Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
String Quartet in G Major, G. 234 Op.52, No.3 (1795)
Stabat Mater G. 532 for soprano and string quintet (1781)
String Quintet in F Minor, G. 348 Op.42, No.1 (1789)
Dominique Labelle (soprano)
Sarasa Ensemble
Text and translation included
rec. 2014/15, Chapel at West Parish, USA
NAXOS 8.573958 [78]
I fell in love with Boccherini’s birthplace, the relatively small Tuscan town of Lucca when I first went there some 25 years ago. I was struck by the town’s beauty, its relaxed and peaceful atmosphere inside its Renaissance-period ramparts, and the relative absence of other tourists. Its delights include a number of astonishingly beautiful Romanesque churches (some with later additions or changes), the main reason why John Ruskin came here on many occasions to sketch and paint. The Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi, while not one of the great galleries of Italy, contains attractive works while the Museo Nazionale Guinigi holds a small, but interesting collection of Luccan art and archaeology; as I walked around the latter the only living creature I encountered was a cat which followed me from room to room!
Before my three-night stay in Lucca, I was already familiar with (and fond of) some of Boccherini’s chamber music. I was, thus, delighted by what happened when mid-afternoon on my first day there I went into a small bar/café to order a coffee, intending to sit outside in the spring sunshine, as a number of locals were doing, to drink it. But when I got into the virtually empty interior, I found that a recording of some of Boccherini’s chamber music (I think it was one of the guitar quintets) was playing. This provided a perfect aural background, as I sat inside the bar, to the consumption of a well-made Caffe corretto con Grappa. The owner was clearly a man of some culture and once the CD had finished, I found myself in conversation with him – in a mixture of my stumbling Italian and his quite fluent English (he turned out to have spent some years in Edinburgh); indeed, it was on his advice that I sought out many of the interesting places in the town. These included the Istituto Luigi Boccherini, a centre for musical studies, in front of which there is a statue of Boccherini – and the birthplace of Puccini. The Puccinis were central figures in the musical life of Lucca for several generations; indeed. an earlier Giacomo Puccini (1712-81), then maestro di cappella and organist at the town’s cathedral, encouraged the talents of the young Boccherini.
The composer was born in Lucca in February 1743, in a house (which now carries a plaque) on the corner of Via Buià and Via Fillungo. He was baptised ‘Ridolfo Luigi’ though he seems never to have used his first name. According to a census of 1744 the town then had a population of around 20,000 (see Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, University of California Press, 1957, p.44). His father Leopoldo (his mother was Maria Santa, née Prosperini) was an accomplished player of the double bass and the cello, who had a place in the musical life of the town and its surrounding region. This was a family in which artistic ability was very much encouraged – one of Luigi’s brothers, Giovanni Gastone (born 1744), after initially working as a dancer, became a poet, dramatist and librettist: he wrote the (admittedly undistinguished) text for Haydn’s Il Ritorno di Tobia (1774-5) and from 1769 to 1775 he was chief poet and artistic director of Vienna’s Burgtheater. He became a friend of Salieri and wrote libretti for him and for Paisiello. Later he was elected to the Arcadian Academy in Rome. Two of Luigi’s sisters, Maria Ester (b.1740) and Anna Matilde (b.1744) became dancers and a third, Riccardia (b.1747) had some success as an opera singer.
Leopoldo gave Luigi his earliest musical tuition and he was playing the cello by the age of five. He studied next with a certain Abbé Vanucci, director of music at Lucca’s Cathedral of San Martino. By the time that he was 13 Luigi’s talents evidently merited more advanced tuition than was available in Lucca, for in 1756 he was sent to Rome in to study with Giovanni Battista Costanzi (1704-1778), a well-known cellist and composer who was then director of the ‘Cappella Giulia’ in St. Peter’s. Boccherini, who had already given many recitals in Lucca, is reported to have given his first Roman concert in the following year and beginning to be acknowledged as a virtuoso cellist. It was also in 1757 that the young Boccherini made his way to Milan with his father, before the two continued to Vienna, where they were employed in the orchestra of the Burgtheater for several seasons between 1757 and 1764. In 1764, however, they returned to Lucca, perhaps because Leopoldo’s health was failing (he was to die in 1766). During these two years in Lucca, Luigi composed two oratorios, Giuseppe riconosciuto and Gioas, re di Giudea. These were amongst the small number of vocal works he was to compose, most of his output consisting of chamber music, along with some symphonies.
