de oír a tantos cantores famosos las mejores arias de Italia, se extendió por Madrid el nuevo gusto de su música, y su decidida afición corrió al instante por todas las capitales de provincia. Apenas habrá un joven, una señorita, un oficial mozo que no supiese y cantase de memoria el Misero pargoletto, 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 particulares o caseras.” José Antonio Armona y Murga, Memorias cronológicas sobre el teatro en España (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 Demofoonte, the third from Didone abbandonata.

notes to pages 59–61

287

81. Charles Emil Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1932), 79–80. 82. “The great drama of Spanish music in the eighteenth century is that of the lack of an efficient printer of music.” (“El gran drama de la música español del siglo xviii 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 did not obey it. He limited himself to having those paintings placed in a restricted hall at the Academy of Fine Arts, accessible only to those whose work required their study.” (“Afortunadamente, Carlos IV no tuvo en cuenta la última orden de su padre y no la obedeció. Se limitó a hacer colocar estos cuadros en una sala reservada de la Academia de Bellas Artes, accesible sólo a quienes por su obra precisaran de su estudio.”) José Del Corral, La vida cotidiana en el Madrid del siglo xviii (Madrid: Ediciones La Librería, 2000), 24. Del Corral points out that not even 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, see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton University 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 lo que me dicten la razón y la experiencia.” Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo, “Physionomía,” 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 Parme devoted to his epistemology also appeared in translation. In the same volume was included . . . Maupertuis’s Essai de philosophie morale, which gives a version of the theory . . . that morality is based on the natural desire to seek pleasure and avoid 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, on ne voit à pied, au Prado, que des femmes uniformément vêtues, couvertes de grands voiles, noirs ou blancs, qui dérobent une partie de leurs traits; que des hommes enveloppés dans leurs vastes manteaux de couleur sombre pour la plupart; en sorte le théâtre de la gravité castillane. Il le paraît surtout, lorsque chaque soir, au premier coup de l’angelus, tous les promeneurs, sans exception, se découvrent, s’arrêtent subitement, comme paralysés par une main invisible, interrompent les discussions les plus animées, les conversations les plus tendres, pour se recueillir pendant quelques minutes.” Jean-François, baron de Bourgoing, Tableau de l’Espagne moderne (Paris: Tourneisen fils, 1807), 1:267–68. Translated as Modern State of Spain (London: J. Stockdale, 1808), 1:248. 91. “Los ay quando se cantan las arias, están durmiendo, en oyendo seguidillas se levantan del asiento.” Ramón de la Cruz, Los payos críticos (1770), in Cinco sainetes inéditos de Don Ramón de la Cruz, con otro a él atribuido, ed. Charles Emil Kany (New

288

92.

93.

94.

95.

96.

notes to pages 61–62 York and Paris, 1924), 35. Quoted and translated in Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 336. “Ahora bien, ¿qué efecto produce ni puede producir la algarabia de la Musica Italiana! Sacamos acaso de ella más utilidad que el placer pasagero de oir una infinidad de combinaciones de sonidos, que nada dicen al alma ni al corazon? . . . Yo no puedo sufrir que esta Musica Italiana haya corrompido nuestra Musica nacional, sencilla, graciosa, expresiva, propio de nuestra caracter, que movia los afectos, 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, gracias a los idiotas en la Musica, que nos conservan todavia algunas gracias de la Musica Española en sus boleras, tiranas &c. que á no ser por ellos, ya cantarian nuestros cocineras arias Italianas con riesgo evidente de que nuestras ollas podridas, pidiesen macarones, fideos, &c. en vez de carnero, jamon, gallina, &c.” Diario de Madrid, 5 September 1795. Quoted and translated in Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 337. It is puzzling that this charmingly republican dedication should have been used when Boccherini was, according to the catalog of his works prepared by his grandson Alfredo Boccherini y Calonje, already in the Infante’s exclusive service. For a consideration of possible reasons for this, see Tortella, Boccherini, un músico italiano, 97–98. Madrid’s noble population was rather more sizable than that of other cities: the Planimetría 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 the total population of the city. Del Corral, La vida cotidiana, 14. Nicolás Solar-Quintes, “Las relaciones de Haydn con la casa de Benavente,”Anuario musical 2 (1947): 87; and Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, 276–79. Noches hay que se hallan congregados veinte y acaso más aficionados que su parte ejecutan de repente. Mi manejo no es mucho ni muy poco y entre ellos logro así lugar decente, pues, cuando no el violín, la viola toco .... Gozamos de un depósito abundante de la moderna música alemana, que en la parte sinfónica es constante que arrebató la palma a la italiana. Si alguno al contrapunto se dedica y cualquier obra suya manifiesta, la aficionada orquesta se la prueba, examina y califica y con benignidad los circunstantes oyen mis sinfonías concertantes. From a letter written by Tomás de Iriarte, quoted in Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III, 108; Gallego remarks, “This refers to that new, Enlightened bour-

notes to pages 62–66

289

geosie which is fond of music and not only listens to it, but performs it” (“Se refiere a esa nueva burguesía ilustrada que es aficionada a la música y no sólo la oye, la interpreta”). 97. Gallego summarizes Valls’s position in the Mapa armónico-práctico as follows: “He shows himself to be especially proud of the Spanish practice of his day, which he values even above the Italian, only preoccupied with flattering the senses, and the French, mere flatterer of the intellect: the Spanish, bringing together both qualities, was more scientific and more solid.” (“Se muestra especialmente orgulloso de la práctica española de su tiempo, a la que reputa incluso superior a la italiana, sólo preocupada de halagar los sentidos, y a la francesca, mera halagadora del intelecto: la española, reuniendo ambas cualidades, era más científica y más sólida.”) Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III, 31. 98. There has been much speculation among biographers about Boccherini’s supposed visit to Prussia in the late 1780s (during which period the general lack of information about the composer becomes a veritable blackout). There is a certain logic to such speculation, since Boccherini had been engaged by Friedrich Wilhelm II as a composer of chamber music, but there is, in the end, no hard evidence to support it, and Tortella has ammassed enough circumstantial evidence to 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 leur âme, 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; que l’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 as The 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 selbst gerührt; so muss er nothwendig sich selbst in alle Affekten setzen können welche er bey seinen Zuhörern erregen will; er giebt ihnen seine Empfindungen zu verstehen und bewegt sie solchergestallt am besten zur Mit-Empfindung.” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, “Vom Vortrage,” in Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen (1753; facsimile reprint, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994), 1:122, trans. William J. Mitchell, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York: Norton, 1949), 122. (This is my reworking of Mitchell’s translation.) 1. “Boccherini n’est connu maintenant qu’en France. L’Allemagne dédaigne sa simplicité naïve et l’opinion qu’en ont les artistes de ce pays se résume dans un mot prononcé par Spohr à Paris, dans une réunion musicale, où l’on venait d’exécuter quelques-uns des quintetti du maître italien. On demandait au célèbre violoniste et compositeur allemand ce qu’il en pensait: je pense, répondit-il, que cela ne 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).

290

notes to pages 66–69

2. The stakes here have only partly to do with Boccherini, and quite a lot to do with nationalism. Fétis’s estimation sets a noticeably defensive tone. Fétis, a Walloon (that is, a French-speaking native of the Low Countries), offers Boccherini as an example of values that are in danger of being lost to the musical world, that danger being personified by Spohr, a German. In Boccherini’s first full-length biography, written in 1851, Louis Picquot, a Frenchman, takes flight from the Spohr anecdote for several outraged pages, railing against the decadence of a modern music dominated by ignorance and “effects, always effects, nothing but effects”; he admonishes Beethoven for having strayed too far in his last quartets from “la poétique musicale” and passionately damns Spohr (without going so far as to name him—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 sentiment are to be banished from it, if melody is an intruder and grace an orphan; if the 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 common with your laborious and indigestible pedantries!” (“Si la musique n’est plus faite pour plaire et pour toucher, si l’imagination et le sentiment doivent en être bannis, si la mélodie est une intruse, la grâce une fille de peu; si le souffle divin qui anime tout cela est lui-même un hors-d’oeuvre, une superfluité, oh! alors vous avez raison, la musique de Boccherini n’est pas de la musique, car elle n’a rien de commun avec vos pénibles et indigestes élucubrations!”) Louis Picquot, Notice sur la 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’s fervor carries over into the work of both Georges de Saint-Foix and Germaine de Rothschild, writing well into this century. As a position of implicit resistance to canonicity, it could well be said to inform the work of most of the Boccherini scholars working in their wake, including myself. 3. “Charles prend son archet: il tenait toujours la partie de premier violon; or, dans cette partie figurait un trait d’une extrême longueur et d’une complète monotonie. Ut si, ut si: ces deux notes rapidement coulées, se répétaient au point de couvrir la moitié d’une page. Le roi les attaque bravement, continue, poursuit ce discours; mais il est tellement absorbé par l’attention donnée à sa partie, qu’il n’entend pas les dessins, les accords ingénieux, introduits au-dessus comme audessous de cette pédale intérieure. Il s’impatiente, sa mauvaise humeur va crescendo, sa voix se joint à son archet pour articuler ridiculement le trait monotone; abandonnant enfin le travail que le fatiguait, il se lève et dit avec accent de la 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 même temps que je retiens le premier violon sur un trait uniforme. Ce trait perd sa monotonie 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 conversation! Musique d’écolier, et de mauvais écolier.” Henri Castil-Blaze, “Alexandre Boucher, célèbre virtuose,” Revue de Paris, May 1845, 10. Quoted in Picquot, No-

notes to pages 69–72

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

291

tice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini, 2nd ed., as Boccherini: notes et documents, 64–65. 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 parts of the Larghetto consist of the note A repeated without variation throughout the movement.” Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 346. In Castil-Blaze’s story, however, the monotonous figure consists of two notes rather than one and is played by the first violin. The most likely candidate I have been 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 these pitches 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 a quintet, since the Boccherini of the story mentions only four instruments. There is a passage in the last movement of the Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, where the first violin repeats A–B b eight times in rapid succession (bars 40–48). But this is scarcely “half a page,” and the cello is not pizzicato. “Dem Hörer wird sozusagen eine akustische Lupe gereicht, um den Übergang von der einen zur anderen Stufe verfolgen zu können.” Christian Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen Stellung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), 39. “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 milieu de 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. Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), chap. 12, “Trouble in Paradise.” “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 evocaciones espectrales, como el resíduo palpitante de una realidad onírica. Y en todos ellos hay mucha distinción, una tensión impregnada de melancolía.” José Luis Morales y Marín, Luis Paret: vida y obra (Zaragoza: Aneto Publicaciones, 1997), 97. I am not the first to have noticed this. “Boccherini seems to have been very much concerned with gradations of piano dynamics.” Ellen Iris Amsterdam, “The String Quintets of Luigi Boccherini” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1968), 59. “Cette disposition compagne de la faiblesse des organes, suite de la mobilité du diaphragme, de la vivacité de l’imagination, de la délicatesse des nerfs, qui incline à compatir, à frissonner, à admirer, à craindre, à se troubler, à pleurer, à s’évanouir.” Denis Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (c. 1770), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 343. “Un’attenzione così puntuale per tutto quello che in teatro si può comunicare tramite immagini, movimenti e gesti, non meraviglia affatto in un librettista che era anche un ballerino operante a Vienna negli anni del trionfo del ballo pan-

292

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

notes to pages 72–75 tomimo.” 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 (Florence: Olschki, 1989), 50. As a direct analogy to the requirement of visual legibility, theorists from Batteux to Rousseau insisted on a clear line as the sine qua non of musical art, indeed of 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 sonic parity with the three Aristotelian dramatic unities (time, place, action): “The unity of melody requires that we never hear two melodies at a time, but not that the melody should never pass from one part to another. . . . There is even harmony ingenious, and well managed, wherein the melody, without being in any part, results only from the effect of the whole.” (“L’Unité de Mélodie exige bien qu’on n’entende jamais deux Mélodies à la fois, mais non pas que la Mélodie ne passe jamais d’une Partie à l’autre: au contraire. . . . Il y a même des Harmonies 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). He calls it “rhythmischen Ausprägung,” rhythmic impression or stamp. See Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette, 176. “Brownian movement: the irregular oscillatory movement observed in microscopic particles or ‘molecules’ of all kinds suspended in a limpid fluid.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Brownian movement,” http://dictionary.oed.com. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 109. “Les esquisses ont communément un feu que le tableau n’a pas. . . . La plume du poète, le crayon du dessinateur habile, ont l’air de courir et de se jouer. La pensée rapide caractérise d’un trait; or, plus l’expression des arts est vague, plus l’imagination est à l’aise.” Denis Diderot, “La Mère bien-aimée (esquisse),” Salon of 1765, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 542–43. Later in the same essay, however, one finds 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 to finish; his head and his hand will become libertines.” (“Un mot sur Robert. Si cet artiste continue à esquisser, il perdra l’habitude de finir; sa tête et sa main deviendront libertines.”) Ibid., 652. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 58. “Il faut entendre dans la musique vocale ce qu’elle exprime. Je fais dire à une symphonie bien faite presque ce qu’il me plaît; et comme je sais mieux que personne 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 situation actuelle, sérieuse, tendre, ou gaie, ne me touche plus qu’une autre qui serait moins à mon choix. Il en est à peu près de même de l’esquisse et du tableau. Je vois dans le tableau une chose prononcée: combien dans l’esquisse y supposeje de choses qui y sont à peine annoncées!” Diderot, “La Mère bien-aimée (esquisse),” 544.

notes to pages 76–78

293

19. There are many examples; among my favorites are the slow movement of the Concerto in C Major, G. 477, where the first entry of the solo cello is virtually indistinguishable from the violin parts that surround it (bars 14–20); and much of the first movement of the Concerto in G Major, G. 480, in which the cello solo 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 cellist Gaspar Cassadó, who died in 1966. It has since been used as such by the German cellist Julius Berger for his recording of Boccherini’s cello concerti (Boccherini: concerti per violoncello, Qualiton Imports, 1988 [?], 6055–57 EBS). While there is certainly no reason to assume that Boccherini did not own this instrument at some point in his life, the documentation is vague; Cassadó’s account, as reprinted in Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, facing illustration 12, seems to be based upon inference. The instrument has some alterations, “probably carried out in Paris towards the end of the 18th century,” which leads Cassadó to speculate that “Boccherini was obliged by his straitened circumstances in the last years of his life to sell his Stradivarius. Unfortunately the name of the purchaser is unknown and we have no trace of the ’cello again until the middle of the 19th century, when it reappears in the important collection of old instruments belonging to the Infante Don Sebastian de Bourbon [sic].” More recently, the composer’s descendant José Antonio Boccherini Sánchez has discovered earlier versions of Boccherini’s will in which he names his instruments: an “Estayner” (Stainer), and a “violonchelo chico”—a small, possibly five-stringed instrument (personal communication, June 2003). See also José Antonio Boccherini Sánchez, “Los testamentos de Boccherini,” Revista de musicología 22, no. 2 (1999): 93. It is worth mentioning that in the eighteenth century Stradivari instruments did not have the enormous prestige they have now; the top-flight instrument of choice 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 the Classic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook, ed. Alan W. Atlas (New York: Pendragon, 1985), 72. I draw all the correspondences that follow from Heartz’s entertaining 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 mouvemens d’une femme qui demande & qui emploie tour à tour la douceur & le reproche. On a presque envie d’y mettre des paroles; cent fois exécutée, elle offre toujours le même sens & la même image.” Claude-Philibert Coquéau, “Entretiens sur 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 in G 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, Boccherini: Six Sonatas for Harpsichord and Violin, Glossa, GCD 920306, 2001.

