Concerto 1700
Gaetano Brunetti. String Quartets Op.3
Gaetano Brunetti was born on 9 August 1744 in Fano, a town then belonging to the Papal States. Little is known about his childhood and training. He may have studied in Livorno or Florence with the violinist Pietro Nardini, a member of the school of Giuseppe Tartini. At Easter 1759, when he was only 14 years old, Brunetti was already in Madrid, accompanied by his father Esteban. In October 1767 Brunetti won by competitive examination a post as violinist in the Royal Chapel. The musician's life changed significantly when, at the beginning of 1771, he was appointed chamber musician and violin teacher to the Prince of Asturias, the future Charles IV. This appointment entailed not only teaching his patron to play the violin, but also composing new works, selecting the repertoire, choosing the musicians and even taking care of the instruments. After the coronation of Charles IV, in 1789 Brunetti formed part of the small ensemble of musicians of the Royal Chamber, an institution of which he was eventually appointed director in 1796. Brunetti died on 16 December 1798, just a few months after the death of his wife Saturnina, in Colmenar de Oreja, where he owned a house and estate. Of Brunetti's extensive output, fifty string quartets have come down to us. He composed ten sets of six quartets each, so that he wrote sixty quartets, ten more than have survived. None of them were published during his lifetime, as Brunetti, unlike Boccherini, was unable or unwilling to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the music market. His quartets did not circulate beyond the narrow courtly or noble sphere for which they were produced and, until recent times, have not been available to performers. In 1774 Brunetti composed two sets of quartets: those of the Opera 2a and those of the Opera 3a. While the quartets of Opera 2a were composed in San Ildefonso, as we read on the first page of the notebook, those of Opera 3a were composed in San Lorenzo. These indications allow us to date the quartets more precisely, since the court of Charles III, in order to escape the heat of the summer, stayed at the Royal Site of La Granja de San Ildefonso between July and September, moving to the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial at the beginning of October, where the king would entertain himself by hunting. Bearing this in mind, the quartets of Opera 2ª must be dated to the summer of 1774 and the quartets of Opera 3ª to the autumn of the same year. For the quartets of Opus 2, structured in four movements, Brunetti followed the example of the quartets of Haydn's Op. 9. For the quartets of Op. 3, on the other hand, structured in two movements, he followed the model of Boccherini's Op. 15. Everything suggests that Brunetti wanted to distance himself with O. 3 from Op. 2, which he had composed shortly before, and in doing so he followed the approach of Boccherini, who had written the opera piccola Op. 15 (1772) after the opera grande Op. 9 (1770). In Mara Parker's terminology, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Op. 3 quartets is the abandonment of the predominance of the lecture texture, in which the first violin claims all the attention. Instead, Brunetti resorted in some movements to the texture of polite conversation, in which several instruments expound melodic material, and of light debate, in which the instruments tentatively dispute the first violin's leadership.