With Daphné du Barry's larger-than-life bronze of Boccherini keeping watch just a few streets away, an international group of scholars gathered within Lucca's walls to discuss the string quartet. Papers delivered in English, German, Italian and French represented a diverse colloquy of methodologies and perspectives. The three-day event was organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini and the Palazzetto Bru Zane/Centre de Musique Romantique Française, in association with the Italian National Edition of Luigi Boccherini's Complete Works and the journal Ad Parnassum.

The two-part title of the conference teases – it implies that the development of the string quartet over time coincided with its shift from a private to a public genre. As a number of presenters emphasized, however, neither the homology nor the very notion of private versus public is so clear-cut. After introductory remarks by Massimiliano Sala (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini), Étienne Jardin (Palazzetto Bru Zane) and Christian Speck (Italian National Edition of Boccherini's Complete Works), the sessions began with four papers on Beethoven's quartets. Nancy November (University of Auckland) questioned the long-standing view that the Quartetto serioso (Op. 95) was meant as a kind of musica reservata, noting that Beethoven's oft-cited warning to George Smart that it was ‘never to be performed in public’ needs to be understood in light of the more amateur-friendly orientation of the English market. Opus 95, she argued, is a drama of subtly linked fragments whose relationship to the prose of Tieck, the Schlegels and others suggests a more outward-looking approach. Your correspondent (Mark Ferraguto, Pennsylvania State University) took up similar themes, arguing that Beethoven's late quartets, with their semi-autobiographical titles, expressive markings and epigraphs, reflect the notion of audience-oriented privacy that Habermas associated with the eighteenth-century novel; rather than introspective and esoteric, these quartets foreground Beethoven's engagement with the literary sphere and its particular forms of sociability. Another pair of complementary papers followed. Stephen Husarik (University of Arkansas at Fort Smith) linked the Grosse Fuge to the aesthetics of the grotesque and comic, focusing on a possible relationship between its cantus firmus and a theme from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. Maria Teresa Arfini (Università della Valle d'Aosta) explored a similarly daunting work by Reicha, the Quatuor scientifique, in which eight of the quartet's twelve movements are fugues. This highly experimental piece may have influenced Beethoven, despite his earlier dismissal of Reicha's Trente-six Fugues pour le Piano-Forté as merely demonstrating ‘daß die Fuge keine Fuge mehr ist’ (that the fugue is no longer a fugue).

Lucca's native son Boccherini was the focus of the next session. Mara Parker (Widener University), in absentia, considered a strange aspect of Boccherini's output, namely the singular eleven-year period (1786–1797) during which he appears not to have sought to publish any of his quartets. This period corresponds to his professional engagement by Friedrich Wilhelm II, a royal patron who was himself a skilled cellist and chamber musician. Parker argued that the quartets from this period were designed to respond to the monarch's musical taste, and that their eccentricities would not have been easily grasped by the general public; hence Boccherini chose not to seek a wider market for them. Lolita Fūrmane (Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music) pursued stylistic issues from a different angle, exploring divergent tendencies in early quartets by Haydn and Boccherini. She suggested that the two composers formulated alternative ways of handling such issues as tempo relations, modal shifts and voice exchange. Michael F. Vincent (University of Florida) concluded the session with a reappraisal of quartets written in Lombardy between 1760 and 1773, a period during which Sammartini, Boccherini and Mozart were all active in the region. Confronting the scholarly tendency to hunt for melodic allusions, Vincent argued that this ‘pocket of repertoire’ represents an opportunity to investigate more thoroughly the referential interplay of generic, gestural and figural conventions.