294

notes to pages 78–79

26. “Nous ne voulons pas tout savoir à la fois. Les femmes ne l’ignorent pas; elles accordent 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’imagination dans une douce rêverie, ou qui la fixe sur des tableaux enchanteurs; c’est la grâce de l’Albane, c’est la naïve sensibilité de Gessner.” Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, and Charles-Nicolas Baudiot, “Sur les Tableaux,”Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement (c. 1804; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 3. The passage in which this description occurs is remarkable throughout for its poetic fervor; Baillot wrote very evocatively. See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini for the entire passage. 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; er lachte das letzte Mal zürück durch den leichten Nebel, der, wie ein göldner Flor, entfernte Weinberge, Haine und Fluren glänzend umschlich; die ganze Natur feyerte im sanften Wiederschein des Purpurs, der auf streifichten Wolken flammte, seinen Abzug; die Vögel sangen ihm das letzte Lied, und suchten gepaart die sichern Nester; der Hirt, vom längern Schatten begleitet, blies, nach seiner Hütte gehend, sein Abendlied, als ich hier sanft entschlief. “Hast du, Philomele! durch dein zärtliches Lied; hat ein lauschender Waltgott mich geweckt, oder eine Nymphe, die schüchtern durchs Gebüsche rauscht? “O! wie schön ist alles in der sänfteren Schönheit! Wie still schlummert die Gegend um mich! Welche Entzücken! Welch sanfter Taumel fließt durch mein wallendes Herz!” Salomon Gessner, “Die Nacht,” in Schriften (Vienna: Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1765), 2:130. See also http://epub.library.ucla .edu/leguin/boccherini. Diderot was reminded of Gessner by what is now Greuze’s most famous painting, the Jeune Fille qui pleure son oiseau mort: “The pretty elegy! 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 belle dans ce petit canton! Arrêtons-nous-y; la chaleur du jour commence à se faire sentir, couchons-nous le long de ces animaux. Tandis que nous admirerons l’ouvrage 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 le silence 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 de son troupeau; et lorsque le poids du jour sera tombé nous continuerons notre route, et dans un temps plus éloigné, nous nous rappellerons encore cet endroit enchanté et l’heure délicieuse que nous y avons passée.” Denis Diderot, “Loutherbourg: paysage avec figures et animaux,” Salon of 1763, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 610.

notes to pages 80–82

295

32. Remigio Coli, Luigi Boccherini, foreword by Emilio Maggini (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1988) 49, mentions a letter of recommendation from an English musical amateur, written in Nice on 5 October 1767, which suggests that by that time Boccherini and Manfredi were on their way to Paris; Coli asserts that they had certainly arrived in Paris by the end of that month. Thus the window of opportunity for Boccherini to visit the Salon would certainly have been small. 33. “L’impression successive du discours, qui frappe à coups redoublés, vous donne bien une autre émotion que la présence de l’objet même, où d’un coup d’oeil vous 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 nos pensées,” 76. 34. “Qu’on n’est affecté, dans les premiers instants de la vision, que d’une multitude de sensations confuses qui ne se débrouillent qu’avec le temps et par la réflexion habituelle sur ce qui se passe en nous.” Denis Diderot, “Lettre sur les aveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui voient” (1751), in Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, revues 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 se mêle à la conversation, on approuve, on blâme, on admire, on s’irrite, on s’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’examinais: d’abord je vois couler des pleurs, il s’interrompt, il sanglote; tout à coup il se lève, il marche sans savoir où il va, il pousse des cris comme un homme désolé, 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 inferir el conocimiento de las almas, invierten el orden de la naturaleza, porque fian á los ojos un oficio, que toca principalmente á los oídos. Hizo la naturaleza los ojos para registrar los cuerpos; los oídos para examinar las almas. A quien quisiere conocer el interior del otro, lo que mas importa no es verle, sino oírle.” Benito Jerónimo 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 Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 39. Stefano Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, Absorption, and Sentiment in the 1780s,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1996): 97. 40. Arnould (1740–1802), who premièred the role of Iphigénie in Gluck’s Parisian operas on that theme, was memorialized by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon in white marble, a sash across her front emblazoned with a star and moon, eyes cast heavenward, and hair swept up: the very figure of womanly nobility—with one breast bared. 41. This was the norm for chamber music published by the Parisian houses with whom Boccherini chiefly dealt (Vénier, La Chevardière, Boyer, Pleyel). In addition, we can infer from some of Boccherini’s correspondence with Pleyel that he was being urged to keep his music accessible to an amateur public—and was irritated by the request; see, for example, the first of the two letters cited at the beginning of chapter 2.

296

notes to pages 83–86

42. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1748), edited and abridged by John Angus Burrell (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 372–73. 43. “Cette bouche entr’ouverte, ces yeux nageants, cette attitude renversée, ce cou gonflé, ce mélange voluptueux de peine et de plaisir, font baisser les yeux et rougir toutes les honnêtes femmes dans cet endroit.” Diderot, “La Mère bienaimée (esquisse),” 544–45. 44. “Il y a au front, et du front sur les joues, et des joues vers la gorge, des passages de tons incroyables; cela vous apprend à voir la nature, et vous la rappelle. Il faut 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 Spielenden entfernt sitzen, um sie nicht der Zerstreuung und Störung auszusetzen; diese aber, wenn sie ihre Instrumente gestimmt haben, müssen sich des, jedem empfindlichen Ohre, so unange-nehmen Präludirens enthalten, um die schöne und große Wirkung nicht zu schwächen, welche Stille und Überraschung so wunderbar hervorzubringen wissen.” Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmack in der Musik (Carlsruhe, 1809). Fétis tells us that Schaul was “a musician at the royal court in Wurtemberg, who died on 23 August 1822, [who] was at the same time a professor of the Italian language” (“musicien du cour du roi de Wurtemberg, mort à Stuttgard le 23 août 1822, était en même temps professeur de la langue italienne”). Fétis, “Schaul ( Jean-Baptiste),” in Biographie universelle. The Briefe was Schaul’s only published work on music. 46. Thomas Twining, letter of 5–6 July 1783, in The Letters of Charles Burney, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro (1751–84; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 376–400. 47. “Den Anfang machte ein Quintett von Bocherini, eine Perrücke, aber mit einem ganz liebenswürdigen, alten Herrn darunter; dann forderten die Leute eine Sonata von Bach.” Felix Mendelssohn, describing a soirée at Baillot’s in a letter to his sister Rebecka, 20 December 1831, in Reisebriefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832, ed. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1862), 292. This translation is by Jonathan Greenberg. 48. Susan Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington: 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’un des moins connus et des moins cités de ses Quintetti. [music example] L’archet lui tombe des mains, et il s’écrie: Voilà le premier accent de la douleur d’Ariadne, 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 âme et 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, Journal 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, perhaps influenced by melodic contour and timbral association, has played an interesting trick on him. I have reproduced the line as the reviewer has given it, with the tempo as “Poco adagio sostenuto” and in common time. Boccherini’s orig-

notes to pages 86–88

297

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 jaunty feel for the tragic scenario proposed. Haydn’s 1789 Arianna (Hob. XXVIb:2) makes an interesting contrast with this 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 a marked 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 the entire 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’ingannai che fedel mi sembrasti, e ch’io t’amai.

A: Dunque adesso— T’abborro!

M: A: E sei— M:

La tua nemica!

A: E vuoi— M:

La morte tua! Quel primo affetto—

A:

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 over ninety 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 auteurs de ces sortes d’ouvrages mettaient volontiers à contribution les plus célèbres compositeurs et puisaient dans leurs oeuvres les morceaux qu’ils jugeaient les mieux appropriés à la situation qu’ils avaient à rendre. Or, la scène où 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 pathétique, une énergie, un désordre qui peignaient admirablement l’état de l’infortunée Nina. Un transport unanime accueillit cette belle conception; et comme les connaisseurs les plus distingués en félicitaient à l’envi de l’auteur du ballet, 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

298

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

notes to pages 88–93 quintetto de Boccherini. En effet, c’était la finale du quintetto en ut mineur de l’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 documents, 119–20. Fétis remarks that “if Persuis lacked dramatic effect in his operas, he was more fortunate 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 dans ses ballets, car il a fait de la musique charmante pour quelques-uns”). Fétis, “Persuis (Louis-Luc),” in Biographie universelle. Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina,” 97. Bryson, Word and Image, 46. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 11. “Un Compositeur de Musique devroit savoir la Danse, on du moins connoître les temps & la possibilité des mouvements qui sont propres à chaque genre, à chaque caractere & à chaque passion.” Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, 163. Translated as Works of Monsieur Noverre, 1:151. “L’oeil du peuple se conforme à l’oeil du grand artiste, et . . . l’exagération laisse pour 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. “Ces Baladins ne vont que par sauts & par bonds, & le plus souvent hors de cadence; il[s] la sacrifient même volontiers à leurs sauts périlleux. . . . Il ne peut exciter dans les Spectateurs qu’un étonnement mêlé de crainte, en voyant leurs semblables exposés à se tuer à chaque instant.” Gasparo Angiolini, Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme au ballet pantomime tragique de Sémiramis (1765; facsimile reprint, Milan: Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, 1956), n.p. “Quant au Danseurs, ils se ne permettent pas les tours de force employés par les Grotesques. . . . Ces Danseurs comiques, s’ils sont habiles, peuvent faire admirer la force jointe à la précision et la légèreté, & même faire rire quelquefois en tournant artistement en grimaces les gestes de contraction qui leur sont indispensables pour leurs efforts.” Ibid. “Autre chose est une attitude, autre chose une action. Les attitudes sont fausses et petites, les actions toutes belles et vraies.” Denis Diderot, “Essais sur la peinture” (1765), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 671. “Elle exige de ceux qui l’exécutent, de la justesse, de la légèreté, l’équilibre, le moelleux, 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 les deux premiers genres ils seroient comptés par rien.” Angiolini, Dissertation. “Il faudroit donc si nous voulons rapprocher notre Art de la vérité, donner moins d’attention aux jambes, & plus de soin aux bras.” Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, 261. Translated as Works of Monsieur Noverre, 2:6. “Mais la danse pantomime qui ose s’élever jusqu’à représenter les grands événements tragiques est sans contredit la plus sublime. Tout ce que la belle danse exige des 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’élégant, le délicat de la belle danse, & cela ne suffit pas encore: il faut, comme nous

notes to pages 94–95

299

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 ce qu’il veut représenter, qu’il éprouve enfin & qu’il fasse sentir aux Spectateurs ces frémissemens intérieurs, qui sont le langage avec quel l’horreur, la pitié, la terreur parlent au-dedans de nous, & nous secouent au point de pâlir, de soupirer, de tressaillir, & de verser des larmes.” Angiolini, Dissertation. 68. These extracts are from Diderot’s Salons, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 521, 539, and 556 respectively. une légère et molle inflexion dans toute sa figure et dans tous ses membres qui la remplit 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 notably in the “Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur son article ‘Genève’” (1758), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Dena Goodman has pointed out that the strenuousness of Rousseau’s protest may be read as indirect evidence of the pervasiveness of the trend. See her The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 2. 70. “Ce n’est pas dans l’école qu’on apprend la conspiration générale des mouvements; conspiration qui se sent, qui se voit, qui s’étend et serpente de la tête aux pieds. Qu’une femme laisse tomber sa tête en devant, tous ses membres obéissent à ce poids; qu’elle la relève et la tienne droite, même obéissance du reste 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 pantomimi (Milan: G. B. Bianchi, 1773), 15–19. Quoted and translated in Bruce Alan Brown, 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 Violoncelli. È lo strumento, e non la nota che produce l’effetto: La Melodia, la Modulazzione, ed i variati moti devon concorrervi, ma senza la giusta, e variata applicazione degl’Instrumenti mai non si speri un particolar effetto.” Gasparo Angiolini, 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 monde sait 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 plupart des Poëtes . . . & s’abandonnent entièrement à l’intelligence des Comédiens. . . . Ils assistent, direz-vous, aux répétitions; j’en conviens, mais ils donnent 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 langage du Poëte. Le Maître de Ballets, à son exemple, doit faire recommencer une

300

77. 78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

notes to pages 96–100 Scène en action, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin ceux qui l’exécutent, aient rencontré cet instant de naturel inné chez tous les hommes; instant précieux qui se montre toujours 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. “Je veux . . . que la régularité se trouve dans l’irrégularité même.” Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, 14; Works of Monsieur Noverre, 13. “Los lineamentos del cuerpo, ú del rostro, no significan naturalmente las disposiciones del ánimo. . . . Esta representacion natural no puede consistir en otra cosa, que en varios, sutiles, y delicados movimientos, que las varias disposiciones del alma resultan al cuerpo, especialmente al rostro, y sobre todos á los ojos. . . . Estos movimientos sutiles . . . llamamos gesto.” Feijóo, “Nuevo arte physiognomico,” in Theatro crítico universal, 5:67. For instance: “Probably other elements, disseminated through dances such as the folía, the chaconne, the sarabande, and others of the seventeenth century, crystallize in the fandango.” (“Probablemente, otros elementes diseminados por danzas como la folía, el canario, la chacona, la zarabanda y otras del siglo xvii, cristalizan en el fandango.”) Faustino Nuñez, “Fandango,” in Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana, general editor Emilio Casares Rodicio, with José López-Calo and Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta ([Madrid?]: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999–). “The bolero has its own, peculiar costume, which has been, is, and will forever be 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 (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulsen, 1807), 44. Quoted in Javier Suárez-Pajares, “Bolero,” in Diccionario de la música española. “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 compás, aunque ejecute primores, no merece el más pequeño aplauso.” Ibid. “No todos tienen aquellos bienparados graciosos, en donde, quedándose inmoviles, el cuerpo descubre con tranquilidad y descanso hasta las más pequeñas gesticulaciones del rostro. La serenidad en los pasos y mudanzas dificiles es la primera cosa que se debe observar en este baile.” Antonio Cairon, Compendio de las principales reglas del baile (Madrid, 1820). Quoted in Suárez-Pajares, “Bolero.” “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 rapprocher; en voyant comment la danseuse, au moment où sa langueur annonce une prochaine défaite, se ranime tout-à-coup pour échapper à son vainqueur; comment celui-ci la poursuit, est poursuivi à son tour; comment les différentes émotions qu’ils éprouvent sont exprimées par leurs regards, leur gestes, leurs attitudes, on ne peut s’empêcher d’observer, en rougissant, que ces scènes sont aux véritables combats de Cythère, ce que sont nos évolutions militaires en temps 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.

notes to pages 100–116

301

84. See Peter Manuel, “From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: Dual Tonicity in Spanish and 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: Musique nocturne des rues de Madrid. Ce morceau est totalement inutile, et même ridicule hors d’Espagne. Les auditeurs n’arriveraient jamais à en comprendre la signification, pas plus que les exécutants ne seraient capables de le jouer comme il se doit.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 261–62. Whatever reservations Boccherini might have had, 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 of its level of general popularity. 86. This was Christine Somis, one of the preeminent tragic sopranos in Paris at the time. 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 performing identity of Madame Van Loo for me. 87. The quotation is from Didone abbandonata, Act 1, Scene 17. I thank Bruce Brown for identifying this for me. 88. “J’avais en une journée cent physionomies diverses, selon la chose dont j’étais affecté. J’étais serein, triste, rêveur, tendre, violent, passionné, enthousiaste. . . . Les impressions de mon âme se succédant très rapidement et se peignant toutes sur mon visage, l’oeil du peintre ne me retrouvant pas le même d’un instant à l’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 rendons, soit à nous-même, soit aux autres; autre chose, la sensation totale et instantanée de cet état; autre chose, l’attention successive et détaillée que nous sommes 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: nous employons bien du temps à le rendre avec fidélité: mais il existe en entier, et tout à la fois: l’esprit ne va pas à pas comptés comme l’expression. Le pinceau n’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 sensibilité jouée 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?

302

notes to pages 116–127 Di vita mancherei Nel dirti addio; Ché viver non potrei Fra 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 scena G. 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 proposed. He includes a sizable chunk of the preceding recitative, in which the queen 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 E b major and 0 meter, the melody’s anti-virtuosic “simplicity” marked by numerous appoggiature, 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 dovrò Senza 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 Enea Abbia nel mio destino Un augurio funesto al suo cammino.

4. I should admit that it took me, learning to play this sonata, much longer than that. I initially “recognized” this passage by dint of a kinesthetic rather than sonic reminiscence: it occurred to me that I had played passages organized around this same E b -major bar-fifth in both the other movements, and that this was odd in a C-major sonata. Only when I played the passages side by side did the thematic resemblances dawn on me. 5. For this passage, as for the piece as a whole, my source was the Duke of Hamilton MS rather than the Milan Conservatorio MS. In the latter, these directions appear not in the solo part but in the basso, which for the duration of this episode moves in triplet arpeggiations rather than in the duple motion of the Hamilton version. The result is quite different; it can be heard in several commercial recordings of this piece, notably that by Richard Lester and David Watkin on Hyperion CDA 66719. Gérard lists the Milan Conservatorio MS, which contains nineteen sonatas and is the only source for some of them, as “Autograph (?),” and in his comments upon it explains his doubts as to its autograph status—although not as to its authorship—wisely refraining from any attempt to resolve them. See Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 3. I have used this am-

notes to pages 128–131

303

biguous source situation as my license to play and discuss the version of the sonata that I find the more interesting. 6. Christian Speck and Stanley Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online (London: Macmillan, 2000–), www .grovemusic.com. See also Timothy P. Noonan, “Structural Anomalies in the Symphonies of Boccherini” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996); and Miriam Tchernowitz-Neustadtl, “Aspects of the Cycle and Tonal Relationships 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. Mandane, angry and confused, addresses her sister-in-law Semira, who has just caused her to doubt the nature of her passions. Mandane professes to hate Arbace; but Semira has reminded her that she once loved him. Se d’un amor tiranno Credei di trionfar, Lasciami nell’inganno, Lasciami lusingar Che più non amo. Se l’odio è il mio dovere Barbara, e tu lo sai, Perché avvedermi fai Che invan lo bramo? If I believed I had triumphed Over a tyrannical love, Leave me deceived, Let me flatter myself That I love no more. If hatred is my duty, Cruel one, and you know it, Why do you make me realize That 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 the later eighteenth-century editions of this sonata reverse the order of the first two movements; it is interesting to note how this reversal changes one’s perception of the meaning and the importance of the self-quotation. 10. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 51. 11. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “idiom,” http://dictionary.oed.com. See

