Great Composers and Their Lives

This Italian composer was actually born into a family full of artists. Amazingly enough, he wrote 300 chamber works, 18 symphonies, and 93 string quartets. His chamber works also included 9 guitar quintets, which guitarists are quite grateful for.

What made this composer special was the fact that he not only came from Italy during the classical era, which was full of liveliness and elegance, but he travelled to Vienna and discovered the beginnings of the Romantic Era. Along with this, he went to Spain, discovering the guitar music of Andalusia along with its rhythm , which influenced his music a great deal.

This passion and drama he found in Vienna with regard to music and literature was part of a movement known even in English under the German phrase ‘Sturm und Drang’. This was also known as the ‘Time of Genius’. In order to understand this term, it is important to know what was going on during the 18^th century, namely another movement known as the Age of Enlightenment, the time where man discovered himself and began to use reason to reappraise social institutions and ideas. ‘Sturm und Drang’ was a furthering of this, being the time when a genius was considered a superior human being raised up amongst the masses and glorified as a creator of art. By the way, in German ‘Sturm’ means ‘storm’, and ‘drang’ means either ‘stress’ or ‘urge.’

Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy. His whole family were filled with great artists. His father, being a double-bass and cello player, taught Boccherini to play the cello at a very young age. At 13, he studied with the Maestro di Cappella(choir director) at St. Peter’s in Rome. Before the age of 21, he had already made 3 visits to the Viennese royal court.

Along with his best friend and violinist, Filippo Manfredi, he formed a string quartet. At the age of 23, the group started giving a concert tour in the north of Italy. Only a year later, they were received in Paris at the Concert Spirituel, which was a public concert series, the first of its kind which lasted from 1725-1790. It was actually the Spanish ambassador to Paris who originally invited Boccherini to come to Spain, for which he started working for as a composer for the Spanish Court under Don Luis.

Following the death of Don Luis in 1789, he went to the court of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, but ended up returning to Spain on account of Wilhelm’s death. In Spain, he organised concerts and composed for the French consul Lucien Buonaparte, Napoleon Buonaparte’s brother.

All in all, there was a point in Boccherini’s career where he had become so famous that his publisher in Paris started putting out music by other composers under his name. Yet, following the deaths of not only Prince Wilhelm, Lucien Buonapart, his wife and two daughters, despite the fame he was awarded, which had been to the extent of influencing Mozart and Haydn and winning Gluck’s admiration, Boccherini ended up dying in 1805 in complete poverty.

To listen to music by this great composer click here.