Longing for Italy

Whilst Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ depicts country life, Luigi Boccherini and Pyotr Tchaikovsky turn their attention to the urban soundscape. Boccherini does this so vividly in his ‘Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid’ that the result is a thoroughly unusual string quintet. In the printed edition, he justifies the musical peculiarities with the ‘truthfulness of the matter’ he is depicting: the evening bells ring out with mysterious pizzicato chords, a drum is beaten, blind beggars sing to the accompaniment of a guitar (listen out for the cellos here!); devout rosaries are recited and whirling dances performed, until the military band marches in with its tattoo and sends us all to bed. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Boccherini wrote the piece at a time when he was unable to experience the nightly life of Madrid, as he and his master’s court had been banished from the capital for several years. Tchaikovsky, too, did not write his famous string sextet in Florence itself, but after his return to Russia: it is, after all, a ‘Souvenir de Florence’, a memory, an emotional memento. As with Boccherini, there is night music here too – the Adagio certainly has a nocturnal feel, with its pizzicato accompaniments, its passion, its ghostly, fantastical middle section and the subsequent romantic dialogue between cello and violin. In the final two movements, the sextet sounds increasingly like Tchaikovsky’s homeland, though the folk themes are treated with the utmost artistry. In letters, the composer describes how much work he put into, among other things, the six-part fugue in the finale; most recently before going to press, whilst he was staying in Paris in January 1892. The sextet is as cosmopolitan as its creator: Florence and Klin, St Petersburg and Paris. Tchaikovsky also had Prague and Vienna, which lie somewhere in between, in mind: his sextet audibly measures itself against Brahms and Dvořák.