304

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

notes to pages 131–133 also Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1726; facsimile reprint, published as Diccionario de autoridades, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963), s.v. “idioma”: “It is a Greek word that means ‘property’.” (“Es voz griega, que significa propriedad.”) “La lengua vulgár, própria y particular de qualquier Nación.” Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “idioma.” “Une façon de parler adaptée au génie propre d’une langue particulière.” M. de Beauzée, “Idiotisme,” 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, 1751–65). Searchable online at the University of Chicago ARTFL Project, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc. “En la Gramatica es la inflexión de qualquier verbo, construcción particular de alguna phrase o particula que tiene alguna irregularidad, y no es segun la regla general de la Nación; sino que está solo en uso en alguna Provincia ò parte de ella.” Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “idiotismo.” “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.). “La universalided de los ignorantes, ò idiotas.” Ibid., s.v. “idiotismo.” 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, disposition and interior affinity for something, such as science, art, or manufacture.” (“La naturál inclinacion, gusto, disposicion y proporcion interior para alguna cosa: como de ciencia, arte, o manifactúra.”) The literary example given for this meaning is from Garcilaso: “Genius is a specific virtue or particular property of everyone who lives.” (“Genio es una virtúd especifica ò propriedad particular de cada uno que vive.”) In the Encyclopédie the two main entries for “Génie” are by the chevalier de Jaucourt (1704–79), one of the encyclopedia’s principal editors. The second is a famous paean to sensibilité: “The man of genius is one in whom the expanded soul, struck by the sensations of all beings, interested in all that there is in nature, does not receive one idea that does not awaken a sentiment; everything animates it, and everything is conserved there.” (“L’homme de génie est celui dont l’âme plus étendue, frappée par les sensations de tous les êtres, intéressée à tout ce qui est dans la nature, ne reçoit pas une idée qu’elle n’éveille un sentiment, tout l’anime & tout s’y conserve.”) “Génie (2),” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. “Eloignée des usages ordinaires, ou des lois générales du langage . . . incommunicable à tout autre idiome.” M. de Beauzée, “Idiotisme,” in ibid. Thus Stanley Sadie: “His style became increasingly personal and even idiosyncratic over the 44 years in which he composed, to such an extent that in his late music he sometimes seems to be repeating himself (even if more subtly).” Speck and Sadie, “Boccherini, (Ridolfo) Luigi,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online. Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 671. Christian Speck, editorial preface to Sonata in A minor by Luigi Boccherini (Mainz: B. Schotts Söhne, 1991). Boccherini to Pleyel, 27 December 1798: “Since 1760, the year in which I be-

notes to pages 133–136

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

305

gan to write, it has been my practice to keep a catalog of all my works, noting the year in which I wrote them, and the person to whom I sold them.” (“Depuis 1760, année où je commençai à écrire, j’ai eu l’habitude de tenir un catalogue de toutes mes oeuvres, avec l’année où je les écrivis, à qui je les vendis.”) See Della Croce, Epistolario, 267. This catalog was transcribed and published by the composer’s grandson, Alfredo Boccherini y Calonje; the loss of the original catalog during the Spanish civil 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’s legacy. More recently, a segment of it, transcribed by the composer into a letter to Pleyel, has resurfaced in Madrid. See Alfredo Boccherini y Calonje, Luis Boccherini: apuntes biográficos y catálogo de las obras de este célebre maestro publicados por su biznieto (Madrid: Imprenta y Litografía de A. Rodero, 1879); and Isabel Lozano Martínez, “Un manoscrito autógrafo de Boccherini en la Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid),” Revista de musicología 25, no. 1 (2002): 225. Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, 683. Chappell White, From Vivaldi to Viotti: A History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 22. For a definitive treatment of the philosophical roots and ramifications of this metamorphosis, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Martha Feldman, “Magic Mirrors and the ‘Seria’ Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 3 (fall 1995): 470. “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. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 6, chap. 3, 1140a, 5. These translations are from Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. William David Ross, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 5, 1140b, 20. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 1, 1103a, 30 (my emphasis). The earlier date according to Jacques Derrida, in his treatment of the Essai in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 194. “Simple sounds emerge naturally from the throat, the mouth is naturally more or less open; but the modifications of the tongue and palate, that create articulation, require attention and practice; one never does them unintentionally; all children must learn them, and many do not come by them easily.” (“Les simples sons sortent naturellement du gosier, la bouche est naturellement plus ou moins ouverte; mais les modifications de la langue et du palais, qui font articuler, exigent de l’attention, de l’exercice; on ne les fait point sans vouloir de faire; tous les enfants ont besoin de les apprendre, et plusieurs n’y parviennent pas aisément.”) 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. To be fair to Rousseau, we should also distinguish it from his much more practical descriptions of the difference between speech and song in the Dictionnaire

306

notes to pages 136–137

of 1768. See the articles “Opéra” and “Chant,” in Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: veuve Duchesne, 1768), trans. William Waring, “Opera,” “Song,” in A Dictionary of Music (London: J. French, 1779). 34. I am much obliged to my colleague Mitchell Morris for clarifying these distinctions to me. 35. Throughout its history, whatever the country of its use, the word virtuoso remains in Italian. As soon as it is translated—virtuous, vertueux, meisterlich—it shifts hopelessly, and tellingly, in meaning. In Sebastien de Brossard’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1703 we read that in Italian, virtu means not only that disposition of the soul which renders us agreeable to God and makes us act according to the principles of sound reason: but also that superiority of genius, skill, or competence which makes us excel in either the theory or the practice of the fine arts beyond those who have applied themselves as much as we have. It is from this that the Italians have formed the adjectives virtuoso, or virtudioso, in the feminine virtuosa, which are often used as nouns for naming or praising those to whom Providence has chosen to give this excellence or superiority. Thus according to them an excellent painter, a skillful architect, etc., is a virtuoso; but more commonly and more particularly they give this fine epithet to excellent musicians. virtu veut dire en Italien non seulement cette habitude de l’âme qui nous rend agréables à Dieu & nous fait agir selon les règles de la droite raison: mais aussi cette Supériorité 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 bien que nous. C’est de-là que les Italiens ont formé les Adjectifs virtuoso, ou virtudioso, au feminin virtuosa, dont même ils sont souvent des Substantifs pour nommer, ou pour loüer ceux à qui la Providence a bien voulu donner cette excellence ou cette supériorité. Ainsi selon eux un excellent Peintre, un habile Architecte, &c. est un Virtuoso; mais ils donnent plus communément & plus spécialement cette belle Épithète aux excellens Musiciens. Sebastien de Brossard, “Virtuoso,” in Dictionnaire de musique: contenant une explication des termes grecs, latins, italiens, 2nd ed. (Paris: C. Ballard, 1705)

In early eighteenth-century Spanish, although the word is spelled identically to the Italian, its meaning did not carry any particular artistic or musical emphasis: “One who operates according to it. It is also applied to the actions themselves.” (“Él que exercita en la virtud, ù obra segun ella. Aplicase tambien à las mismas acciones.”) Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “virtuoso.” As French and Italian musical cultures established themselves ever more firmly in Spain during the course of the century, the word presumably acquired the connotations described by Brossard. 36. “Le goût fuit toujours les difficultés, il ne se trouve jamais avec elles. . . . Je regarde les difficultés multipliées de la Musique & de la Danse comme un jargon qui leur est absolument étranger; leurs voix doivent être touchantes, c’est toujours au coeur qu’elles doivent parler; le langage qui leur est propre est celui

notes to page 138

307

du sentiment; il séduit généralement, parce qu’il est entendu généralement de toutes les Nations. “Tel Violon est admirable, me dirai-t-on; cela se peut, mais il ne me fait aucun 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 & personne ne 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 parcouru le manche avec légèreté; que dis-je? Il a été jusqu’au chevalet; il a accompagné ces difficultés de plusieurs contortions qui étoient autant d’invitations, & qui vouloient dire, Messieurs, regardez-moi, mais ne m’écoutez pas: ce passage est diabolique; il ne flattera pas votre oreille, quoiqu’il fasse grand bruit, mais il y a vingt ans que je l’étudie. “L’applaudissement part; les bras & les doigts méritent des éloges, & on accorde à l’homme machine & sans tête, ce que l’on refusera constamment de donner à un Violon François.” Jean-Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (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 in 1760 were not rich in such visitors. Constant Pierre remarks of the period 1755–62 that “foreign visitors suspended their visits, leaving the field open to French artists”(“les violonistes étrangers suspendirent leurs visites, laissant le champ libre aux artistes français”). Histoire du Concert spirituel 1725–1790 (Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 1975), 125. The most likely candidate for Noverre’s disdain would seem to be Domenico Ferrari, who (along with Pugnani and a number of other Italians) had a triumphant season at the Concert Spirituel 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 Paris referred 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” (“des grâces infinies, un savoir, une sagesse, un goût au-dessus de tout éloge.” Quoted in Pierre, Histoire du Concert spirituel, 183. 37. It is only fair to Noverre to acknowledge that more generally he participated in his generation’s enthusiasm for the mechanical. His letters 11 and 12 contain a good deal of precise and voluble information about the correct deployment of joints, tendons, muscles, weight, balance; he remarks, “Dancers must . . . follow the same regime as Athletes” (“Les Danseurs devroient . . . suivre le même régime que les Athlètes”), and refers repeatedly and pragmatically to the body as a machine. Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, 325. 38. “L’exécution . . . dépend surtout de deux choses: premièrement, d’une habitude parfaite de la touche & du doigter de son Instrument; en second lieu, d’une grande habitude de lire la Musique & de phraser en la regardant: car tant qu’on ne voit que des Notes isolées, on hésite toujours à les prononcer: on n’acquiert la grande facilité de l’Exécution, qu’en les unissant par le sens commun qu’elles doivent former, & en mettant la chose à la place du signe.” Rousseau, “Exécution,” in Dictionnaire de musique, trans. William Waring, “Execution,” in A Dictio-

308

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

notes to pages 139–147 nary of Music (London: J. French, 1779). I have modified Waring’s translation slightly, replacing the word “from” with “on” in two places. Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 48. For a sensitive exploration of Mozart’s relation to period concepts of mechanism, see Annette Richards, “Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sublime,” Music and Letters 80, no. 3 (August 1999): 366–89. “Le mercredi des Cendres . . . a lieu, à Madrid, une procession burlesque . . . Dès le matin des bandes de gars grotesquement masqués et des filles aguichantes envahissent les rues en gambadissant et folâtrant. Toute la journée ces troupes bruyantes et insolentes sont maîtresses de la ville. Le soir, un cortège se forme. En tête, trois personnages traditionnels: l’oncle Chispas, roulant sous son masque des yeux furibonds; la fille Chusca, endiablée et provocante; le Juanillo, embossé dans sa cape et à allure de bourreau des cours. Derrière, un gigantesque mannequin de paille, vêtu de haut en bas, le pelele, auquel est accrochée une petite sardine. Derrière encore, gambadant, vociférant et prodiguant des lazzi, tous les compagnons d’artisans, courtauds de boutiques, portefaix, porteurs d’eau, valets en rupture de service, marchands de fruits et de légumes, harengères, commises et femmes légères de la capitale. Ils et elles sont affublés, qui de masques grimaçants, qui de cagoules de pénitents, qui encore de san benitos pointus. A la lueur des torches, dans un bruit de pétards, au sourd tam-tam de zambombas . . . tous ces pantins désarticulés, au-dessus desquels flottent des cerfs-volants, dévalent en vociférant vers la porte de Tolède, la franchissent et, au-delà, enfouissent solennellement la sardine en terre tandis que, sur une bûcher, le pelele brûle haut.” Jacques Chastenet, La Vie quotidienne en Espagne au temps de Goya (Paris: Hachette, 1966), 137. It is quite possible that Goya and Boccherini knew each other, since both were employed by Don Luis de Borbón during 1770–72, Boccherini as a permanent member of the Infante’s household, Goya as a seasonal employee. Further evidence that the two men were acquainted is presented in Jaime Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano en la España ilustrada (Madrid: Sociedad española de musicología, 2002), esp. chap. 6. This appears in Richard Aldrich’s foreword to the 1902 Schirmer edition of Duport’s Études. At a colloquium at UC Berkeley in 1995, Lewis Lockwood remarked that the anecdote, however delicious, remains “untraceable.” This is wonderfully audible on a 1988 recording by Anner Bylsma and the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Luigi Boccherini Quintets op. 11, 4–6, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi RD 77159. “Die Dekoration von Quaglio war völlig im chinesischen Geschmack und transparent. Lackierer, Bildhauer und Vergolder hatten sie reichlich mit alledem, was ihre Kunst vermochte, ausgestattet. Aber was der dekoration den größten Glanz gab, waren prismatische gläserne Stäbe, die in böhmischen Glashütten geschlissen worden waren und, genau ineinander gepaßt, in die leergelassenen Flecke gesetzt wurden, die, sonst buntfarbig mit Öl getränkt werden. Es ist unbeschreiblich, welchen prächtigen, höchst überraschenden Anblick diese von unzähligen Lichtern erleuchteten Prismen, die schon im bloßen Licht- und Sonnenschein eine große Wirkung tun, auf das Auge hervorbrachten. Man stelle sich den Spiegelglanz der azurfarblackierten Felder, den Schimmer des vergoldeten Laub-

notes to pages 147–150

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

309

werks und endlich die regenbogenartigen Farben, die so viele hundert Prismata mannigfaltig, gleich Brillanten vom ersten Wasser, spielten, vor, und die stärkste Einbildungskraft wird hinter diesem Zauber zurückbleiben müssen. Und nun die göttliche Musik von einem Gluck!” Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Lebensbeschreibung (1799), ed. Eugen Schmitz (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1940), 81, trans. Arthur Duke Coleridge, The Autobiography of Karl von Dittersdorf (London: Bentley and Son, 1896), 70–71. Schmitz cites Anton Schmid’s biography of Gluck to assert that these decorations were in fact not by Quaglio at all, but by Angelo Pompeati. Ditters’s description is of the première performance at the summer residence of the Prince von Hildburghausen; he subsequently tells us that the sets never quite achieved the same effect when they were transferred to the Burgtheater. A useful and concise account of the history of stage mechanisms and automata appears 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. For a fascinating exploration of automata in mid-century Paris, see Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Antonio Martín Moreno tells us that it is not clear whether these particular automata were ever constructed; but others were built for the Alba household in the following generation. Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, 233–34. Roach, Player’s Passion, 66. I explore the relationship of early modern animal training to Enlightenment self-constitution in “Man and Horse in Harmony,” in Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, ed. Philip Thurtle (London: Routledge, 2003), and also in Kingdoms of the Horse: The Culture of the Horse in the Early Modern World, ed. Karen Raber (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Giovanni Andrea Gallini, A Treatise on the Art of Dancing (London: Dodsley, Becket, and Nichol, 1762), 166. Quoted in Susan Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 111. “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 un lungo 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 così esercitandolo per qualche ora al giorno, verrà fortificato nelle parti deboli.” Gennaro Magri, Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo (Naples: V. Orsino, 1779), 2:11. Quoted and translated in Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 111. “Étudions l’intention de la nature dans la construction du corps humain, & nous trouverons la position & la contenance qu’elle prescrit clairement de donner au soldat. . . . La tête doit être droite, dégagée hors des épaules, & assise perpendiculairement au milieu d’elles. Elle doit n’être tournée ni à droite ni à gauche; 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 circulairement sans entraîner légérement du même côté qu’elle agit, une des branches de l’épaule, & qu’alors le corps n’étant plus placé quarrément, le soldat ne peut plus marcher droit devant lui, ni servir de point d’alignement.”

310

54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

notes to pages 150–152 François-Apolline, comte de Guibert, Essai général de tactique: précédé d’un discours sur 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. Guibert’s account, a sort of ergonomics avant la lettre, bears an eerie resemblance to some recent discussions sponsored by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about the precise relation of workplace conditions to musculoskeletal injuries. See, for instance, the detailed testimonies and discussions presented at an OSHA Forum at the University of Chicago, 20 July 2001, 618 ff., www.osha.gov/ergonomics-standard/index.html. Francisco [?] Brunetti, “Método de violoncello” (c. 1800), autograph [?] manuscript, signature 1/7041 (10), Biblioteca del Conservatorio Superior de Música, Madrid. I am indebted to Emilio Moreno for bringing this treatise to my attention and very kindly providing me with a copy. Brunetti was born around 1770, the son of Boccherini’s contemporary Gaetano Brunetti (1744–98), who was violinist and composer of chamber music to the Spanish court. The elder Brunetti, a composer of no mean gifts, held this extremely desirable professional position throughout his life—a position for which Boccherini would otherwise have been eligible. He has often been presented by Boccherini biographers as a rival, and not a well-disposed one. In 1785, Francisco Brunetti competed with Boccherini for a position in the Capilla Real, and won. In attempting to determine whether there is any truth in 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 candidate of Boccherini’s importance” (“tampoco sería extraño pensar que, de nuevo, Gaetano hiciera los imposibles por proteger a su hijo frente a un candidato de la envergadura de Boccherini”). Tortella, Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano, 44 and 246. Also see Germán Labrador, “Gaetano Brunetti: un músico en la corte de Carlos IV,” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2003). Despite the evidence of systematic askesis in works like Brunetti’s, or the important 1756 treatise by the violinist José de Herrando (1720/21–63), and despite the utilitarian bent of the Borbón monarchy, the institutionalization of musical efficiency in a conservatory system comparable to the Paris Conservatoire did not evolve in Spain until much later. In 1810 the violinist Melchor Ronzi proposed formation of a Spanish conservatory system “como los de París o Napoles,” and mentioned the indigence of “los profesores de música de Madrid.” But this did not occur until 1836. Martín Moreno, Historia de la música española, 302. Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 7. Fétis gives these dates for Raoul, and informs us that he was an amateur cellist employed as a legal counsel (avocat) to the king. He was evidently also a musical antiquarian: “Around 1810, [he] conceived the project of reclaiming the bass viol from the oblivion into which it had fallen.” (“Vers 1810, Raoul conçut le projet de tirer la basse de viole de l’oubli où elle était tombée.”) François-Joseph Fétis, “Raoul ( Jean-Marie),” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873; facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972).