Following his father’s death, Luigi joined up with a Lucchese violinist Filippo Manfredi (they had played together in the Cappella Palatina in Lucca) and the two travelled, giving concerts in several cities in Northern Italy, before making their way to Paris in 1769. They met with a good deal of success in Paris, where some of Boccherini’s music was published for the first time. It was also in Paris that Boccherini met and fell in love with his future wife, Clementina Pellicia, a soprano then in the city with an Italian opera company. One of those on whom Boccherini made a particularly favourable impression was the Spanish Ambassador in Paris. He advised Boccherini and Manfredi to go to Spain, assuring them that they would be well-received there. Boccherini was perhaps all the more willing to accept this advice because the opera company in which Clementina Pellicia was singing was about to leave for Spain! Boccherini found a valuable patron in Spain; in November of 1770 he entered the service of Don Luis de Bourbon (1727-85), Infante of Spain and younger brother of King Carlos III of Spain, being appointed ‘cellist of his chamber and composer of music to his Royal Highness, with the approval of His Majesty’. There followed what were the most stable years in Boccherini’s musical life. He had a secure position, a good salary and a well-disposed patron. Such remained the position until the death of Don Luis in August 1785. It was in the intervening years that Boccherini wrote most of his best music. In it he made use of the Italian foundations his early training and experience had given him, while also borrowing elements from the musical traditions of Spain. He soon married Clementina, and within a few years they had five children. However, the death of Don Luis and the loss of his salary put an end to Boccherini’s years of stability. He had no pension, save a rather miserly one granted by the Spanish King, so he had to find other sources of income to support his family.
Within Spain he initially found favour with the remarkable Maria Josefa Alonso-Pimental, Duchess of Benavente-Osuna (1752-1834), an aristocratic patron of the arts and sciences with a palace in Madrid, where she hosted a salon for artists, philosophers and scientists. She gave Boccherini the title of her ‘Director de la Orquesta y compositor’ and it was for her that Boccherini wrote his one ‘operatic’ work, La Clementina (1786); it is a measure of how far Boccherini was now influenced by Spanish models, that this is better described as a zarzuela than as an opera. However, the Duchess and her husband left Madrid for Paris, ending that source of patronage. Boccherini was also assisted by the patronage of Crown Prince (later King) Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia, an accomplished amateur musician, one of whose instruments was the cello; in 1786 he named Boccherini ‘compositeur de notre chambre’. The composer probably didn’t travel to Prussia, but seems regularly to have sent new compositions to Prussia, for which Frederick recompensed him. The King died suddenly in 1797 and his successor offered Boccherini no support.
Boccherini’s final years were overshadowed not only by financial difficulties and uncertainties, but also by his own growing illness and a series of family deaths – of his mother (in Spain) in 1776, of his wife in 1785, and of three of his children who died one after the other during an epidemic. In 1800, however, Boccherini gained the support of Lucien Bonaparte (younger brother of Napoleon), then French Ambassador in Madrid, who employed him to organise musical events and accepted the dedication of some of Boccherini’s compositions. (The best account of Boccherini’s life is Jaimie Tortella’s excellent Boccherini, un músico italiano en la España, published in 2002).
