String Quartet in C major Op.2 No.6

In spite of claims made to the contrary, Boccherini cannot be said to have “invented” the string quartet. In so far as any one composer can be credited in that way, it has to be his older contemporary, Joseph Haydn. Boccherini was certainly prolific in writing chamber music for strings and he can be said to have invented the string quintet, of which he wrote as many as 125 examples. By far the most of his quintets are scored with two cellos (rather than two violas, although he wrote for that format too) which places him at the beginning of a tradition including Schubert’s unsurpassable Quintet in C major.

By demonstrating what the cello could do – a phenomenally gifted cellist who could play a violin part at pitch if a violinist was missing – Boccherini was effective in liberating the instrument from fundamental harmonic duties on the bass line, perhaps influencing even Haydn in that respect. His influence was less widespread than it might have been, however, since for most of his life – like an earlier Italian, composer, Domenico Scarlatti – he was working in Spain, well out of the mainstream. Haydn, on the other hand, was working alongside Mozart and Beethoven: given his own genius and followers of such stature, his model of the string quartet could scarcely fail. At the same time, unlike Boccherini’s, Haydn’s quartet-writing developed with every new set he wrote.

Boccherini’s Op.2 No.6, published in Paris in 1767, is one of the earliest of Boccherini’s 91 string quartets. Like two of the others in the Op.2 set it is in three movements ending with a minuet – which, to anyone accustomed to the standard Haydn model, has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like three quarters of a string quartet.The opening Allegretto spirituoso, however, adheres to the conventions of sonata form with a second subject which, after a succession of multi-stopped chords, is liberally made up of three different themes in the dominant. The cello is prominently featured here, as it is in the freely modulating development and in a recapitulation concerned more with the second subject than the first. But where the cello’s voice is most appealing is in the short but characteristically expressive Largo in C minor which, beginning with a canonic introduction of the opening theme, reserves several solo episodes for Boccherini’s favourite instrument.