auty in instrumental tone-colour, must have made even his
earlier works seem to contemporaries at least as novel and mature as any
of those experiments at which Haydn, with eight years more of age and
experience, was labouring in the development of the true new forms. Most
of Boccherini's technical resources proved useless to Haydn, and
resemblances occur only in Haydn's earliest works (e.g. most of the
slow movements of the quartets in _op_. 3 and in some as late as _op_.
17); whichever derived the characteristics of such movements from the
other, the advantage is decidedly with Boccherini. But the progress of
music did not lie in the production of novel beauties of instrumental
tone in a style in which polyphonic organization was either deliberately
abandoned or replaced by a pleasing illusion, while the form in its
larger aspects was a mere inorganic amplification of the old
suite-forms, which presupposed a genuine polyphonic organization as the
vitalizing principle of their otherwise purely decorative nature. The
true tendency of the new sonata forms was to make instrumental music
dramatic in its variety and contrasts, instead of merely decorative.
Haydn from the outset buried himself with the handling of new rhythmic
proportions; and if it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the
surprising beauty of colour in such a specimen of Boccherini's 125
string-quintets as that in E major (containing the popular minuet) is
perhaps more modern and certainly safer in performance than any special
effect Haydn ever achieved, it is nevertheless true that even this
beauty fails to justify the length and monotony of the work. Where Haydn
uses any fraction of the resources of such a style, the ultimate effect
is in proportion to a purpose of which Boccherini, with all his genuine
admiration of his elder brother in art, could form no conception.
Boccherini's works are, however, still indispensable for violoncellists,
both in their education and their concert repertories; and his position
in musical history is assured as that of the most original and, next to
Tartini, perhaps the greatest writer of music for stringed instruments
in the late Italian amplifications of the older quasi-polyphonic sonata
or suite-form that survived into the beginning of the 19th century in
the works of Nardini. Boccherini may safely be regarded as its last real
master. He was wittily characterized by the contemporary violinist Puppo
as "the wife of Haydn";