“One Says That One Weeps, but One Does Not Weep”: Sensible, Grotesque, and Mechanical Embodiments in Boccherini's Chamber Music

Abstract

Abstract The structural coherence and teleology emblematic of eighteenth-century Classicism are not strong features in the music of Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805). His posthumous reputation has suffered a great deal as a result. But regarded through the lens of performance—the sensations and images involved in its bodily presentation—his music evokes a different eighteenth century characterized by urgent, even volatile, inquiries into the nature of the self. In this article I use contemporary theories of embodiment as articulated by Gasparo Angiolini and other creators of pantomime dance—a tradition to which Boccherini had considerable exposure—in order to address the heart of Boccherini's oeuvre, the chamber music for strings, in regard to its characteristic presentations of sensibilité through extreme repetitiveness and a hyperattention to details of dynamics and articulation; of the grotesque through bizarre timbres and registral excesses; and of Newtonian mechanistic philosophy through gestural enactments of rapidity and rigidity. These presentations often distance and ironize the performer, particularly in regard to virtuosity. I argue that they make thereby a sophisticated contribution to the central Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and appearance so memorably articulated in Diderot's “Paradoxe sur le Comédien.”