notes to pages 152–154

311

59. “Le pouce n’est qu’un point d’appui et de direction pour toute la longueur du manche.” 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, je répondrois que cela est dans la nature, chacun devant avoir la sienne, mais pour le doigté qui est tout-à-fait mécanique, il me semble qu’il doit être un, c’est-àdire, le même pour tous.” Jean-Louis Duport, “Avant-propos,” in Essai sur le doigté du 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 approchera néanmoins et même malgré le joueur, un peu de chevalet quand on augmentera 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’archet, 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 pourrait avoir l’air ou de la négligence ou de l’affectation. On ne saurait trop recommander aux élèves de chercher à prendre une attitude noble et aisée; il éxiste un 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 de negligé, qui semble contredire tout ce qu’il peut faire avec expression et avec grace, il fait souffrir ceux qui l’écoutent en rendant d’autant plus choquant le contraste qu’il présente à la fois entre son jeu et son attitude. “Disons plus, il est extrêmement rare et presqu’impossible de voir en même tems un virtuose charmer les oreilles et blesser les yeux.” Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel and Charles-Nicolas Baudiot, 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 Keyboard Works of Domenico Scarlatti” (paper, winner of 2004 Ingolf Dahl Award at joint meeting of the Northern California and Pacific Southwest chapters of the American Musicological Society, 2 May 2004, University of San Francisco). 64. I am grateful to Charles Sherman, whose vivid performance of some of these sonatas in Los Angeles in April 2001 first presented the idea of a mechanistic topos to me. 65. “On est soi de nature; on est un autre d’imitation; le coeur qu’on se suppose n’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 disseminated in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire in 1770 and then popularly reprinted in 1812–13.” Roach, Player’s Passion, 157. It was not printed in the longer 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 le manque absolu de sensibilité qui prépare les acteurs sublimes.” Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 313. 68. “Naturalistic,” telegraphic acting styles arose in part because of the sheer size of the newer playhouses; the 1791 rebuilt version of London’s Drury Lane seated

312

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

notes to pages 155–156 3,611 souls. See Roy Porter, “Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Porter (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 29. “L’homme sensible est trop abandonné à la merci de son diaphragme pour être un grand roi[,] un grand politique, un grand magistrat, un homme juste, un profond observateur, et conséquemment un sublime imitateur de la nature.” Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 362. “Est-ce que son âme a pu éprouver toutes ces sensations et exécuter, de concert avec son visage, cette espèce de gamme? Je n’en crois rien, ni vous non plus.” Ibid., 328. “Ce serait un singulier abus des mots que d’appeler sensibilité cette facilité de rendre toutes natures, mêmes les natures féroces.” Ibid., 343. “Ils ne sont propres à les jouer tous que parce qu’ils n’en ont point.” Ibid., 350. “Suspendus entre la nature et leur ébauche.” Ibid., 309. Compare Jaucourt, writing about genius in the Encyclopédie: Sang-froid, that quality that is so necessary to those who govern, without which one would rarely make a just application of means to circumstances, without which one would be subject to imprudence, without which one would lack presence of mind (la présence d’esprit); sang-froid, which submits the activity of the soul to reason, and which is preserved in all events, in fear, in drunkenness, in haste, is it not a quality which could not exist in those men whom imagination governs? This quality, is it not absolutely opposed to genius? Le sang froid, cette qualité si nécessaire à ceux qui gouvernent, sans lequel on feroit rarement une application juste des moyens aux circonstances, sans lequel on seroit sujet aux inconséquences, sans lequel on manqueroit de la présence d’esprit; le sang froid qui soumet l’activité de l’âme à la raison, & qui préserve dans tous les évenemens, de la crainte, de l’yvresse, de la précipitation, n’est-il pas une qualité qui ne peut exister dans les hommes que l’imagination maîtrise? cette qualité n’est-elle pas absolument opposée au génie? “Génie (2),” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné

74. “La caramba fue llamada por las autoridades, pero se defendió sabiamente diciendo que ella, pobrecita de ella, no hacía más que cantar las letras que le ponían delante, con la música que también le daban, y que bastante trabajo tenía en aprenderse una y otra, con los cambios continuos de piezas, para fijarse siguiera en qué es lo que decía, y que se algo decía, ella no entraba en ello, que lo suyo era 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 (Salamanca: Ediciones Anaya, 1967), 113–15. Quoted in Charles Emil Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1932), 307. 77. “L’homme sensible obéit aux impulsions de la nature et ne rend précisément

notes to pages 156–162

78.

79. 80. 81.

313

que le cri de son coeur; au moment où il tempère ou force ce cri, ce n’est plus lui, c’est un comédien qui joue.” Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 335. “On dit qu’on pleure, mais on ne pleure pas lorsqu’on poursuit une épithète énergique qui se refuse; on dit qu’on pleure, mais on ne pleure pas lorsqu’on s’occupe à rendre son vers harmonieux: ou si les larmes coulent, la plume tombe des mains, on se livre à son sentiment et l’on cesse de composer.” Ibid., 333–34. “Un grand comédien n’est ni un piano-forté, ni une harpe, ni un clavecin, ni un violon, ni un violoncelle.” Ibid., 347. “Il n’a point d’accord qui lui soit propre; mais il prend l’accord et le ton qui conviennent à sa partie, et il sait se prêter à toutes.” Ibid. Roach, Player’s Passion, 145.

chapter 5. a melancholy anatomy 1. See Gino Fornaciari, Marielva Torino, and Francesco Mallegni, “Paleopathology of an Eighteenth-Century Italian Musician: The Case of Luigi Boccherini (1743– 1805),” Il Friuli Medico, Alpe Adria Journal of Medicine, 11 June 1996; and Luciano Gallo, “Boccherini ucciso dalla tisi: l’esito degli esami della commissione che ha riesumato la salma,” Il Tirreno, 14 April 1996. My transcriptions of the reports 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 the disease: TB was most often present in a relatively quiescent or passive form. See David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (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 confused by doctors who judge with too much haste.” (“Il est aussi très-difficile de bien connoître cette maladie, & il est très-ordinaire de la voir confondre par des médecins qui jugent avec trop de précipitation.”) M. Malouin, “Tubercule,” 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). Searchable online 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 of classical 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 family was prone to fall into melancholy, and fearing its harmful results, to which he had seen his parents and brothers fall victim, he always took great care to avoid it, however he could. He knew that the best means or, rather, the only means to achieve this was to flee from idleness and to be always employed and in the most violent action possible.” (“Conociendo por experiencia que su familia era expuesta a caer

314

8. 9. 10.

11.

notes to pages 162–163 en la melancolía, y temiendo sus malas resultas, de que había visto sus padres y hermanos habían sido las víctimas, procuró siempre evitarla con gran cuidado, como lo consiguió. Sabía que el mejor medio o, por mejor decir, el único para conseguirlo, era el huir la ociosidad y estar siempre empleado y en acción violenta en lo posible.”) Antonio Gallego, La música en tiempos de Carlos III: ensayo sobre el pensamiento musical ilustrado (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988), 100. Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1776–89; reprint, New York: Dover, 1957), 2:815. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 2, sec. 2, mem. 6, subsec. 3, “Music a Remedy,” 336. “S’il fait parler à la fois les cinq instruments, c’est avec une harmonie pleine et auguste qui . . . prend une teinte sombre et mélancolique, il va droit au coeur par des moyens si doux, que les larmes coulent sans qu’on s’en aperçoive.” PierreMarie-François de Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, and Charles-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 . . . dieser hingegen in lachende Gegenden, mit blumigen Auen, klaren, rieselnden Bächen, dichten Haynen bedeckt, worinn sich der Geist mit Vergnügen der süßen Schwermuth überläßt.” Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmack in 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 melanconia che è proprio degli uomini mansueti e dabbene.” Giuseppe Carpani, Le Haydine, 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 charme inexprimable par leur naïveté.” François-Joseph Fétis, “Boccherini (Louis),” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873; facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972). All of these quotations may be found in context at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini. “Les Quatuors de Bocherini ont, je ne sais quoi, de sombre qui les ont fait comparer aux Nuits d’Young.” Boyé, L’Expression musicale, mise au rang des chimères (Amsterdam, 1779), 15. Claude-Philibert Coquéau, another Parisian pamphleteer writing in 1779, located Boccherini’s somberness and gloominess in a specific piece, the first movement of the Violin Sonata in B b Major, op. 5, no. 3, G. 27; it “expresses most singularly the impact of a somber and profound grief ” (“exprime singulièrement l’atteinte d’une douleur sombre & profonde”). ClaudePhilibert 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 cannot find anything profoundly gloomy in the piece. The movement named is in a major key, characterized by a gently undulating cantabile. It is sweet, galant, and lacks all of the conventional signifiers of “une douleur sombre & profonde.” Moreover, he calls it a Largo, although it is marked “Moderato” in the score. I suspect Coquéau was referring to a different piece.

notes to pages 163–181

315

12. Young had an important Spanish imitator in José Cadalso, whose Noches lúgubres of 1789, “imitando el estilo de las que escribió en inglés el Doctor Young,” was very popular among Spanish readers well into the nineteenth century. See the editorial preface to Cadalso, Noches lúgubres (1789), ed. Joaquín Marco (Barcelona: Planeta, 1985). 13. Edward Young, The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1741; reprint, Hartford: Silas Andrus, 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 ist etwas mürrisch und nimmt höchst selten eine gefällige Miene an. Moquerien gegen Gott und die Welt; Mißvergnügen mit sich und allem; Vorbereitung zum Selbstmord hallen in diesem Tone.” Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1784), ed. Paul Alfred Merbach (Leipzig: Wolkenwanderer, 1924), 262. Quoted and translated in Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 291 (appendix A). 15. “Bb. è un Tono tenero, molle, dolce, effeminato, atto ad esprimer trasporti d’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 Boccherini doch wohl wahrhaftig nicht der Mann, dem ich so aus Herzens Wonne lange zuhören,—dessen Faden, (wenn er anders einen hat) ich unermüdet nachgehen;—dessen Produkt, (im Ganzen genommen) sinnliches Wohlgefallen in mir erregen könnte;—wahrhaftig nicht mein Mann,—weil er mir zu schatticht, zu finster zu mürrisch ist. “Seys nun Entschluß, labyrinthisch zu sein, um sich durch Neuheit zu empfehlen . . . seys zu viel bestimmende Neigung furs Lieblingsinstrument,—oder unwiederstehlicher Drang der Natur; wie oft opfert er da, alles der Kunst auf! “ Wahr ists Entwicklung ist für den forschenden Geist angenehm, und um deswillen auch oft verworrener Gang, Fall ins finstere Moll; aber schürzen sollst du doch nicht ohne Noth; Knoten soll nichts als Contrast seyn, und die Auflösung desselben, allmähliger Übergang. Wenn der Setzer ohne Noth sich in Schwierigkeiten verwickelt, so quält er’s Ohr, ohne’s Herz zu befriedigen, und unterbricht den Fortgang der Empfindungsgeschichte. Der Kenner bestimme die Vielheit dieser Fälle bey Boccherini.” Carl Ludwig Junker, Zwanzig Componisten: eine Skizze (Bern, 1776), 17–18. 17. Elaine Sisman, “The Labyrinth of Melancholy” (paper). I am grateful to Dr. Sisman for sharing her work with me. Interestingly, Johann Baptist Schaul uses exactly this metaphor to describe Mozart’s music as undesirably labyrinthine, in explicit comparison to Boccherini’s: “I marvel at the ingenious art of this musical Daedalus [i.e., Mozart], who has understood how to build such great, impenetrable labyrinths; but I cannot find the Ariadne to show me the thread by which to find the entrance, much less the exit.” (“Ich bewundere die sinnreiche Kunst jenes musikalischen Dedalus, der so große, undurchdringliche Labyrinthe zu bauen gewußt hat; aber ich kann die Ariadne nicht finden, die mir den Faden

316

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

notes to pages 182–184 reicht, um den Eingang, noch weniger den Ausgang entdecken.”) Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmack in der Musik, 10; for the complete extract, see http://epub .library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini. Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 38. This style of medicine is concisely portrayed (and expertly skewered) in Molière’s last play, Le Malade imaginaire (1673). “Je désire que vous considériez . . . que toutes les fonctions que j’ai attribuées à cette machine, comme la digestion des viandes, le battement du coeur et des artères, la nourriture et la croissance des membres, la respiration, la veille et le sommeil; la respiration de la lumière, des sons, des odeurs, des goûts, de la chaleur, et de telles autres qualités dans les organes des sens extérieurs; l’impression de leurs idées dans l’organe du sens commun et de l’imagination; la rétention ou l’impreinte de ces idées dans la mémoire; les mouvemens intérieurs des appétits et des passions; et, enfin, les mouvemens extérieurs de tous les membres. . . . Je désire, dis-je, que vous considériez que ces fonctions suivent toutes 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 leur occasion conçevoir en elle aucune autre âme végétative ni sensitive, ni aucun autre principe de mouvemen et de vie, que son sang et ses esprits agités par la chaleur du feu qui brûle continuellement dans son coeur, et qui n’est point d’autre nature que tous les feux qui sont dans les corps inanimés.” René Descartes, 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, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 213. “Nerfs . . . sont comme de petits filets ou comme de petits tuyaux qui viennent tous du cerveau, et contiennent ainsi que lui un certain air ou vent trés subtil qu’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. “Ce sont des corps très petits et qui se meuvent très vite.” Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme, 140. Francis Glisson, De naturae substantia energetica (1672), discussed in Sergio Moravia, “From Homme machine to Homme sensible: Changing Eighteenthcentury Models of Man’s Image,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 48. “Chaque partie organique du corps vivant a des nerfs qui ont une sensibilité, une espèce ou un degré particulier du sentiment.” Théophile Bordeu, Recherches sur les pouls, par rapport aux crises . . . (1756), quoted in Moravia, “From Homme machine to Homme sensible,” 55. “ What I mean is this, said Simmias. You might say the same thing about tuning the strings of a musical instrument, that the attunement is something invisible and incorporeal and splendid and divine, and located in the tuned instrument, while the instrument itself and its strings are material and corporeal and composite and earthly and closely related to what is mortal. Now suppose that the instrument is broken, or its strings cut or snapped. According to your theory

notes to pages 184–185

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

317

the attunement must still exist—it cannot have been destroyed, because it would be inconceivable that when the strings are broken the instrument and the strings themselves, which have a mortal nature, should still exist, and the attunement, which shares the nature and characteristics of the divine and immortal, should exist no longer, having predeceased its mortal counterpart.” Plato, “Phaedo,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Lane Cooper et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 85–86. For a thorough treatment of Cassiodorus’ theological interpretations of the stringed-instrument imagery in the Psalms, see Nancy van Deusen, The Harp and the Soul: Essays in Medieval Music (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), esp chap. 6, “The Cithara as Symbolum: Augustine vs. Cassiodorus on the Subject of Musical Instruments.” To the chorus of ancients on this topic we might also add Cicero: “For nature has assigned to every emotion a particular look and tone of voice and bearing of its own; and the whole of a person’s frame and every look on his face and every utterance of his voice are like the strings of a harp, and sound according as they are struck by each successive emotion” (De Oratore, Book 3, with De Fato, Paradoxa Storicorum, De Partitione Oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, 2 vols. [London: Heinemann, 1942], 2:172). “Quella dolce lira . . . che la destra del cielo allenta e tira.” Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Milan: Mursia, 1971), 413. Paradiso, canto 15, lines 4 and 6. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739), ed. with an introduction by Ernest 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. See Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998). “On peut considérer l’unisson et même l’octave comme l’expression la plus juste de la sympathie, expression supérieure en quelque sorte à l’harmonie même, pusiqu’elle est le résultat d’une concordance parfaite; or, la musique ne saurait inspirer trop souvent cette sympathie: il faut donc ne rien négliger pour en faire sentir tout le charme.” Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot, L’Art du violon (Paris: Dépôt Central de la Musique, 1835), 207. Translated by Louise Goldberg as “Effect and Means of Effect,” in The Art of the Violin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 381. John Hill’s account of Spranger Barry as Othello in The Actor, or A Treatise on the Art of Playing (London: R. Griffiths, 1755), 10. Quoted in Roach, Player’s Passion, 102. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768), ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 140–41. I am indebted to Professor James Turner for bringing this passage to my attention. “Melancolía negra causada por adustión y encendimiento de cólera [la cual] causa grande enfermedades como son locuras, melancolías extrañas, depravadas imaginaciones, y varios furores y pensamientos maniacos.” Alonso de Freylas, Si los melancólicos pueden saber lo que está por venir (1605), fol. i–v. Quoted in Roger Bartra, 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

