Partial English text from Booklet:

The fact that Boccherini chose to be in Spain, living in or near Madrid at a time when his creative work was beginning to bear fruit, has been regarded by some musicologists as almost incomprehensible. Only recently, Christian Speck expressed his surprise that Boccherini should have left Italy and moved to Spain after having visited such cities as Milan, Vienna and Paris, remarking “From a central European perspective, the composer’s move tends to be seen as a step down the scale, placing him in the second league as far as the music world was concerned.” (Christian Speak - 'Boccherini's Concert Arias')

He then goes on to say, “From the point of view of the history of composition, Spain was something of a backwater during the second half of the 18th century.”

In fact, Madrid was far from being a musical backwater. In 1768, the very same year that Boccherini arrived in Spain, José de Nebra, one of the great masters of the Spanish Baroque and a worthy successor to renowned musicians such as Sebastián Durón and Antonio Literes, died in Madrid. Nebra, like Domenico Scarlatti, had taught Fr. Antonio Soler, an outstanding musical figure of the day.

Soler lived at the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, an important centre of cultural activity. On the very day that Nebra died, Antonio Rodríguez de Hita (1724-1787), Master of the Chapel at the Monastery of La Encarnación, staged his heroic zarzuela Briseida at the Príncipe theatre. The work had been given a private performance the previous day at the house of the Count of Aranda. Don Pedro Abarca de Bolea (1719-1798), Count of Aranda and Duke of Almazán, was at that time president of His Majesty’s Council and Captain General of New Castile. In 1767, he authorized the celebration of carnival festivities and masque balls at the Caños del Peral and Príncipe (now the Teatro Español) theatres, despite protests from the archbishop of Toledo, who petitioned for them to be banned. The custom of holding masque balls to the accompaniment of an orchestra at the two theatres became increasingly popular, as we can see from the following words written in a letter in 1767 by Manuel de Roda, the then Minister of Grace and Justice, to his friend Azara: “The masque balls have banished melancholy from Madrid. There is an incredible atmosphere of happiness and gaiety”. He then goes on to say, “It gives me the greatest satisfaction to hear foreign ministers confess in amazement that there is no European court to match that of Madrid”. The masques reinstated by Aranda have been beautifully captured for posterity in the paintings of the Madrid artist Luis Paret y Alcázar, a close friend and partner in revelries of the infante Don Luis de Borbón, Boccherini’s principal patron in Spain.

There can be no doubt that Boccherini was familiar with the zarzuela and the theatre music of his day and had an intimate knowledge of the genre, as can be seen from his opera Clementina, in which he artlessly combines Classicism with popular Madrid culture, striking a balance between enlightened rationalism on the one hand and the characteristic verve and wit of the capital’s lower classes on the other. This marriage between the refined and the popular is particularly evident in two of the pieces included in the present recording, the Quintettino for Strings in C Major, G. 324 (“La Musica Notturna di Madrid”) and the Quintet No. 4 for Guitar and Strings in D G. 448. Having said that, it would be mistaken to over-exaggerate the Spanishness of such a fundamentally European musician, one whose art had been honed by his experience of Vienna, Mannheim, Milan and Paris and who was therefore immersed in a powerful tradition of instrumental music which is palpable in his symphonies and concertos. Indeed, striking similarities have been observed between Boccherini’s Clementina and The Marriage of Figaro, which had been staged only a few months earlier in Vienna, where the Valencian composer Vicente Martin y Soler had enjoyed great success with his two operas to libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte: Il burbero di buon cuore and Una cosa rara.

It is possible that Boccherini attended performances of both these operas by Martín y Soler, which were staged in Madrid at the Caños del Peral theatre on 30th May, 1792, and 24th September, 1797, respectively. Another of Martín y Soler’s operas, the beautiful L’arbore di Diana, was performed at the same theatre on 4th November, 1789, followed by La capricciosa corretta on 16th April, 1797. He may well have also attended performances at the three Madrid opera houses of works by Cimarosa, Jommelli, Salieri, Sart, Paisiello, Anfossi, Gazzaniga, Tritto, Paer, Zingarelli, Guglielmi, Portugal and others.

In 1769, as a young newly-wed, Boccherini might have seen the Madrid production of La buena muchacha, a Spanish version of Nicolò Piccinni’s famous La Cechina. Some thirty years later, he might also have attended a performance of Orfeo ed Euridice by Piccinni’s rival on the Paris stage, Christoph Willibald Gluck, an absolute masterpiece only to be surpassed, perhaps, by Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, which was performed in May, 1802, at the Caños de Peral. The production featured the Seville-born tenor and composer Manuel García, who was to become one of the most outstanding interpreters of operas by Mozart and Rossini.

From around the time that Boccherini arrived in Spain, musical life in Madrid and other Spanish cities began to thrive, not only at court and in aristocratic circles, but also among the bourgeoisie and even further down the social scale, as the increasing popularity of the piano and the guitar would soon demonstrate. In Madrid there were distinguished music academies which gave rise to an incipient, cosmopolitan philharmonic orchestra.

One need only read Tomás de Iriarte’s poem La Música (Madrid, 1779) to realize that, while never losing its love of popular music, Madrid was a remarkably active city when it came to cultivated, classical music. Madrid audiences were well acquainted with the music of the central European composers whose names are mentioned in the poem; Iriarte makes special reference to the great composers Gluck and Haydn. In the fifth canto of La Música he writes, “If public acclaim of Joseph Haydn, or Hieden (sic), were to be measured by the current success of his works in Madrid, it would certainly appear to be exaggerated or passionate in the extreme.”

Between 1799 and 1801, the great German cellist Bernhard Romberg (1767-1841) visited Madrid on several occasions. There he had formed a quartet together with the violinists Franz Ries and Andreas Romberg (his cousin) and Ludwig van Beethoven on the viola. Romberg naturally visited Boccherini, who was delighted to see him. Romberg always fondly remembered the concerts he had given in Madrid, as reflected, for example, in the “Fandango” of his Concerto No. 2 for cello and orchestra. A few years later, in 1807, his opera Ulysses und Circe, based on a work by the Spanish dramatist Calderón de la Barca, was staged in Berlin.

Boccherini was also visited by the eminent French violinist and composer from Bordeaux, Pierre Rode (1774-1830), who appeared in Madrid on a number of occasions from 1795 to 1800. A pupil of the great Viotti and soon to be employed in the service of Napoleon Bonaparte, Rode felt the greatest admiration for Boccherini.

Boccherini’s Madrid was therefore characterised by the period of enlightenment propitiated by King Charles III and, to some extent, by the latter’s son, Charles IV, at least until the War of Independence. The atmosphere in Spain was one in which the composer enjoyed the freedom to compose without undue financial worries, and to project his extraordinary work on the wider European stage.

~Andrés Ruiz de arazona