String Quintet in F minor, Op.42, No.1

Allegro moderato assai

Minuetto

Adagio cantabile

Allegro giusto

A prolific composer by any standards, Boccherini wrote no fewer than 500 chamber works - including 91 strings quartets and 125 string quintets - between the composition of his first trios as a famously prodigious teenager in Vienna in 1760 and his death in poverty in Spain 45 years later. And yet the only works of his which are at all familiar are a cello concerto in an arrangement by someone else and a tuneful Minuet from his String Quintet in E major, Op.11, No.6, which was written in Spain in 1771. His string quartets have always been overshadowed by those of Haydn, who is generally regarded as the creator of the form although he and Boccherini were actually producing their earliest examples at much the same time. More ironic still, the area of the repertoire in which he indisputably does have chronological priority, the string quintet with two cellos, is dominated by the unassailably sublime Quintet in C major written by Schubert shortly before his death.

Although Boccherini did write 24 quintets with two violas, the form preferred by Mozart, half of them are arrangements of piano quintets and the other half are comparatively late works which, since they were commissioned for the private use of Louis Napoleon and not published until the 1960s, can claim no historical importance. The 113 quintets with two cellos, all of which were written after the composer settled in Spain in about 1770 and many of which were published (mainly in Paris but also in Vienna) during his lifetime and in the years immediately after his death, are a different matter. The Spanish element in them - most picturesquely represented by Op.30, No.1 in G, subtitled La Musica Notturna delle strade di Madrid - had no influence on his contemporaries in the European main stream, but his scoring certainly did. Boccherini’s own instrument was the cello and his writing for the pair of cellos is always interesting and enterprising - just as it is in Schubert’s Quintet in C major.

The Quintet in F minor, Op.42, No.1, which was written in 1789 and published by Pleyel in Paris as Op.37, No.19 in 1809, is a very characteristic example of its kind - vital in rhythm and attractively melodious with a particularly expressive slow movement in B flat major and an entertaining rondo finale.

Rupert Avis