318

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

notes to pages 185–188 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, added to the end of Freylas’ Knowledge of, cure of, and protection from the plague.”) Quoted in Bartra, Cultura y melancolía, 65. This and the following quotation appear in John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 209 and 211. “Sans fièvre, sans toux, ni difficulté de respirer qui soit considérable, avec perte d’appétit, indigestion & grande foiblesse, les chairs étant fondues & consumées.” Anonymous, “Phtisie nerveuse,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1, sec. 1, mem. 2, subsec. 2, “Division of the Body, Humours, Spirits,” 95. “Passion de l’âme, qui influe beaucoup sur le corps. L’affliction produit ordinairement les maladies chroniques. La phtisie est souvent la suite d’une grande affliction.” Denis Diderot, “Affliction,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. “La cause la plus commune des tubercules est une disposition héréditaire qui affecte également les tumeurs & le tissu des poumons; il peut se faire aussi que les rheumes négligés, les catarrhes, les autres affections de poitrine, les virus vénériens & scrophuleux, leur donnent naissance.” M. Malouin, “Tubercule,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. Sir Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of Consumptions and Other Distempers Belonging to the Breast and Lungs (London: John Pemberton, 1724), 45. Denis Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (c. 1770), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 343; see chapter 3, note 10, above. “Chaque vie personnelle peut être décomposée en facteurs communs, homogènes 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. “Le triomphe de cette géométrie plane n’est possible que grâce à une neutralisation de toutes les dissidences personelles.” Ibid. “Pour répondre d’une manière complète à ce que vous me demandez, je dois vous dire que l’état de ma santé et l’obligation où je me trouve d’écrire toujours pour le roi de Prusse que j’ai l’honneur de servir, ne me permettent en aucune manière 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 bonne et mes nerfs me font beaucoup souffrir.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), 245 and 259–60. Demonstrating this prudent aspect of Boccherini’s character is the more or less explicit concern of both Jaime Tortella, in Luigi Boccherini y el Banco de San Carlos: un aspecto inédito (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1998); and José Antonio Boccherini Sánchez, in “Los testamentos de Boccherini,” Revista de musicología 22, no. 2 (1999): 93–121. 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 1768 to 1805—he never wrote fewer than six pieces annually, and he not infrequently produced as many as fifteen. Jaime Tortella has examined the patterns of Boccherini’s creativity, and the biographical reasons for them, in “Boccherini, su

notes to pages 189–193

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

319

tercera crisis de creación y el Conde de Aranda: una hipótesis explicativa,” Nassarre (Revista aragonesa de musicología) 14, no. 2 (1998): 179–94. Roy Porter, “Enlightenment and Pleasure,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Porter (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 11. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “The Author’s Abstract of Melancholy, Diakoco,” xiv. A useful discussion of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as a work of literature can be found in Teresa Scott Soufas, Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 110–13. Baillot, the only writer on music I know of to use this term beside Boccherini himself, includes it as an indication of simplicity or naivety—and uses Boccherini’s music to exemplify it. See Baillot, Art of the Violin, esp. chap. 23, “Musical Character and the Accent That Determines It.” I draw here upon Soufas’s Melancholy and the Secular Mind, esp. chap. 3, “Love Melancholy (Lope, Calderón),” and chap. 4, “The Melancholy Malcontent (The Picaresque).” “La phtisie dorsale est la suite familière & la juste punition des débauches outrées.” Anon., “Phtisie,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. The Spanish attitude to this condition seems to have been a good deal more straightforward than the French or English. The entry “ptísico/a” in the Diccionario de la lengua castellana describes a consumption that may be either pulmonary or syphilitic, but it engages in no associative flights of fancy: “Illness caused by having some lesion in the lungs or genitals, originating in an acrid and corrosive humor which has arisen in those organs, and causing in the patient a cough accompanied by slow heat which attenuates and consumes him little by little.” (“Enfermedad causada por tener alguna llaga en los pulmónes ò livianos, originada de humor acre y corrosivo, que ha caído a ellos, y causa el paciente tos accompañada de calentúra lenta, que le va atenuando y consumiendo poco à poco.”) Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1726; facsimile reprint, published as Diccionario de autoridades, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963), s.v. “ptísico/a.” “Après ces éjaculations qui interrompent son sommeil, le malade est plongé dans une espèce d’anéantissement, ses yeux s’obscurcissent, une langueur extrème s’empare de tous ses sens, il lui semble n’exister qu’à-demi; cette terrible idée qui lui retrace sans cesse sa foiblesse & son néant, qui souvent entraîne avec elle l’image d’une mort prochaine, qui la lui représente le bras levé, la faux déployée prête à moissonner ses jours, le plonge dans une tristesse accablante, & jette peuà-peu les fondemens d’une affreuse mélancolie; le sommeil vient—il ferme de nouveau sa paupière, le dérobe à lui-même, met fin à ses cruelles réflexions, ce n’est que pour lui en procurer une nouvelle matière; à-peine est-il endormi, que les songes les plus voluptueux présentent à son imagination échauffée des objets lascifs, la machine suit sa pente naturelle, des foibles désirs naissent aussi-tôt, mais plus promptement encore les parties qui doivent les satisfaire obeissent à ces impressions, & plus encore à la disposition maladive dont elles sont attaquées; le nouveau 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 plus de force dans l’anéantissement horrible qu’il avoit deja éprouvé. Dans quelquesuns, un nouveau sommeil prépare encore de nouvelles éjaculations & de nou-

320

54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

notes to pages 194–207 veaux tourmens encore plus terribles. Après avoir passé de pareilles nuits, quelle doit être la situation des malades pendant le jour? on les voit pâles, mornes, abattus, ayant de la peine à se soutenir, les yeux enfoncés, sans force & sans éclat, leur vûe s’affoiblit, une maigreur épouvantable les défigure, leur appétit se perd, les digestions sont dérangées, presque toutes les fonctions s’alterent, la mémoire n’a plus sa vivacité . . . bien-tôt des douleurs vagues se répandent dans différentes parties du corps, un feu intérieur les dévore . . . la fièvre lente survient, & enfin la phtisie dorsale, suite funeste des excès dans l’évacuation de la semence.” M. Malouin, “Pollution nocturne,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. The phrase is Elaine Scarry’s, from The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28. “L’amour démesuré ne s’annonce cependant pas toûjours par des signes évidens, il se tient quelquefois caché dans le coeur; le feu dont il le brûle, dévore la substance de celui qui est affecté de cette passion, & le fait tomber dans une vraie consomption: il est difficile de connoître la cause de tous les mauvais effets qu’elle produit en silence.” Anon., “Érotique mélancolie,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné. Although Rousseau allows for the representation of “silence” through musical sound, it is through a kind of representational sleight of hand; he surely is not referring to the kind of absolute pall that Young describes: “Though all Nature may sleep, he who contemplates it sleeps not, and the art of the musician consists in substituting for the inaudible image of the object that of the movements which its presence excites in the heart of the contemplator.” (“Que tout la nature soit endormie, celui qui la contemple ne dort pas, et l’art du musicien consiste à substituer à l’image insensible de l’objet celle des mouvements que sa présence excite dans le coeur du contemplateur.”) 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,” 130. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 3, sec. 2, mem. 5, subsec. 2, “Cure of LoveMelancholy,” 532. “All their senses are troubled, they think they see, hear, smell, and touch that which 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-elle perdu, et comment de toutes ces pertes en est-il résulté la conscience d’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, in Absicht auf Orchester- und Quartettspiel, Nardini, der als Virtuos durch die Vol-

notes to pages 207–208

2.

3.

4.

5.

321

lendung seines Spiels so berühmt geworden, und Boccherini, dessen Verdienste bekannt genug sind, erzeigten mir die Ehre, mich als Bratschisten unter sich aufzunehmen. Wir studirten auf die angegebne Weise Quartetten von Haydn (die, welche jetzt in der Suite Op. 9, 17 und 21 ausmachen), und von Boccherini, die dieser damals eben schrieb und man noch immer so gern hört.” Giuseppe Maria Cambini, “Ausführung der Instrumentalquartetten,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 22 August 1804. Cambini also mentions this group in his violin treatise of 1803: “Alas! that those who regard instrumental music as no more than a meaningless noise did not hear, as I did, quartets by Boccherini, Haydn, and other celebrated masters played by Manfredi, Boccherini, Nardini, and myself, only too happy to play the viola!” (“Hélas! que ceux qui ne regardent pas la musique instrumentale que comme un vain bruit n’ont-ils, comme moi, entendu exécuter les quatuors de Boccherini, de Haydn, et de quelques autres maîtres célèbres, par Manfredi, Boccherini, Nardini, et moi, qui étois trop heureux de faire l’alto!”) Giuseppe Maria Cambini, Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (Paris: Naderman, c. 1803; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 22. For the full text and translation, see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini. The “autres maîtres célèbres,” as direct influences and models for the young Boccherini’s string quartets, probably included Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1700/1701–75), Milan’s doyen composer, who by 1765 had produced at least twenty-one works in a variety of quartet configurations (three violins and bass; flute, two violins, and bass; and the “standard” string quartet). On the assumption that works were often available in manuscript well before their appearance in 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 may have been written as early as 1757). Closer to Boccherini’s own generation was the Viennese Joseph Starzer (1728–87), whose twenty-six works for string quartet are, unfortunately, impossible to date. Through Boccherini’s documented travels to Vienna, and his possible travels to Munich and Mannheim, there would have been opportunities for him to meet all these quartet-writing gentlemen in person. Further opportunities would have existed for him to play and acquire copies of their works. “It seems there are no precedents in the quartet genre for these classifications into large and small works.” (“Für diese Klassifizierung in opere “grandi” und “piccole” scheint es im Streichquartett keinen Vorläufer zu geben.”) Christian Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen Stellung, vol. 7 of Studien zur Musik, ed. Rudolf Bockholdt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), 16. Another peculiar usage emerges here: Boccherini’s use of the Italian opera to mean a single work (where most use the Latin opus), and its plural opere to indicate more than one work (where most use the Latin opera). There is obviously excellent potential for confusion here; I propose to bypass it through the use of the standard abbreviations: op. X can stand for either the Latin or the Italian term, as can its plural opp. “Distinguo le opere in piccole, e grandi, perché le grandi constano di quattro

322

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

notes to pages 208–212 pezzi cada quintetto, e le piccole di due, e non più. Fra queste potranno scegliere a loro piacere postoché tutto è panno dell’istessa pezza.” Quoted in Luigi Della Croce, 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 for the composer. “In the ‘opera grande’ slow tempi (and thus a certain songfulness) get the upper hand.” (“Nell’ ‘opera grande’ s’impone il valore dei tempi lenti [e quindi di una certa volontà di canto].”) Guido Salvetti, “Luigi Boccherini nell’ambito del quartetto italiano del secondo settecento,” Analecta musicologica 12 (1973): 227–52. See Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette, chap. 3, “Entwicklung in Boccherinis Quartettschaffen.” “Ses idées sont tout individuelles, et ses ourages sont si remarquables sous ce rapport, qu’on serait tenté de croire qu’il ne connaissait point d’autre musique que la sienne.” François-Joseph Fétis, “Boccherini (Louis),” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ed. (1873; facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972). Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 7. The “he” in this passage is once again the painter Giambattista Tiepolo. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 35. We can postulate commercial as well as artistic reasons for this demotion of the cello from the spotlight: by 1769, the year he composed op. 8, Boccherini had only just established his publishing “pipeline” from Spain to Paris, and for the next few years probably had technical accessibility (an important component of saleability to his amateur market) in mind. By 1775, when op. 22 appeared, Boccherini had presumably established enough confidence in his marketability to begin reinserting virtuosity into the equation. A judicious number of cello solos appear in each quartet opus from that year forward. See Guido Salvetti, “Camerismo sinfonico e sinfonismo cameristico: alla ricerca di un approccio analitico pertinente,” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 337–53. “Non seulement la conscience nous donne connoissance de nos perceptions, mais encore, si elles se répètent, elle nous avertit souvent que nous les avon déjà eues, et nous les fait connoître comme étant à nous, ou comme affectant, malgré 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 existence, et notre connoissance ne s’étendroit jamais au-delà d’une première perception: je la nommerai réminiscence.” Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines: ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain (1746; présentation de Aliénor Bertrand, Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2002), 25. Translated by Thomas Nugent as An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge; Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, with an introduction by Robert G. Weyant (1756; reprint, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971), sec. 2, chap. 1, sec. 15, 36.

notes to pages 217–224

323

14. Ellen Amsterdam has noted Boccherini’s marked affinity for third-related harmonies in the quintets. See Ellen Iris Amsterdam, “The String Quintets of Luigi Boccherini” (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 originated around 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 the reign of Louis XV, when Mme de Pompadour was an arbiter of taste’. (Condemnation of the more ‘feminized’ features of the Rococo style was routine until recent times.)” Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown, “Rococo,” in The New Grove 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; le timbre de la voix; le timbre d’un instrument musical, d’airain ou de métal.”) Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, “Timbre (2),” 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). Searchable online at the University of Chicago ARTFL 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 premier coup de l’oeil tout est vu. Mais plus on regarde et plus on est enchanté; il ne 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 point les 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’harmonie. Les couleurs sont la parure des êtres inanimés; toute matière est colorée; mais les sons annoncent le mouvement; la voix annonce un être sensible.” JeanJacques 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 merkliche Schwäche vor sich: sonst würde es kein Ton, sondern nur ein unangenehmer und unverständlicher Laut seyn. Eben diese Schwäche ist an dem Ende iedes Tones zu hören.” Leopold Mozart, Gründliche Violinschule (1787; facsimile reprint, 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 Early Classical Period,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 27, no. 2 (summer 1974): 212. 22. Speck, Boccherinis Streichquartette, 53–54, calls this technique “erweiterter Zweistimmigkeit.” Writing of the quintets, Amsterdam refers to Boccherini’s “common reinforcement of harmonic textures through octave doubling and the employment of parallel thirds and sixths.” Amsterdam, “The String Quintets of Luigi Boccherini,” 32.

324

notes to pages 230–254

23. I distinguish open-closed relationships from antecedent-consequent ones as follows: in the former, the harmony remains the same in both blocks (as between bars 3–4 and 7–8, both V–I in root position), the distinction between phrases being made melodically (an upward-turning tune in bar 4, a descent to the tonic in 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 de leur 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 une longue grappe de petits animaux ailés, tous accrochés les uns aux autres par les pattes? . . . Cette grappe est un être, un individu, un animal quelconque. . . . Si l’une de ces abeilles s’avise de pincer d’une façon quelconque abeille à laquelle elle s’est accrochée, que croyez-vous qu’il en arrive? Dites donc.—Je n’en sais rien. . . . —Celle-ci pincera la suivante; [il] s’excitera dans toute la grappe autant des sensations qu’il y a de petits animaux. . . . Le tout s’agitera, se remuera, changera de situation et de forme; [il] s’élèvera de bruit, de petits cris. . . . Celui qui n’aurait jamais vu une pareille grappe s’arranger, serait tenté de la prendre pour un animal à cinq ou six cents têtes et à mille ou douze cents ailes.’” Diderot, “Le Rêve de d’Alembert,” 889. 25. Alpers and Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, 45. The authors are discussing the curious perspectival and affective disjointures among the figures in Tiepolo’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, dicendoli che sono uno de i suoi più appassionati stimatori e ammiratori insieme del suo Genio, e Musicali componimenti de quali qui si fà tutto quel apprezzo, che in rigor di Giustizia si meritano.” Carl Ferdinand Pohl, Joseph Haydn (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1878), 2:180–81n6. This letter is not included in the Epistolario of Luigi Della Croce’s Il divino Boccherini (Padua: Zanibon, 1988), but appears 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 belongs to Artaria and Co. 2. “Übersende zugleich den Brief von Herrn Boccherini, bitte mein gehorsambstes Gegencompliment an denselben. Niemand bey uns weiß mir zu sagen: wo dieser Orth Arenas ligt. Es muß doch unweit Madrid seyn; bitte demnach mir diese zu wissen zu machen, indem ich selbst dem Herrn Boccherini schreiben werde.” Joseph Haydn, Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, unter Benützung der Quellensammlung, ed. Dénes Bartha and H. C. Robbins Landon (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1965), 97. 3. “Übersende demnach beide briefe, bedaure nur, daß ich dermahlen an Herrn

notes to pages 254–256

4.

5.

6. 7.

325

Boccherini nicht eigenhändig schreiben kann, wollen Sie bey gelegener zeit mein Ergebensten Respect an Hochdemselben übermachen, werden Sie mich verbinden.” Ibid., 115. “Gegen die Gewohnheit seiner Landsleute ging er mit der Zeit und der Ausbildung der Tonkunst auch in Deutschland fort, und nahm von den Fortschritten derselben, besonders in wiefern sie von seinem alten Freunde, Joseph Haydn, bewirkt oder veranlasst wurden, in sein Wesen auf, so viel ohne Verleugnung seiner Individualität geschehen konnte.” (“Contrary to the custom of his countrymen, he progressed with the times and with the development of composition in Germany, in particular those developments inspired or invented by his old friend Joseph Haydn; but very much in his own style, without denying his own individuality.”) Anonymous obituary, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 21 August 1805, 756–58. For the full text of this article, see the Web site, http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/boccherini. Christian Speck, “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik in europäische Musikzentren des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 119–20. Speck tells us that he derives this information from Wilfried Scheib, “Die Entwicklung der Musikberrichterstattung im Wienerischen Diarium von 1703– 1780” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Vienna, 1950). Speck, “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik,” 120. London printings of Boccherini’s music issued by 1795, the time of Haydn’s second 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, and William 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 Yves Gérard, Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, 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 World Connections,” Inter-American Music Review 4, no. 2 (spring–summer 1982): 3. 9. “ Wenn den Boccherinischen Quartetts auch im Ganzen das Große in der Anlage und Reich und Frappante der liberalen Durchführung eines Kühnern Genies