Friday's proceedings culminated in a trio of papers on listening and performing. Stefan Caris Love (University of Massachusetts Amherst) drew a distinction between ‘first-time’ and ‘experienced’ listeners to quartets by Haydn and Mozart, arguing that the luxuries of the modern analyst – close study of the score and repeated hearings – strip away the sense of surprise and deception that is crucial to experiencing many distinctive passages. Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University) also encouraged us to listen with eighteenth-century ears. Why, she asked, did Pleyel's quartets outsell Mozart's in the 1780s? Perhaps the answer lies in the ‘topical competency’ of the amateur performer: Pleyel's quartets seldom mixed and matched topics; Mozart's, by contrast, often involved a kaleidoscope of topics, presenting considerable technical and conceptual challenges to amateur performers. Certainly the most memorable sound bite of the conference was Lowe's recording of four Vanderbilt students playing a chasse finale from one of Pleyel's quartets impeccably at sight – what better illustration that eighteenth-century performers could sink their teeth into a Pleyel work without having to worry about its being ‘too finely spiced’? Finally, Edward Klorman (The Juilliard School) investigated the emergence of modern quartet rehearsal practices. While quartets were frequently performed at sight until well into the early nineteenth century, writers began advocating more serious rehearsal practices around 1800. An 1804 essay in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, attributed to Giuseppe Maria Cambini (falsely, Klorman suggested), was among the first to argue for the careful study of quartets, not just to achieve a proper performance but also as essential training for aspiring composers.

On Saturday morning, delegates were presented with a choice between sessions on Haydn and on the string quartet in Italy. A surprising number of the Haydn papers tackled structural issues: indeed, a sonata-form subplot soon emerged to rival the conference's main theme. Alexander Ludwig (Boston College) shone a light on Tovey's ‘purple patches’, those harmonic deflections to ♭III or ♭VI that often appear in Schubert and Beethoven, but are no less startling in Haydn's ‘three-part’ expositions. In these expositions, Haydn frequently averts closure by delaying the perfect authentic cadence as long as possible; as Ludwig demonstrated, a significant strategy for such delays is the use of the purple patch. Rainer Kleinertz (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken) followed with a new look at sonata form as described by Francesco Galeazzi in 1796. While Haydn was a possible model for the description, Kleinertz observed, few of his expositions seem to conform to Galeazzi's principles. James S. MacKay (Loyola University) applied Hepokoski's and Darcy's sonata-form typology to Haydn's little-known Op. 17 quartets. What emerged from the exercise, as MacKay noted, was how inadequate the typology appears to be for this repertoire; rather than opt for rigid interpretations, he allowed for multiple readings for each movement he surveyed. Two further scholars addressed analytical issues in Haydn's quartets. Federico Gon (Università di Padova) considered baroque reminiscences and romantic tendencies in Op. 76, while Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan, Canada / Universität Wien) took up learned counterpoint and galant style in Op. 20.

Balázs Mikusi (National Széchényi Library, Budapest) turned our attention back to the sources, allowing us a peek into the treasure trove of Haydn materials housed in Budapest's national library. Mikusi focused on an under-researched and hitherto poorly documented part of the collection, namely Haydn's personal copies of other composers' works. As he noted, seven of the fifteen quartet publications in the collection are works dedicated to Haydn himself. Assessing the extent to which the collection reflects Haydn's personal taste, then, is problematic in so far as many of these scores appear to have been sent as gifts. At the same time, the collection reveals significant details about Haydn's social contacts, especially in his later years. One has the impression that Mikusi's ongoing archival work will yield many new discoveries in the years to come.

In the parallel session on Italy, Elisa Grossato (Università di Verona) discussed composer Giovanni Bottesini (1821–1889) and the Concorso Basevi (an annual competition for the composition of quartets). Alice Sbrilli (Università di Perugia) surveyed the quartets of Francesco Zanetti (1737–1788), and Alessandro Mastropietro (Università di Catania) reassessed the trio for two violins and cello, noting how it rivalled the quartet's popularity in both salon and concert hall settings. Rounding out the session were Mariateresa Dellaborra (Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali Vittadini, Pavia) on ‘Giovanni Battista Viotti e “les quatuors dialogués”’ and Stephanie Klauk (Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma) on ‘Streichquartettpflege in Rom in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’ (Cultivation of the String Quartet in Rome during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century).

