“It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece”: The Early String Quartets

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This chapter focuses on Luigi Boccherini's works in the string quartet medium called quartettini. It explains that Boccherini used the term, and probably even coined it himself, because the works are shorter pieces and usually in two movements. It argues that some of the most affecting and characteristic music in the quartets can be found among the quartettini and that Boccherini's own typically diffident acknowledgment of the complex and distinctive unity in his work might not be made either by or on behalf of many other composers.