Boccherini's Minuet

Luigi Boccherini was a cellist from Lucca who spent most of his working life in Spain, in the service of the king's younger brother, Don Luis. He wrote well over a hundred string quintets, most of them for two violins, a viola and two cellos, so that he could play in them himself. The quintet in E, Op. 11 No. 5, dates from 1771, and its third movement is this minuet.

It became famous on its own long after Boccherini died poor in Madrid in 1805. Salon orchestras and violin teachers took it up in the nineteenth century, it turned up in countless arrangements, and in the 1955 film The Ladykillers Alec Guinness's gang of crooks, posing as a string quintet, plays a gramophone record of it to cover their planning. For many people it is simply the sound of the eighteenth century.

The first violin plays it muted, with a little motion, over a light accompaniment in the other four strings. The tune hangs on a few gestures: a flourish into a high A, a drop of an octave, and small figures that step down by half steps. This page carries both strains as Boccherini printed them, each repeated, with the trills and quick flourishes played as plain notes.

On a mandolin in A the minuet crosses all four courses in first position, from the low A on the G course at the very end to the high A at the fifth fret of the E course. The leaps are the hard part, an octave or more in a single beat, so learn the right hand's string crossings slowly before the tune. The second strain's repeated E's want to be quiet and short, with the melody notes above them standing out. Played softly and a little detached, it keeps the muted, courtly sound Boccherini asked for.