Boccherini’s music was not widely known at the time of his death – given the years he had spent in the relative musical isolation of Spain this is not surprising. Only in relatively recent decades has it (deservedly) attracted more attention. One can see one stage in that process (in the 1930s) recorded by the poet and music-lover Ezra Pound in his eccentrically-titled, but consistently stimulating, book Guide to Kulchur, first published in 1938. (My quotations are taken from the London edition published in 1952). Pound finds a performance of Boccherini’s String Quartet Op. 8 No. 5 to be “utterly beautiful” (p.135), but complains that most of his music is unavailable, “lying hid or monopolized in our libraries” (p.148). As recently as 2005, introducing a special section of essays on Boccherini in Early Music (Vol.33, No.2), Miguel-Ángel Marin still felt obliged to make the following observation (p.163): “Exactly 200 years after Boccherini’s death in Madrid May 1805 one might very well have the impression that studies into this composer and his work have not been particularly prolific. He has occupied a relatively marginal position in music performance, writing and scholarship throughout the 19th and 20th centuries”.
I am not alone, I know, in finding Boccherini’s chamber music – his cello sonatas, string quartets, string quintets, guitar quintets etc – more engaging and more successful than his symphonies. Boccherini displays his distinctive inventiveness and intricacy of mind far more completely in his small-scale works; in their more lucid textures his fluid and expressive melodies can be savoured more fully. His best music is a matter of intimacy rather than grand rhetoric, of telling detail rather than large structures or grand gestures. He wrote relatively little vocal music – apart from the works already mentioned, he composed a mass which is now lost, a few motets and some 18 operatic arias,
fifteen of them for soprano (G.544-85). His Stabat Mater exists in two versions; the first for soprano and string quintet (made up of two violins, viola and two cellos). A revised version was made in 1800, scored for two sopranos and a tenor; this also included an instrumental introduction based on the Allegro of Boccherini’s Second Symphony. (There are useful discussions of the two versions in Guido Salvetti’s ‘Le due versione della Stabat Mater di Boccharini’ in Musica Sacra aggetivi. Studi per Fedele d’Amico, ed. Agostino Zino, Florence, 1991 and Luca Lévi Sala’s ‘Le Stabat Mater Op.61 (1801) de Luigi Boccherini: genèse et état des sources’, Revue de musicologie, 100:2 (2014), pp. 323-56.)
My own firm preference is for the first version, which is more intimate and personal. The 1781 Stabat Mater commissioned by the Infante Luis and was doubtless performed privately in the chapel of his Palacios Mosquera in the relative remoteness of Arenas de San Pedro, a hundred or so miles west of Madrid, near Avila. In the service of Don Luis at much the same time as Boccherini was a string quartet made up of the Spanish violinist Antonio Font (c.1727-1810) and three of his sons. Doubtless Boccherini joined the Font Quartet, presumably as first cello, in playing the Stabat Mater. The 1800 revision was commissioned by – and dedicated to – “Cittadino Bonaparte” (i.e. Lucien Bonaparte) and performed to a larger public in Madrid. Though it may seem paradoxical to say so, I find that the very intimacy of the 1781 setting produces an intensity and power, greater than found in many ‘grander’ and more lavish versions of the Stabat Mater, in which a quasi-theatrical dimension often takes over.
In the 1781 version Boccherini focuses on every detail of the text, a 13th century Latin hymn traditionally attributed, though with no certainty, to Jacopone da Todi (c.1230-1306). Boccherini’s setting invites (requires?) the listener to undertake a prayerful meditation which passes through several stages. Verses 1 and 2 focus the mind, and the ‘internal’ eye, on the ‘picture’ of Mary at the foot of the cross:
Stabat mater dolorosa At the Cross her station keeping,
Juxta crucem lacrimosa, stood the mournful Mother weeping,
Dum pendebat Filius. close to her Son to the last.
Quotations are taken from the Naxos booklet. The English version given there is by Edward Caswall (1814-78), taken from his collection Lyra Catholica, first published in 1849 (according to several reference books I have been able to consult and the catalogue of the British Library), although Naxos give the date of 1645. Caswall’s translation is not completely ‘accurate’, but conveys much of the emotional power of the original.
