Background
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini was born in 1743 at Lucca, Italy. The son of an Italian bass-player.
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini was born in 1743 at Lucca, Italy. The son of an Italian bass-player.
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini studied at Rome, where he became a fine cellist.
In 1757 Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini and his father went to Vienna, where the court employed them as musicians in the Burgtheater. In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid, entering in 1770 the employ of Infante Luis Antonio of Spain (1727–1785), younger brother of King Charles III of Spain. He afterwards became "chamber- composer" to King Frederick William II of Prussia, till 1797, when he returned to Spain.
Boccherini represents the effect of the rapid progress of a new art on a mind too refined to be led into crudeness, too inventive and receptive to neglect any of the new artistic resources within its cognizance, and too superficial to grasp their real meaning.
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.
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini had two wives. They died in 1785 and 1805. He had four daughters.