“Boccherini, Haydn and Beethoven in Restoration Spain (1815-1848): a Study on the Reception of Chamber Music Works”. 2017 (paper from 2012) (original) (raw)

2017, en Christian Speck (ed.), Boccherini Studies, Bolonia, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Vol 5

This article examines a case related to ‘musical idealism’ in Restoration Spain (1814-1833), based on the reception of music -mainly chamber music- by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) . The main documentary source for this study is a Spanish music library which conserves a great collection of chamber pieces of these composers: the Adalid Music Library (A.M.L.), located in A Coruña on the North Atlantic coast of Spain . This library is, to our best knowledge, the only known Spanish historical music score collection that conserves chamber music pieces, printed mainly in Paris between ca. 1814 and 1827, which were received contemporaneously by their collectors without any intermediary settled in Spain. According to William Weber, the musical idealism movement was reaffirmed as a musical community who, although relatively small in number, had a considerable public resonance. Its participants defended a high culture, based on the taste for ‘classical music’ –also called ‘serious music’– as a reaction to the growing commercialization of the opera and the life of the virtuoso concert –known as ‘light music’ or ‘salon music’–. In the 1820s, musical commentators very often restricted the term ‘classical’ to quartets, symphonies and sacred music . The social class that championed musical idealism was the growing middle class, although Weber suggests that this role of social classes in the period has to be seen and analyzed from different perspectives.