326

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

notes to pages 256–257 abgeht, das man an den mehresten Haydn’ und Mozart’schen.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 1 June 1799, 586. The complete text and translation of this review, and of the sources cited in the following six notes, may be found at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/leguin/ boccherini. “Ich leugne nicht, daß Haydns Quartette unter allen neuen Compositionen dieser Art nur das meiste Vergnügen gewähren; es ist ein Vergnügen des Verstands, willkührliche Auslegung. Boccherinis Werke hingegen haben immer ein herrschende, bestimmte Grundidee, die gleichartige, interessante Bilder darstellt; man wird dadurch erschüttert, gerührt, in unruhige Bewegung versetzt; das Herz wird hingerissen, und fühlt noch lange nachher die tiefen Eindrücke seiner Zaubertöne.” Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmack in der Musik (Carlsruhe, 1809), 10. “Deutschland scheint, in seiner jetzigen Vorliebe für das Schwierigere, Künstlichere, Gelehrtere, ihn noch zu wenig zu kennen: wo man ihn aber kennet und besonders den melodischen Theil seiner Werke zu geniessen und zu würdigen verstehet, hat man in lieb und hält ihn in Ehren.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 21 August 1805. “Le compositeur pénétré de son sujet étend ou resserre ses idées dans un cercle plus ou moins grand; comme Mozart, il s’élève jusqu’aux cieux pour implorer un 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 génie de l’homme émané de la divinité, ou ramené vers la terre, il présente, comme Gluck, le tableau des passions qui nous agitent sur la scène du monde, ou bien enfin, choisissant un moins vaste théâtre et se repliant sur lui même, comme Boccherini, il cherche à nous rappeller à notre primitive innocence.” PierreMarie-François de Sales Baillot, Émile Levasseur, Charles-Simon Catel, and Charles-Nicolas Baudiot, Méthode de violoncelle et de basse d’accompagnement (c. 1804; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 6. “Il est plus enivrant qu’Haydn.” The journal of Charles-Julien Lioult de Chênedollé, entry for 4 February 1808. Quoted in Rothschild, Boccherini: sa vie et son oeuvre, 99–100. “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 jouer celle de Boccherini. M. Puppo les a très-bien appréciés aussi, en disant: Boccherini est la femme d’Haydn.” Alexandre Choron and François Joseph Marie Fayolle, “Boccherini (Luigi),” in Dictionnaire historique des musiciens (Paris: Valade, 1810). “Haydn dichtete seine Werke immer vor dem Klavier. ‘Ich setzte mich hin, fing an zu fantasieren, je nachdem mein Gemüth traurig oder fröhlich, ernst oder tändelnd gestimmt war. Hatte ich eine Idee erhascht, so ging mein ganzes Bestreben 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 Komponisten fehlt; sie reihen ein Stückchen an das andere, sie brechen ab, wenn sie kaum angefangen haben: aber es bleibt auch nichts im Herzen sitzen, wenn man es angehört hat.’ “Er tadelte es auch, daß jetzt so viele Tonmeister komponiren, die nie singen gelernt hätten; ‘das Singen sey beynahe unter die verlorenen Künste zu rech-

notes to pages 257–260

327

nen, und anstatt des Gesanges lasse man die Instrumente dominiren.’” Georg August 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 description and theorizing than any other instrumental medium. See, for example, Suzanne Cusick, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem (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 of playing Bach on the organ; Charles Fisk, “Performance, Analysis, and Musical Imagining,” College Music Symposium 36 (1996): 59–72, and 37 (1997): 95–109, who devotes a thoughtful and extended discussion to the ways in which playing Schumann informed his analyses, and vice versa; Charles Rosen, “On Playing the Piano,” New York Times Review of Books, 21 October 1999, who focuses on the peculiarly exigent task of playing Beethoven, and the storehouse of meanings the exigencies entail; and David Code, “Parting the Veil of Debussy’s Voiles” (unpublished paper delivered at the meeting of the International Musicological Society, Leuven, Belgium, August 2002). As a non-keyboardist, I am not the writer to bring Haydn’s keyboard music into this fold. That honor should go to Tom Beghin, who to date has produced two fascinating exegeses of the mutual influences among Haydn and his executants historical and living: “A Composer, His Dedicatee, Her Instrument: Thoughts on Performing Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas,” in Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); and also “Delivery, Delivery, Delivery! Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas,” 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 virtuosity, tone and expressiveness, suggesting a high degree of collaboration between 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 statue que 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 les habitudes qu’elle contracte: en un mot, il faut n’être que ce qu’elle est. Elle ne jugera des choses comme nous, que quand elle aura tous nos sens et tout notre expérience; et nous ne jugerons comme elle, que quand nous nous supposerons privés de tout ce qui lui manque. Je crois que les lecteurs, qui se mettront exactement à sa place, n’auront pas de 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

328

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

notes to pages 261–265 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. Ibid. Barbara Hanning, “Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenthcentury Parisian Salon,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 4 (1989): 512–28. Ramón de la Cruz, Los payos críticos (1770). Quoted and translated in Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 336. Martha Feldman, “Magic Mirrors and the ‘Seria’ Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 3 (fall 1995): 423–85. Gasparo Angiolini, Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme au ballet pantomime tragique de Sémiramis (1765; facsimile reprint, Milan: Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, 1956), n.p. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: A. Millar, 1752), 1:185. Quoted in John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99. Plainly not every middleclass woman subscribed to the sensible style. “La voix, le ton, le geste, l’action, voilà ce qui appartient à l’acteur; et c’est ce qui nous 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: Éditions Gallimard, 1951), 1:220. “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 vit en 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 de l’ouïe,” sec. 1, “La statue bornée au sense de l’ouïe est tout ce qu’elle entend,” 59. For grace of style (and for deliberate conflation of voices), I will often paraphrase my eighteenth-century sources in what follows. In each case, a note will present the original text. I take this idea from the program notes to a performance of the complete cycle by Tom Beghin at UCLA’s Clark Library in June 2000. “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 méritoit si peu. Supposez-lui un caractère encore plus naïf que celui de Colette dans le 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 violon Paris: Naderman, c. 1803; facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972, 21

notes to pages 265–268

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

329

This is a response to a not dissimilar phrase of Haydn, the first opening violin line of the Andante of his Symphony no. 53, Hob. I:53. You subsequently reminded me that it is this very tune to which Haydn refers in the “Avertissement” published with this group of sonatas, as follows: “Among these six sonatas there are two single movements in which the same idea occurs through several bars: the author has done this intentionally, to show different methods of execution.” The other piece that uses this tune is the second movement of the second sonata in the set, in C # minor, Hob. XVI:37. It would seem from 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, which I had not heard for well over a year). “Cependant plus la mémoire aura occasion de s’exercer, plus elle agira avec facilité. C’est par là que la statue se fera une habitude de se rappeler sans effort les changemens par où elle a passé, et de partager son attention entre ce qu’elle est et ce qu’elle a été. Car une habitude n’est que la facilité s’acquiert par la réitération des actes.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 1, chap. 2, “Des opérations de l’entendement . . . ,” sec. 13, “La mémoire devient en elle une habitude,” 21. “C’était la saison où la terre est couverte des biens qu’elle accorde au travail et à la sueur des hommes.” Diderot, “Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel,’” 1:220. “Alle Gemählde von stiller Ruhe und sanftem ungestöhrtem Glücke müßen Leuten von edler Denkart gefallen.” Salomon Gessner, “Idyllen: an den Leser,” in Schriften (Vienna: Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1765), 3:6. “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, des campagnes fertiles . . . à fuir au fond des forêts.” Diderot, “Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel,’” 1:222. This is a description of Diderot’s character Dorval, as imagined by Diderot. “Il s’était abandonné au spectacle de la nature. Il avait la poitrine élevée. Il respirait avec force. . . . Je m’écriai, presque sans le vouloir: ‘Il est sous le charme.’” Ibid. “Hast du, Philomele! durch dein zärtliches Lied; hat ein lauschender Waltgott mich geweckt, oder eine Nymphe, die schüchtern durchs Gebüsche rauscht?” Salomon Gessner, “Die Nacht,” in Schriften, 2:130. I am inspired to use this Ovidian imagery by Wye Allanbrook, who has pioneered its use as an exegetical tool. See “Theorizing the Comic Surface,” in Music in the Mirror : Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen. (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2002), and “Haydn and the Rhetoric of Comic Metamorphosis” (paper delivered at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, 2001). “Si cependant elle n’a point encore été blessée par les corps sur lesquels elle a porté la main, elle continuera d’étendre les bras sans défiance: mais, à la première piqûre, cette confiance l’abandonnera, et elle demeurera immobile.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, pt. 2, chap. 7, “Des idées que peut acquérir un homme borné au sens de toucher,” sec. 5, “La douleur suspend le désir qu’elle a de se mouvoir,” 116.

330

notes to pages 269–271

43. “[Le mal qu’on reproche au théatre n’est pas précisement d’inspirer des passions criminelles, mais] de disposer l’âme à des sentimens trop tendres, qu’on satisfait ensuite aux dépens de la vertu.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur son article ‘Genève’” (1758), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 5:42. 44. “Je n’accuse pas [le comédien] d’être précisément un trompeur, mais de cultiver pour tout métier le talent de tromper les hommes, et de s’exercer à des habitudes qui ne pouvant être innocentes qu’au théâtre, ne servent par tout ailleurs qu’à mal faire. Ces hommes si bien parés, si bien exercés au ton de la galanterie et aux accens de la passion, n’abuseront-ils jamais de cet art pour séduire de [ jeunes] personnes?” Ibid., 73. 45. “Et lorsque le poids du jour sera tombé nous continuerons notre route, et dans un temps plus éloigné, nous nous rappellerons encore cet endroit enchanté et l’heure délicieuse que nous y avons passée.” Denis Diderot, “Loutherbourg: paysage avec figures et animaux,” Salon of 1763, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 610.

appendix I am indebted to Christian Speck’s Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen Stellung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987) for the basic idea and structure of this table; his version, which also compares the composition and publication dates of Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets with those of Boccherini’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, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor (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 performances recorded on the CD B. Primary sources (to 1900) referring directly to Boccherini. The relevant passages of many of these sources appear in http://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 and for the performances recorded on the cd Cello Concertos Concerto in C Major, G. 573. Boccherini: concerto n. 11 in do maggiore, G. 573. Edited by Aldo Pais. Padua: Zanibon, 1995.

Cello Sonatas Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo. MS, Milan, Conservatorio G. Verdi. Discovered A. Z. Laterza, 1982. (Autograph?) Sonata in G Major, G. 5. London: R. Bremner, 1770–75. 331

332

bibliography

Sonata in C Major, G. 17. MS, Lennoxlove, Scotland, collection of the Duke of Hamilton. (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 quintetti de 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 de l’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, and Charles-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. Bentley, 1834.

bibliography

333

Boccherini y Calonje, Alfredo. Luis Boccherini: apuntes biográficos y catálogo de las obras de 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: Clarendon Press, 1991. Cambini, Giuseppe Maria. “Ausführung der Instrumentalquartetten.” Allgemeine musikalische 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 Giuseppe Haydn. 1808. Bologna: Forni Editore, 1969. Choron, Al[exandre], and François Joseph Marie Fayolle. Dictionnaire historique des musiciens. 2 vols. Paris: Valade, 1810. Fétis, François-Joseph. “Boccherini, Louis.” In Biographie universelle des musiciens. 2nd ed. 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 Air Are 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 sources Angiolini, Gasparo. Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme 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 William David 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, Joaquín Alvárez Barrientos, and María Del Carmen Sánchez García. Vitoria: Diputación, 1988.

334

bibliography

Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen. 2 vols. 1753. Facsimile reprint, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994. Translated by William J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York: Norton, 1949). Blackmore, Sir Richard. A Treatise of Consumptions and Other Distempers Belonging to the Breast and Lungs. London: John Pemberton, 1724. Bourgoing, Jean-François, baron de. Tableau de l’Espagne moderne. 4 vols. Paris: Tourneisen fils, 1807. Translated as Modern State of Spain. 4 vols. (London: J. Stockdale, 1808). Anonymous translation of Nouveau Voyage en Espagne, ou Tableau de l’état actuel de cette monarchie. Paris, 1788. Brossard, Sebastien de. Dictionnaire de musique: contenant une explication des termes grecs, latins, italiens. 2nd ed. Paris: C. Ballard, 1705. Burney, Charles. A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. 2 vols. 1776–89. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1957. ———. Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy. 1770. Edited by H. Edmund Poole. London: Folio Society, 1969. Burney, Frances. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay). Edited by Joyce Hemlow et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It. 1621. New ed., with translations of classical texts by “Democritus Minor.” Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1854. Cadalso, José. Cartas marruecas. c. 1774. Noches lúgubres. 1789. Edited by Joaquín Marco. Barcelona: Planeta, 1985. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Traité des sensations. 1754. Reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1984. ———. Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines: ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain. 1746. Présentation de Aliénor Bertrand. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2002. Translated by Thomas Nugent as An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge; Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding (1756; reprint, with an introduction by Robert G. Weyant, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971). Dante Alighieri. La divina commedia. Edited by Fredi Chiappelli. Milan: Mursia, 1971. Descartes, René. Les Passions de l’âme. 1646–50. In Les Classiques français, edited by Julien Benda. Mulhouse: Bader-Dufour, 1948. ———. Traité de l’homme. 1632. In vol. 4 of Oeuvres de Descartes, publiées par Victor Cousin. Paris: La Chevardière Fils, 1824. Diccionario de la lengua castellana. 1726. Facsimile reprint, published as Diccionario de autoridades, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963. Diderot, Denis. “Éloge de Richardson.” 1761. In Oeuvres esthétiques, edited by Paul Vernière. Paris: Bordas, 1988. ———. Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot. 1769. In Oeuvres, edited by André Billy. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951. ———. “Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel.’” 1757. In Oeuvres. ———. “Essais sur la peinture.” 1765. In Oeuvres esthétiques. ———. “Lettre sur les aveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui voient.” 1751. In vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, revues sur les éditions originales, edited by Jules Assézat. Paris: Garnier, 1875. ———. “Lettre sur les sourds et muets.” 1751. In Oeuvres complètes de Diderot.

bibliography

335

———. “Loutherbourg: paysage avec figures et animaux.” Salon of 1763. In Oeuvres esthétiques. ———. “La Mère bien-aimée (esquisse).” Salon of 1765. In Oeuvres esthétiques. ———. Le Neveu de Rameau. c. 1761. In Oeuvres. ———. “Paradoxe sur le comédien.” c. 1770. In Oeuvres esthétiques. ———. “Le Rêve de d’Alembert.” 1769. In Oeuvres. ———. “Van Loo.” Salon of 1767. In Oeuvres esthétiques. Dittersdorf, Karl Ditters von. Lebensbeschreibung. 1799. Edited by Eugen Schmitz. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1940. Translated by Arthur Duke Coleridge as The Autobiography of Karl von Dittersdorf (London: Bentley and Son, 1896). Duport, Jean-Louis. Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle et sur la conduite de l’archet, dedié aux professeurs de violoncelle. Paris: Imbault, 1820. Elchinger, Richard, ed. Beethovens Briefe. Munich: G. Hirth, 1924. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Edited by 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. Esteve, Pablo. Tonadillas escénicas a solo. 1779–82. Edited by Fernando J. Cabañas Alamán. Madrid: Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, 1992. Eximeno, Antonio. Del origen y reglas de la música. 1796. Edited by Francisco Otero. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1978. First published in 1774 as Dell’origine e delle regiole della musica. Feijóo, Benito Jerónimo de. Cartas eruditas, y curiosas, en que, por la mayor parte, se continúa el designio del Theatro critico universal. 5 vols. Madrid: F. del Hierro, 1742–60. ———. Theatro crítico universal, o discursos varios en todo genero de materias, para desengaño de errores comunes. 8 vols. Madrid: J. Ibarra, 1765–73. Fétis, François-Joseph. Biographie universelle des musiciens. 2nd ed. 8 vols. 1873. Facsimile reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1972. Galeazzi, Francesco. Elementi teorico-pratici di musica. Rome: Pilucchi Cracas, 1791–96. Gallini, Giovanni Andrea. A Treatise on the Art of Dancing. London: Dodsley, Becket, and Nichol, 1762. Gerber, Ernst Ludwig. Historisches-Biographisches Lexikon der Tonkunstler. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1790. Gessner, Salomon. Schriften. 2 vols. Vienna: Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1765. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italienische Reise, 1786–1788. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1960. ———. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Vol. 11 of Goethe’s Collected Works. Translated by Victor Lange. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1983. Griesinger, Georg August. Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn. 1810. Facsimile reprint, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981. Guibert, François-Apolline, Comte de. Essai général de tactique: précédé d’un discours sur l’état actuel de la politique. London: Les Libraires Associés, 1773. Gumpenhuber, Philippe. “Répertoire de tous les spectacles qui ont été donnés au Théâtre près de la Cour.” 1761–63. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Mus. Hs. 34580a–c.