The opening of verse 3 requires us to refocus our meditative eye – “Christ above in torment hangs” and in verse four we are obliged to think about the adequacy of our own reaction:
Quis est homo qui none fleret Is there one who would not weep,
Christi Matrem si videret whelmed in miseries so deep,
In tanto supplicio? Christ’s dear Mother to behold?
Up to this point Boccherini’s setting has employed minor keys (F minor and C minor); only with verse 5 – in which, for the first time, the power of Christ’s suffering to ‘save’ mankind begins to be asserted, does he switch to a major key (A flat):
Pro peccatis suae gentis For the sins of His own nation,
Vidit Jesum in tormentis, She saw Jesus wracked with torment,
Et flagellis subditum. All with scourges rent.
With verse six, meditation evolves into petitionary prayer:
Eja Mater, fons amoris, O thou Mother! Fount of love!
Me sentire vim doloris Touch my spirit from above,
Fac, ut tecum lugeam. make my heart with thine accord:
Fac, ut ardeat cor meum Make me feel as thou hast felt;
In amando Christum Deum, make my soul to low and melt
Ut sibi complaceam. with the love of Christ my Lord.
Boccherini sets verses 7-9 in major keys and only returns to C minor in verse 10, to exquisitely poignant effect, in what is, both literally and metaphorically, a ‘crucial’ moment in the work:
Fac me plagis vulneravi Wounded with his every wound,
Crue hac inebriari steep my soul till it hath swooned,
Et cruore Filii. in his very Blood away.
A more literal translation of this verse might read “Make me vulnerable to plagues, / drunk with the Cross / and the blood of the Son”.
Throughout, Boccherini’s setting – full of a sombre lyricism making much use of yearning appoggiaturas, but shot through with sudden shafts of light – subtly but clearly articulates the emotional arc of the medieval hymn. The blending of voice and instrument is perfect. The result is a minor masterpiece of sacred music, to my ears and mind superior to many more famous settings of the Stabat Mater. Though Boccherini seems to have had an unshaken Catholic faith throughout his life, this is perhaps the one work of his in which one feels the presence of that personal faith.
Fortunately, this 1781 Stabat Mater here gets an exemplary performance. All the performers bring to the music what one might call a ‘Mediterranean’ rather than a Central European/German sensibility. Soprano Dominique Labelle is deeply impressive. She is at all points richly expressive without the slightest sign of excess or the overly operatic. She commands a rich variety of vocal colours. Although the gleaming radiance of her voice at the top of its range is what is most obviously striking (listen, for example, to ‘Quae moerebat et dolebat’), she can also produce enough hints of a kind of darker ‘mezzo’ quality where appropriate (as in the very opening phrase of the whole work, or parts of ‘Eja, mater, fons amoris’). At all points she has clearly thought about and ‘felt’ the text, and the result is a thing of very considerable, and moving, beauty. Labelle receives excellent support from the Sarasa Ensemble.
Sarasa, based in Boston, Massachusetts is, as its website tells one, “a performing collective of more than one hundred instrumentalists and singers, presenting music spanning the 17th to the 21st centuries”. Although not, as this makes clear, an exclusively ‘early music’ ensemble, in 2007 Sarasa received the ‘outstanding achievement award’ from Early Music America. The musicians heard on this recording – in three different configurations – are violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and Christina Day Martinson, violist Jenny Stirling and cellists Timothy Merton (who plays – very well - the beautiful cello line in the third movement of the string quintet) and Phoebe Carrai. Some British readers may remember Englishman Timothy Merton from performances with, for example, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.
Until now, my go-to recording of Boccherini’s 1781 Stabat Mater was the version by Agnes Mellon and Ensemble 415, issued in various incarnations by Harmonia Mundi, recorded, I think, in the early 1990s (the copy I have doesn’t give a recording date). That version certainly has its merits and I shall listen to it again from time to time. However, if pushed to choose between the two, my vote would certainly go to this new recording from Naxos. It helps that this recording is part of a very thoughtful programme, in which the Stabat Mater is framed, as it were, by one of the composer’s many string quartets (91 or more, counts vary!) and one of his even more numerous (some 125) string quintets.