Participants then reconvened for a keynote address by Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau). Taking as his starting-point Goethe's bon mot about the string quartet as ‘four rational people conversing’, Speck explored the interaction of instrumental and vocal ideals in the slow movement of the ‘Emperor’ Quartet (Op. 76 No. 3). He highlighted the ways in which the theme migrates from the vocal register of its opening statement toward a climax that lies beyond the compass of the human voice (Variation 4). The movement not only ‘expresses the integration of vocal music into the genre of instrumental music’, but also illustrates the transformation of the ‘Emperor's Hymn’ from public anthem into private chamber music.

The day wrapped up with a short session on the string quartet in Vienna. Julia Gołębiowska (Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music / Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań) examined Silesian-born composer Józef Elsner's two sets of published quartets, Op. 1 (1781) and Op. 8 (1806), both of which are interesting not least because of their incorporation of mazurkas and polonaises into works that seem otherwise Viennese in style. Elsner's progressive use of third relations and reverse recapitulations also resonated with the next paper, in which Anne M. Hyland (Royal Holloway, University of London) offered a throughgoing analysis of Schubert's Quartettsatz. She suggested that the ‘symphonic’ design of the piece's themes and harmonic juxtapositions gesture beyond the modest confines of the Schubertiade and toward the public realm in which it would eventually gain popularity.

Sunday morning involved competing sessions on the string quartet in France and on production and reception in European countries. (My thanks go to Balázs Mikusi for kindly reporting on Sunday's proceedings.) In the latter session, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald (Cheltenham) offered an analytical survey of the little-known corpus of string quartets by English composer Samuel Wesley. Warwick Lister (Florence) investigated the career of Polish violinist and composer Feliks Yaniewicz (1762–1848), highlighting his role as an early promoter of professional quartet performances in Britain. Michaela Freemanová (Etnologický ústav Akademie věd České republiky) considered Bohemian music culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing ample evidence of the popularity of string quartets in both aristocratic and monasterial circles. The session concluded with an Iberian turn, comprising Christiane Heine (Universidad de Granada) on quartet composition in Spain from Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga (1806–1826) to around 1870 and Beatriz Hernández Polo (Universidad de Salamanca) on ‘Schumann from “Modern” to “Classic”: Presence and Reception of the String Quartets of European Romantic Composers in Madrid through the Activity of the “Cuarteto Francés”’.

The parallel session on France opened with an account by Florence Doé de Maindreville (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne) of the birth and development of a quartet society in nineteenth-century Reims. Next, Louise Bernard de Raymond (Université Paris-Sorbonne) detailed the ways in which Reicha's quartets exemplify the genre's ‘symphonization’. Muriel Boulan (Université Paris-Sorbonne) then focused on the publicly performed quartets of Alsatian composer Henri Reber (1807–1880). After the break, Fabio Morabito (King's College London) examined violinist Pierre Baillot's marked-up parts for quartets by Cherubini and Beethoven. Baillot's part for Beethoven's Op. 127 included fingerings, bowings and other markings directly imported from the Galitzins’ environment; the violinist retained some of these choices and discarded others, creating a fascinating palimpsest. Finally, Livia Laifrova (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) shed light on the popularity of Bohemian composers in Paris, showcasing the diverse editions of quartets by Kozeluch, Wranitzky, Krommer, Gyrowetz and Reicha published in the French capital between 1790 and 1830.

That the string quartet, long upheld as the pinnacle of absolute music, should have elicited such a broad sweep of topics and approaches is telling. More than anything else, the programme underscored the degree to which the pendulum has swung in the direction of the listener, both in terms of culturally oriented interpretations of the musical score and in terms of mapping the physical and social realities of music-making. Whether or not the pendulum will return, perhaps inaugurating a renewed focus on the musical text as ‘authoritative’ utterance, is anybody's guess; in the meantime, new insights abound.