336

bibliography

Haydn, Joseph. Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, unter Benützung der Quellensammlung. Edited by Dénes Bartha and H. C. Robbins Landon. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1965. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739. Edited by Ernest Mossner. London: Penguin Books, 1984. Iriarte, Tomás de. “La música.” In vol. 1 of Colección de obras en verso y prosa de D. Tomas de Yriarte. Madrid: Benito Cano, 1787. Jovellanos, Gaspar Mechor de. Espectáculos y diversiones públicas en España. 1790. Edited by Camilo González Suárez-Llanos. Salamanca: Ediciones Anaya, 1967. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Edited with a foreword by Peter Harold Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Magri, Gennaro. Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo. 2 vols. Naples: V. Orsino, 1779. Mersenne, Marin. Harmonicorum libri xii: in quibus agitur de sonorum natura. 1635. Facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972. ———. Harmonie universelle: The Books on Instruments. Translated by Roger E. Chapman. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1957. Metastasio, Pietro (Pietro Trapassi). Artaserse. 1730. In Opere di Pietro Metastasio. Florence: Per Gius. Formigli, 1832. ———. Didone abbandonata. 1724. In Opere, edited by Franco Mollia. Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin). Le Malade imaginaire. 1673. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. 1670. In Théatre, edited by Daniel Mornet. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre,1910. Morton, Richard. “Of a Consumption Proceeding from Melancholy, As Also from an Hysterical and Hypochondriacal Affliction.” In Phthisiologia, or A Treatise of Consumption. Translated by Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford. London: Smith and Walford, 1694. Mozart, Leopold. Gründliche Violinschule. 1787. Facsimile reprint, Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1966. Noverre, Jean-Georges. Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets. 1760. Facsimile reprint, New York: Broude Brothers, 1967. Translated as The Works of Monsieur Noverre (1782–83; facsimile reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1978). Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Translated by Lane Cooper et al. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. Pohl, Carl Ferdinand. Joseph Haydn. 3 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1878. Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes. Edited by François Lesure. 2 vols. Geneva: Minkoff, 1984. Raoul, Jean-Marie. Méthode de violoncelle. 1797. Facsimile reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1980. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady. 1748. Edited and abridged by John Angus Burrell. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Dictionnaire de musique. Paris: veuve Duchesne, 1768. Translated by William Waring as A Dictionary of Music (London: J. French, 1779). ———. Essai sur l’origine des langues. 1754–63. Reprint, Paris: L’École, 1987. ———. “Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur son article ‘Genève.’” 1758. In vol. 5 of Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.

bibliography

337

———. “Lettre sur la musique française.” 1753. In vol. 6 of Oeuvres complètes de JeanJacques Rousseau. Paris: Hachette, 1891. Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst. 1784. Edited by Paul Alfred Merbach. Leipzig: Wolkenwanderer, 1924. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey. 1768. Edited by Graham Petrie. London: Penguin Classics, 1986. Twining, Thomas. Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, Translated, with Notes and Two Dissertations, on Poetical, and Musical, Imitation. London: Luke Hansard, 1812. Viadana, Lodovico. Cento concerti ecclesiastici. 1607. Reprint, Mantua: Istituto Carlo d’Arco per la Storia di Mantova, 1964. Villanuova, Francesco Alberti di. Nuovo dizionario italiano-francese. Nice: Gabriele Floteront, 1780. Villeneuve, François d’Alberti de. Grand Dictionnaire français-italien. Bassano: Remondini, 1811. Young, Edward. The Complaint, or Night Thoughts. 1741. Reprint, Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1823.

d. secondary sources referring directly to boccherini Amsterdam, Ellen Iris. “The String Quintets of Luigi Boccherini.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1968. Arrighi, Gino. “Giovan Gastone Boccherini.” Lucca: Rassegna del comune 6 (1962): 13–23. Barblan, Guglielmo. “Boccheriniana, pts. 1–2.” Rassegna musicale 29, no. 2 (1959): 123–28; no. 4 (1959): 322–31. Barce, Ramón. Boccherini en Madrid: primeros años: 1768–1779. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1992. ———. “Boccherini, Luigi.” In Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana. General editor Emilio Casares Rodicio, with José López- Calo and Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta. [Madrid?]: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999. Bertoldi, Donata. Luigi Boccherini e la cultura musicale del classicismo. Fucecchio (Florence): Edizioni dell’Erba, 1994. Biagioni, Ugo. Boccherini. Madrid: Istituto Italiano de Cultura, 1993. Biagi-Ravenni, Gabriella. “Calzabigi e dintorni: Boccherini, Angiolini, la Toscana e Vienna.” In La figura e l’opera di Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, edited by Federico Marri. Florence: Olschki, 1989. ———. “‘Molti in lucca si applicavano alla professione della musica’: storie di formazione e di emigrazione nella patria di Luigi Boccherini.” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 69–110. Boccherini Sánchez, José Antonio. “Los testamentos de Boccherini.” Revista de musicología 22, no. 2 (1999): 93–121. ———, with Jaime Tortella. “Las viviendas madrileñas de Luigi Boccherini. Una laguna biográfica.” Revista de musicología 24, nos. 1–2 (2001): 163–87. Bonaventura, Arnaldo. Boccherini. Milan and Rome: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, 1931. Coli, Remigio. “Casanova incontra Boccherini: i primi anni del musicista in Spagna (1768–1771).” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 4 (1993): 557–62.

338

bibliography

———. Luigi Boccherini. Foreword by Emilio Maggini. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1988. ———. Luigi Boccherini. 2nd ed. Milan: Zanibon, 1992. Della Croce, Luigi. Il divino Boccherini: vita, opere, epistolario. Padua: Zanibon, 1988. ———. Le trenta-tre sinfonie di Boccherini: guida e analisi critica. Introduction by Pina Carmirelli. Turin: Eda, 1979. Eitner, Robert. “Boccherini, Luigi.” Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1959. Fornaciari, Gino, Marielva Torino, and Francesco Mallegni. “Paleopathology of an Eighteenth-century Italian Musician: The Case of Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805).” Il Friuli Medico, Alpe Adria Journal of Medicine, 11 June 1996. Gallego, Antonio. “‘La Clementina, de Boccherini,” Revista de musicología 10, no. 2 (1987), 633–39. Gallo, Luciano. “Boccherini ucciso dalla tisi: l’esito degli esami della commissione che ha riesumato la salma.” Il Tirreno, 14 April 1996. Gándara, Xosé Crisanto. “Algunos aspectos sobre el contrabajo en la música de Luigi Boccherini.” Revista de musicología 23, no. 2 (2000): 443–64. Gérard, Yves. “Luigi Boccherini and Madame Sophie Gail.” The Consort 24 (1967): 294–309. ———. Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini. Translated by Andreas Mayor. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Heartz, Daniel. “The Young Boccherini: Lucca, Vienna, and the Electoral Courts.” Journal of Musicology 13, no. 1 (March 1995): 103–16. Le Guin, Elisabeth. “‘Cello-and-Bow Thinking’: Luigi Boccherini, Sonata ‘fuori catalogo’ in E b Major.” Echo: A Music-centered Journal 1, no. 1 (1999). www.echo.ucla .edu/volume6-issue1/archives/index.html. ———. “‘One Says That One Weeps, but One Does Not Weep’: Sensible, Grotesque, and Mechanical Embodiments in Boccherini’s Chamber Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 2 (fall 2002): 207–54. Lozano Martínez, Isabel. “Un manoscrito autógrafo de Boccherini en la Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid).” Revista de musicología 25, no. 1 (2002): 225–36. Luigi Boccherini e la musica strumentale dei maestri italiani: Siena 1993. Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993). Noonan, Timothy P. “Structural Anomalies in the Symphonies of Boccherini.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996. Pais, Aldo, ed. “Note introduttive.” Boccherini: sonate per violoncello e basso, n. 26, Mi bemolle maggiore G. 566 [sic]. Padua: Zanibon, 1984. ———. “Note introduttive.” Boccherini: concerti per violoncello e orchestra, n. 11, do maggiore, G. 573. Padua: Zanibon, 1995. ———. Note introduttive.” Boccherini: quindici arie accademiche per soprano e orchestra. Fascicolo 1. Padua: Zanibon, 1988. Picquot, Louis. Notice sur la 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). Rothschild, Germaine de. Luigi Boccherini: sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris: Plon, 1962. Translated by Andreas Mayor as Luigi Boccherini: His Life and Work (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

bibliography

339

Salvetti, Guido. “Camerismo sinfonico e sinfonismo cameristico: alla ricerca di un approccio analitico pertinente.” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 337–52. ———. “Luigi Boccherini nell’ambito del quartetto italiano del secondo settecento.” Analecta musicologica 12 (1973): 227–52. Solar-Quintes, Nicolás. “Nuevas obras de Sebastián Durón y de Luigi Boccherini.” Anuario musical 13 (1958): 225–59. ———. “Las relaciones de Haydn con la casa de Benavente.” Anuario musical 2 (1947): 81–104. Speck, Christian. “Boccherini und die Verbreitung seiner Musik in europäische Musikzentren des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts.” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 111–34. ———. Boccherinis Streichquartette: Studien zur Kompositionsweise und gattungsgeschichtlichen Stellung. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987. ———. Liner notes to Luigi Boccherini: concerti per violoncello, vol. 1. EBS 6055. ———. Editorial preface to Sonata in A Minor by Luigi Boccherini. Mainz: B. Schotts Söhne, 1991. Speck, Christian, with Stanley Sadie. “Boccherini, Luigi.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online. London: Macmillan 2000–. www.grovemusic.com. Tchernowitz-Neustadtl, Miriam. “Aspects of the Cycle and Tonal Relationships in Luigi Boccherini’s String Trios.” Chigiana, n.s., 23 (1993): 157–69. Tortella, Jaime. “Boccherini, su tercera crisis de creación y el Conde de Aranda: una hipótesis explicativa.” Nassarre (Revista aragonesa de musicología) 14, no. 2 (1998): 179–94. ———. Luigi Boccherini: un músico italiano en la España ilustrada. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2002. ———. Luigi Boccherini y el Banco de San Carlos: un aspecto inédito. Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1998. Traglia, Gustavo. Ariette e amori di musicisti. Genoa: Degli Orfani, 1940. Zechmeister, Gustav. Die Wiener Theater nächst der Burg und nächst dem Kärntnerthor von 1747 bis 1776. Vienna: Böhlau im Komm, 1971.

e. contextual secondary sources Allanbrook, Wye J. “Haydn and the Rhetoric of Comic Metamorphosis.” Paper delivered at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, 2001. ———. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: “Le nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. ———. “Theorizing the Comic Surface.” In Music in the Mirror : Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2002 Alpers, Svetlana, and Michael Baxandall. Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Barnes, David S. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Bartra, Roger. Cultura y melancolía: los enfermedades del alma en la España del Siglo de Oro. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2001.

340

bibliography

Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Beghin, Tom. “A Composer, His Dedicatee, Her Instrument, and I. Thoughts on Performing Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas.” In Cambridge Companion to Haydn, edited by Caryl Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming Beghin, Tom, Sander Goldberg, and Elisabeth Le Guin, eds. Engaging Rhetoric: Essays on Haydn and Performance. Publication under review. Bonds, Mark Evan. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Boyd, Malcolm, and Juan José Carreras, eds. Music in Spain during the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Brenner, Clarence D. The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 1716—1793. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961. Brown, Bruce Alan. Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Bryson, Norman. Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Castelvecchi, Stefano. “From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, Absorption, and Sentiment in the 1780s.” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1996): 91–112. Chastenet, Jacques. La Vie quotidienne en Espagne au temps de Goya. Paris: Hachette, 1966. Churgin, Bathia. “Giovanni Battista Sammartini.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. 20 vols. London: Macmillan, 1980. Code, David. “Parting the Veil of Debussy’s Voiles.” Paper delivered at the meeting of the International Musicological Society, Leuven, Belgium, August 2002. Cone, Edward T. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974. Cotarelo y Morí, Emilio. Orígenes y establecimiento de la ópera en España hasta 1800. Madrid: Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas, y Museos, 1917. Crow, Thomas. Painting and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Cucuel, Georges. “Le Baron de Bagge et son temps.” L’Année musicale 1 (1911): 145–86. ———. La Pouplinière et la musique de chambre au xviiie siècle. Paris: Fischbacher, 1913. Cusick, Suzanne. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem (Towards a Feminist Music Theory).” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (1994): 8–27. Del Corral, José. La vida cotidiana en el Madrid del siglo xviii. Madrid: Ediciones La Librería, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana. General editor Emilio Casares Rodicio, with José López- Calo and Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta. [Madrid?]: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999. Eitner, Robert. Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1959. Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Edited by Silvio D’Amico. 9 vols. Rome: Le Maschere, 1961. Epstein, Julia. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

bibliography

341

Feher, Michel, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, eds. Fragments for a History of the Human Body. 3 vols. New York: Zone, 1989. Feldman, Martha. “Magic Mirrors and the ‘Seria’ Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 3 (fall 1995): 423–85. Finscher, Ludwig. Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1974. Fisk, Charles. “Performance, Analysis, and Musical Imagining.” College Music Symposium 36 (1996): 59–72, and 37 (1997): 95–109. Foster, Susan. Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ———. The History of Sexuality. Part 2. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Frank, Robert G., Jr. “Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in SeventeenthCentury Medicine.” In The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Franko, Mark. Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Edited by Francesco Pellizzi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Gallego, Antonio. La música en tiempos de Carlos III: ensayo sobre el pensamiento musical ilustrado. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988. Gidwitz, Patricia Levy. “‘Ich bin die erste Sängerin’: Vocal Profiles of Two Mozart Sopranos.” Early Music 19, no. 4 (November 1991): 565–79. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Gross, Sara. “Scarlatti and the Spanish Body: On National Character in the Keyboard Works of Domenico Scarlatti.” Paper, winner of 2004 Ingolf Dahl Award at joint meeting of the Northern California and Pacific Southwest chapters of the American Musicological Society, 2 May 2004, University of San Francisco. Gusdorf, Georges. Naissance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières. Paris: Payot, 1976. Hanning, Barbara. “Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth-century Parisian Salon.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 4 (1989): 512–28. Heartz, Daniel. “The Concert Spirituel in the Tuileries Palace.” Early Music 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 240–48. ———. Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740–1780. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. ———. “The Theâtre Italien from Watteau to Fragonard.” In Music in the Classic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook, edited by Alan W. Atlas. New York: Pendragon, 1985. Herr, Richard. The Eighteenth-century Revolution in Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. Isherwood, Robert. “Popular Musical Entertainment in Eighteenth-century Paris.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 9 (1978): 295–310.

342

bibliography

Johnson, James. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Kany, Charles Emil. Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1932. Le Guin, Elisabeth. “Man and Horse in Harmony.” In Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, edited by Philip Thurtle. London: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Man and Horse in Harmony.” In Kingdoms of the Horse: The Culture of the Horse in the Early Modern World, edited by Karen Raber. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Le Huray, Peter, and James Day, eds. Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and EarlyNineteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lippman, Edward. Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader. New York: Pendragon, 1986–90. Lippmann, Friedrich. “Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhythmus.” Analecta musicologica 12 (1973): 253–366; 14 (1974): 324–410; and 15 (1975): 298–333. Lützen, Ludolf. Die Violoncell-Transkriptionen Friedrich Grützmachers: Untersuchungen zur Transkription in Sicht und Handhabung der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Regensburg: G. Bosse Verlag, 1974. Manuel, Peter. “From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: Dual Tonicity in Spanish and Latin American Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 2 (summer 2002): 311–36. Martín Gaite, Carmen. Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España. Madrid: Siglo Ventiuno de España, 1972. Martín Moreno, Antonio. Historia de la música española vol. 4: Siglo XVIII. Edited by Pablo López de Osaba. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985. ———. El padre Feijóo y las ideologías musicales del xviii en España. Orense: Instituto de Estudios Orensanos Padre Feijóo, 1976. McClary, Susan. “Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenthcentury French Music.” Echo: A Music-centered Journal 2, no. 2 (2000). www.echo .ucla.edu/volume6-issue1/archives/index.html. Metzner, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Mishkin, Henry G. “Five Autograph String Quartets by Giovanni Battista Sammartini.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 6, no. 2 (summer 1953): 136–47. Morales y Marín, José Luis. Luis Paret: vida y obra. Zaragoza: Aneto Publicaciones, 1997. Moravia, Sergio. “From Homme machine to Homme sensible: Changing Eighteenthcentury Models of Man’s Image.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 45–60. Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie. 1st ed. 29 vols. New York: Grove, 1980. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online. London: Macmillan 2000–. www.grovemusic.com.

bibliography

343

Pellegrini, Amachilde. Spettacoli lucchesi nei secoli xvii–xix. Lucca: Regia Accademia Lucchese, 1914. Penesco, Anne, ed. Défense et illustration de la virtuosité. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1997. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E., and Eleanor A. Sayre, eds. Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1989. Pierre, Constant. Histoire du Concert spirituel 1725–1790. Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 1975. Pincherle, Marc. The World of the Virtuoso. Translated by Lucile H. Brockway. New York: Norton, 1963. Porter, Roy. “Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body.” In The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, edited by George Sebastian Rousseau. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. ———. “Enlightenment and Pleasure.” In Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Porter. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. ———. “Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society.” In Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Puglisi, Catherine R. Francesco Albani. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Ratner, Leonard. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer, 1980. ———. “Eighteenth-century Theories of Musical Period Structure.” Musical Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 1956): 439–54. Richards, Annette. “Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sublime.” Music and Letters 80, no. 3 (August 1999): 366–89. Roach, Joseph R. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1985. Roberts, John. “ Why Did Handel Borrow?” In Handel Tercentenary Collection, edited by Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987. Roche, Daniel. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Marie Evans and Gwynne Lewis. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987. Rosen, Charles. “On Playing the Piano.” New York Times Review of Books, 21 October 1999. Russell, Craig H., ed. Santiago de Murcia’s “Códice Saldívar No. 4”: A Treasury of Secular Guitar Music from Baroque Mexico. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit Books, 1987. Sarrailh, Jean. La España ilustrada de la segunda mitad del siglo xviii. Translated from the French by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schmalfeldt, Janet. “On the Relationship of Analysis to Performance: Beethoven’s Bagatelles op. 126, nos. 2 and 5.” Journal of Music Theory 29, no. 1 (1985): 1–32. Sherman, Nancy. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Sisman, Elaine. “The Labyrinth of Melancholy.” Unpublished paper. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998. Solar-Quintes, Nicolás, and Yves Gérard. “La Bibliothèque musicale d’un amateur éclairé de Madrid: la Duchesse-Comtesse de Benavente, Duchesse d’Ossuna

344

bibliography

(1752–1834).” In vol. 3 of Recherches sur la musique française classique. Paris: Picard, 1963. Solomon, Maynard. Mozart: A Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978. Soufas, Teresa Scott. Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Starn, Randolph. “Pleasure in the Visual Arts.” In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from Outside, edited by Irving Lavin. Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995. Steblin, Rita. A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. 2nd ed. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Stevenson, Robert. “Haydn’s Iberian World Connections.” Inter-American Music Review 4, no. 2 (spring–summer 1982): 3–30. Sudnow, David. Talk’s Body: A Meditation between Two Keyboards. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. ———. Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account. Foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. ———. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. Turrentine, Herbert. “The Prince de Conti: A Royal Patron of Music.” Musical Quarterly 54, no. 3 ( July 1968): 309–15. Van Deusen, Nancy. The Harp and the Soul: Essays in Medieval Music. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989. Vartanian, Aram. Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Verba, Cynthia. Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue 1750– 1764. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Walden, Valerie. One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Weber, William. “The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-century Musical Taste.” Musical Quarterly 70, no. 2 (spring 1984): 175–94. Webster, James. “Towards a History of Viennese Chamber Music in the Early Classical 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.