The disc opens with Boccherini’s String Quartet in G Major, G. 234 Op.52, No.3. (The G. numbers in this review refer to Yves Gérard’s Thematic, Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini (London, O.U.P, 1969), of which a revision is currently in progress.) This is among the quartets Boccherini wrote for King Friedrich Wilhelm II. By then Boccherini had been writing and publishing string quartets for almost 35 years – so it is perhaps no surprise that this work should be a sophisticated piece, with an impressive emotional and dynamic range. Appreciation of Boccherini’s work has, I think, often been held back by the much-quoted observation that Boccherini was, in stylistic terms, “the wife of Haydn”. It was, I believe, the violinist Giuseppe Puppo, a fellow Lucchese (1749-1827) who was responsible for this witticism. It is, consciously, or unconsciously, remembered in many later discussions of Boccherini’s music as, to quote just one example, when Charles Rosen (The Classical Style, 1971, p.47) praises the elegance of Boccherini’s music, but qualifies that praise by saying that it lacks “force”. I wonder if Rosen had heard the opening movement of the quartet which opens this disc? I am happy to endorse what is said of this Allegro con moto in Jennifer Morsches’ booklet essay accompanying this CD: “a bucolic sense of ease in the opening is interrupted almost immediately by a plethora of dynamic contrasts and varying motivic ideas”. Indeed, I would be inclined to talk about this movement in terms of passionate emotional outbursts of some forcefulness. As well as suggesting (if we are to deal in such unattractive stereotypes) that Boccherini’s work can be every bit as ‘masculine’ as Haydn’s, this particular Quartet also displays a degree of structural sophistication with which Boccherini’s has not often been credited, in the way that the opening theme of that first movement reappears in the final movement (Allegro giusto) before the very last bars of the work.
In the context of the Stabat Mater, the string quintet which closes the disc is even more interesting, given that it borrows/quotes from that work. A secondary theme in the first movement (Allegro moderato assai), stated in measures 12-18, quotes the setting of ‘Pro peccatis suae gentis’ and the slow movement (Adagio cantabile) borrows an F minor melody heard at the word ‘lacrimosa’ in the first verse of the Stabat Mater.
In what is already a rather lengthy review, I won’t speculate on the ‘meaning’ of these quotations within the quintet, save to say that they further reinforce my feeling that the 1781 setting of the Stabat Mater had a strongly personal significance for Boccherini. Further such ‘reinforcement’ can be found in the String Quartet Op. 40, No. 1, G. 214), published in 1798, in which the minuet contains a quotation from the ‘Cujus animam gementem’ as the first eight bars of the trio.
There is far more to Boccherini than such ‘lollipops’ as the famous Minuet from the String Quintet in E major, Op.11 No.5, G.275, ‘La Musica Notturna della Strade di Madrid’ from the String Quintet in C major, Op.3, No.6, G324 and the ‘Fandango’ from the Guitar Quintet in D major, G.448. When Charles Burney came to summarise Boccherini’s achievement, he might almost have been answering Puppo’s waspish observation (as quoted earlier), in his stress on Boccherini’s music as “bold” and “masterly”: “Boccherini […] has perhaps supplied the performers on bowed-instruments and lovers of Music, with more excellent compositions than any master of the present age, except Haydn. His style is at once bold, masterly, and elegant. There are movements in his works of every style […] that place him high in rank among the greatest masters who have ever written for the violin or violoncello.” (A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1798), ed. F. Mercer, 1957, Vol. II, 455).
The fine performances of the two chamber works on this disc, coupled with the outstanding interpretation of his first Stabat Mate, make it a disc that is warmly recommended both to those who admire Boccherini as much as I do and to those who have yet to discover just what an interesting composer he is.
Glyn Pursglove