index

acoustics, 222; influence of, 76–77 acting. See under Diderot afrancesismo, 61, 63–64, 97, 255 Albani, Francesco, 78 Alborea, Francesco. See Francischello Alpers, Svetlana, 76, 244 Amsterdam, Ellen Iris, 224 analysis through performance, 234–53 Andreoli, Carlo, 208 Angiolini, Gasparo, 46–48, 91–96, 138–39, 263; Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre, 47, 94; Sémiramis, 93 Aristotle, on making and doing, 135–36 Artaria (publisher), 255 Artaria Quartet, 12 automata, 147–48 Bach, C.P.E., 65; Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere, 181, 195 Bachaumont, Louis Petit de, 39 Bagge, Baron de, 52 Bailleux (publisher), 55 Baillot, Pierre, 78, 153, 163, 184, 256, 319n50 ballet, 88. See also pantomime ballet Barnes, David, 160 Batoni, Pompeo, 39 Baxandall, Michael, 4, 76, 244 Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, 77 Beethoven, Ludwig van, on composition, 277–78n15

bel canto, cellistic, 23 Biagi-Ravenni, Gabriella, 71–72 bien-parado, 97, 100 Blackmore, Richard, 187 Boccherini, Anna Matilda, 43 Boccherini, Giovanni Gastone, 43–45, 71–72 Boccherini, Leopoldo, 43–44, 48 Boccherini, Luigi: abandonment of melodic line, 72–73, 75–76, 210, 223–24; accounts of his cello playing, 39; anecdotes about, 68–69; autograph catalog, omission of virtuoso works, 133; autopsy of, 160, 187–88; “celestial” topos, 32, 130; cello possibly owned by, 293n22; compositional process, 33–36; contemporary comparison with Haydn, 255–57; contemporary writings on, 4; and Haydn, 254; health, 160, 187–88; hedonistic quality in his music, 219; influence of dance music on, 48; influence of Viennese style on, 46–48; interdependence of composer and performer identities, 42; in Lucca, 42–44; and melancholy, 162–82, 204–6; his music associated with painting, 78–79; in Paris, 49–55; partiality to soft dynamics, 71; on performers, 1; portraits of, 39–42, 134; posthumous reputation, 66, 68, 163, 255–56; publications, 55, 61, 255, 325n7; relations with Pleyel, 38; self-

345

346

index

Boccherini, Luigi (continued ) presentation in letters, 38; sonatas in his oeuvre, 132–33; in Spain, 3, 55–64, 134; string quartets, chronology of, 208–9, 271; string quartets, early, 207–53; style periodization, 208–210; tours of northern 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 a reflection of his character, 38–39; works in Spanish style, 100–102; works omitted from his catalog, 133 Boccherini, Luigi, works: aria “Se d’un amor tiranno” in B b Major, G. 557, 58, 129; Cello Concerto in B b Major, 273n1; Cello Concerto in C Major, G. 573, 53; Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17, 105–29; Cello Sonata in E b Major, fuori catalogo, 14– 37; Cello Sonata in G Major, G. 5, 130; La Clementina, G. 540, 100; Concerto in A Major, G. 475, 129; Concerto in C Major, G. 477, 293n19; Concerto in G Major, G. 480, 293n19; Quartet in A Major, 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 in D Major, op. 8, no. 1, G. 165, 70, 190–91; Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179, 223–53; Quartet in E b Major, op. 8, no. 3, G. 167, 217–18; Quartet in E b 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; Quartet 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 in A 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 delle strade 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,

302n1; Sextet in C Major, G. 466, 129; Sinfonia in C Major, G. 491, 129; Sonata in A Major, G. 4, 129; Sonata in A Major, G. 13, 128; Sonata in B b Major, G. 565, 141; Sonata in C Major, G. 17, 129, 145, 152, 154, 215; Sonata in C Major, G. 569, 128; Sonata in E b 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 B b Major, op. 5, no. 3, G. 27, 314n11; Violin Sonata in G Minor, G. 29, 293n25 Boccherini, Maria Ester, 43–44, 46–47 Boccherini, Riccarda, 43 body: 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 conceptions of; humors, bodily; inward movement; kinesthesia; nerves likened to strings; pain; stringed instruments associated with body; tactile experience and composition; tension and release body, performing: muscular resistance, 18, 21; transfer of styles, 22–23 bolero, 97 Bordeu, Théophile, 184, 207 Boswell, James, 185 Boucher, Alexandre, 69 Boucher, François, 78, 219 boulevard theaters, Paris, 50 Bourgoing, Jean-François, 60 Boyé, 163, 165 Brillon de Jouy, Madame, 53 Broschi, Carlo (Farinelli), 58, 162 Brunetti, Francisco, 151–54 Brunetti, Gaetano, 310n55 Bryson, Norman, 103, 219 Burgtheater (Vienna), 44–46, 147, 222 Burney, Charles, 53, 133, 162, 255–56, 279n9, 284n68 Burton, Robert, 162–63, 189–90, 195–96 Cadalso, José, 315n12 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 191 Calzabigi, Raniero de, 44 Cambini, Giuseppe, 5, 48, 86–87, 207, 211, 255–56, 276n25

index cantor–musicus distinction, 134–35 Capron, Nicolas, 52 Carlos III, King of Spain, 58–59, 313n7 Carlos IV, King of Spain, 68–69 carnal musicology, 3, 26, 33 Carpani, Giuseppe, 163 Cartier, Jean-Baptiste, 256 Casanova, Giacomo, 285n71 Cassiodorus, 184 Castelvecchi, Stefano, 87 Castil-Blaze, Henri, 68–69 cellists in Paris, 51–52 cello: as virtuoso instrument, 43–44, 210– 11; methods, 151–54 Chênedollé, Charles, 256 Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 1 Cheyne, George, 185–86 Christmann, Gerhard, 39, 41 chromaticism, pathetic connotations of, 23 Cirri, Giambattista, 211 Clairon, La (Claire -Joseph Léris), 154 clefs, 32; as signals for thumb placement, 21 Coltellini, Celeste, 87 comfort, 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 Sitios Reales, 56, 58 compositional process and execution, 33–34 concert behavior, 83–84 Concerts Spirituels, 51–52 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 7–9, 11, 60, 211–12, 258 con smorfia. See smorfioso “conspiration,” 94 consumptions, 186, 192–93 Conti, Prince de, 52, 139 Coquéau, Claude-Philibert, 314n11 Correspondance littéraire (Grimm), 154 Creus, Francisco, 55, 285n71 Cruz, Ramón de la, 60–61 cyclicity: of movements, 128; of themes between movements, 116, 127–28. See also recycling Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie, 87; Nina, 90 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 8, 236 dance, 149; and the body, 90–96; classification of motions in, 92–93; French, in Spain, 64; influence on Boccherini, 43; personal styles, 95; rehearsals, 95–96;

347

Spanish, 96–102; Viennese reform of, 46–47 Della Croce, Luigi, 32 Descartes, René, 183 descending tetrachord, 100 Diderot, Denis, 59, 207; anti-sensible ideas, 154–55; on attitudes and actions, 92; beehive image, 236–37; on body and culture, 6–7; on “conspiration” of movements, 94; on expressive power of gesture, 85; on Greuze, 83; on a Loutherbourg paysage, 79; on le moelleux, 93; Le Neveu de Rameau, 145, 190; paradox of the actor, 154–57; on performance, 2, 5, 105, 154, 156–57, 222, 264–65; portrait 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 also comfort, technical Ditters, Karl, 45, 147 Don Juan, 192 double-stopping, 21, 30–31, 53, 151 drone, 21 Dugazon, Louise-Rosalie, 87 Duport, Jean-Louis, 51–53, 143, 151–52 Duport, Jean-Pierre, 51–54 Durazzo, Giacomo, 49 dynamics, 71, 145–46; physical production of, 145 embodiment, historical conceptions of, 6–11. See also body eroticism, 82–83, 100, 219 Esteve, Pablo, 155–56 eudaemonism, 9 expectations, different between listener and performer, 30–31 expressive playing, 86 fact and fiction, 12–13 fandango, 100 Farinelli. See Broschi, Carlo Farnese, Queen Isabella, 58 Favart, Charles Simon, 49 Favier, Mimi, 43 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo de, 59–60, 96, 182, 275–76n23 Feldman, Martha, 262

348

index

Felipe V, King of Spain, 64, 162 Fernando VI, King of Spain, 58, 148 Ferrari, Domenico, 307n36 Fétis, François-Joseph, 52, 209 fingerings, 25, 105, 152 Font, Francisco, 134, 136 Foucault, Michel, 150 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 75 Francischello (Francesco Alborea), 45, 276 “fundamental feeling,” 7 Gabrielli, Caterina, 43, 45 galanterie, as antidote to love-melancholy, 196; in Spain, 60 galant style, 10 Galen, 182–83 Gallini, Giovanni Andrea, 149 Galuppi, Baldassare, L’Artaserse, 43 Garrick, David, 154–55 Gassmann, Florian, 45 genius and virtue, 132 Gérard, Yves, 39, 129, 133 Gessner, Salomon, 78–80 Glisson, Francis, 183–84 Gluck, Christoph von, 46–47, 94–95; Le cinesi, 147; Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre, 47, 94; Orfeo, 47; Sémiramis, 93 Goldoni, Carlo, 244 Gossec, François-Joseph, 52 Goya, Francisco de, 63, 140–42, 192 Grangé (publisher), 55 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 69, 77, 81, 83– 84, 93 Griesinger, Georg August, 256–57 Grimm. See Correspondance littéraire Gross, Sara, 153 grotesque style, 138–47; in art, 139–41; in dance, 139; in music, 141, 143–47 Grützmacher, Friedrich, 273n1 Guadagni, Gaetano, 43, 45 Gumpenhuber, Philipp, 46, 281n29 Gusdorf, Georges, 188 half-step descent, 215–18 Hanning, Barbara, 261 harmonics, cello, 143, 220 Harvey, William, 182 Haydn, Joseph, 3, 57, 61–62, 85, 207, 254– 57; Arianna, 297n51; composition through execution, 256–57; G-major keyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39, perfor-

mance of, 263–70; on singing, 257; writing for strings, 257 Heartz, Daniel, 1, 45 Hilverding, Franz, 46–47 Hübner, Christian Friedrich, 7 humors, bodily, 182 identification with composer, 24–25 idiom, and creation, 131–32 instrumentation, to convey emotion, 95 inward movement, 18–19, 23, 31, 70, 215–16 Iriarte, Tomás de, 62 Jansson, Jean-Baptiste, l’aîné, 51–52 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 156 Junker, Carl, 176, 181 Kärtnertortheater (Vienna), 44, 46, 139 kinesthesia, 7. See also embodiment Kraft, Anton, 257 labyrinth, harmonic, 181 La Chevardière (publisher), 52 lacuna, as sensible strategy, 73, 75 Lekain, Henri-Louis, 154 Léris, Claire-Joseph. See Clairon, La Leutgeb, Joseph, 45 Liotard, Jean-Étienne, 39, 41 Lippmann, Friedrich, 129 listeners and listening, 84; eighteenthcentury, 260; familiarity, 27, 265, 268; inattention, 261–62; the perfect, 258–63. See also concert behavior Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de, 79 Lucca, 42–44 Luis de Borbón, Infante Don, 57, 71, 134, 223 Madrid, 60–62, 76, 139 majismo, 63, 97, 141 Majo, Gian Francesco, L’almería, 57–58 Manfredi, Filippo, 39, 48–49, 55, 207 Marescalchi, Luigi, 55, 57 María Bárbara de Braganza, Queen, 58 María Josefa, Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna, 61–62, 100, 141, 155 Maria Theresa, Empress, 45–46 masturbation, 192–94 mechanism, 148–49, 249; in music, 153–54, 157

index 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, 265–66 Mendelssohn, Felix, 85 Metastasio, 43, 46; Artaserse, 58, 86–87, 303n8; Le cinesi, 147; Didone abbandonata, 115–16 moelleux, le, 93, 187 motion toward center. See inward movement movement, personalization of, 149 Mozart, Leopold, 22, 221 Mozart, Wolfgang, 70, 139, 163, 315n17 Nardini, Pietro, 45, 48, 207 narrative. See tableaux vivants nerves likened to strings, 184 Newtonianism, 148–49 night, 165 nightingale, 76, 206 nocturnal emission, 192–93 nocturnal music, 76 novelty, desire for, 30 Noverre, Jean-Georges, 65, 91, 93, 95–96; on virtuosity, 137–38 Opéra (Paris), 49–50 opéra-comique, 50 oration, musical metaphor of, 75 Orléans, Duc d’, 52 pain, 10–11 Paisiello, Giovanni, 87; Nina, 90 pantomime ballet, 46–47, 50, 93, 95, 139 paradox of the actor. See under Diderot Paret y Alcázar, Luis, 71–72 Paris, 49–55 Pelliccia, Clementina, 57–58 Pelliccia, María Teresa, 285n71 performance: 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 serva padrona, 58 periodicity, 48, 68 Persuis, Louis-Luc, Nina, ou La Folle pour amour, 88

349

phrasing, 69 Picquot, Louis, 52, 55, 290n2 Pitrot, Antoine, 43 Plato, 184 Pleyel, Ignaz, 38, 101, 188 ponticello tone, 127 Porter, Roy, 189 pseudo-Aristotle, 185 Puccini, Giacomo, 44 Puppo, Giovanni, 256 quartet-playing, interaction in, 237–53 quartettini, 208, 223 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 50–51 Raoul, Jean-Marie, 152 readers and reading: relationship to CD examples, 2; relationships to analysis, 234 recording and editing performance, 250–53 recycling, 211–15; inter-generic, 128–30; inter-movement, 129–30; of transitional material, 130–31. See also cyclicity reminiscence, thematic, 212–15 repetition, 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, 229 Richardson, Samuel, 53, 69, 81–83 Richter, Franz Xaver, 321n2 Roach, Joseph, 182 Robert, Hubert, 292n16 rococo, 219–21 rondos, 117, 128 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59, 185; antivisuality, 138; Le Devin du village, 256; on language and emotions, 136–38; on performance, 138; on the role of the performer, 24–25; on synesthesia, 220; on tableaux, 80; on tragédie-lyrique, 50–51; on unity of melody, 292n12 Sade, Marquis de, 194–95 Sadie, Stanley, 128 Salieri, Antonio, 45 Salomone, Giuseppe, 43 Sammartini, Giovanni Battista, 48, 321n2 Sardini, Giovan Battista, 45 Saunier, Vincent, 43 Scarlatti, Domenico, 153, 162 Schaul, Johann Baptist, 83–84, 163, 256 Schenker, Heinrich, 260

350

index

seguidillas, 97, 100–101 senses. See embodiment; sixth sense sensibilité, 53–54, 70, 161, 304n17; represented by sympathetic vibration, 184–85 sensible 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, 25 sforzando, 221–23 silences, 195, 229 Sisman, Elaine, 181 Sitios Reales, Madrid, 55 sixth sense, 7–8 sketches, esthetics of, 75 slow movements and sensible style, 70 Small, Christopher, 184 smorfioso, 190 Solomon, Maynard, 70, 139 sonata form: expectations, 27, 30; personification in, 27 Sontag, Susan, 161 sound, personal. See timbre Spain, 55–64, 134; Italian music in, 55–56, 58, 61 Speck, Christian, 68–69, 73, 129, 132, 208–9, 224, 230 spectacle, stage, 147 Spohr, Louis, 66 Starzer, Joseph, 46–47, 321n2 stasis, 68 Stegreif komödie, 46 Sterne, Laurence, 185 stringed instruments associated with body, 184 string quartet: early history of ensemble, 48; first professional, 207 subjectivity as a necessity, 25–26 Sudnow, David, 22 sympathetic vibration, 184 syphilis, 192–93 tableaux vivants, 4, 77–84; and sensible reception, 80–84 tactile experience and composition, 131 tension and release, 30, 66 tessitura, 95, 112, 211; extreme, 141 textile-like writing, 210–11 Théâtre-Italien, 49–50 theatricalized reading of instrumental music, 112, 115–17

third-relations, 205, 217 thumb-position, 19–22, 27, 30, 105, 111–12, 116–17, 152, 276n3 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 37 timbral ambiguity, 75 timbre, 219–20; personal, 23 tonadilla escénica, 62–63 Tortella, Jaime, 3, 55 torture, 10 tragédie-lyrique, 50–51 tragedy: in Boccherini’s music, 85–90, 94– 95; in instrumental music, 112; and the tableau, 85–90 tuberculosis, 160–61, 186–87; and melancholy, 6; metaphorical associations, 161; and sensible reception, 80–84 Turchi, Francesco, 43 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 8 Twining, Thomas, 85, 255–56 unusual keys, 166, 176, 181 Vallejo Fernández, María Antonia (La Caramba), 155–56 Vallotti, Antonio, 45 Valls, Francisco, 62 Van Loo, Carle, 77 Van Loo, Louis-Michel, 102–3 Vaucanson, Jacques, 147–48 Vénier, Jean Baptiste, 52–53, 55, 61, 223 Viadana, Lodovico, 17 vibrato, 22 Vienna, 44–55, 139 Viganò, Onorato, 43, 280n25 virtue, 135–36 virtuosi, 134–36, 157 virtuosity contra sensibilité, 136–38 visuality: and instrumental music, 4, 65– 66, 103, 153–54, 190, 262–63, 266–67; physical gestures of performer, 35–36 visualization of hearing, 219–20 Voltaire, 143; Sémiramis, 93 Weigl, Joseph, 257 wit in music, 128 Wollheim, Richard, 210 work and performance, inseparability of, 133 work-concept, 133 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 163–65, 195