To date, six volumes of the Italian National Edition of the Complete Works of Luigi Boccherini, directed by Christian Speck, have been produced: three volumes of chamber music, two of vocal music and one containing an opera.

The chamber-music volumes, edited by Rudolf Rasch, relate to the early life of the composer. As Rasch states, while the Six Duets for Two Violins Op. 3, g56–61 (published in 2007), and the Six Trios for Two Violins and Cello Op. 1, g77–82 (published in 2013), can be considered part of a series of exercises in composing for two to four stringed instruments, they remain complete, even mature, compositions (Introduction to edition of Op. 1, xiii). The Six Sonatas for Keyboard and Violin Op. 5, g25–30 (published in 2009), written during Boccherini's stay in Paris in 1786, are atypical of the composer's musical output generally. However, as is the case for the Op. 1 set, they were amongst Boccherini's most widely disseminated single compositions, having been reprinted and copied more frequently than any of his other works.

With regard to vocal music, Concert Arias G 544–559, edited by Christian Speck, emerged in 2005 as the first volume of the complete edition. This consists of fifteen concert arias in total, twelve of which were written between 1786 and 1797, each using the title ‘Aria accademica’. Also published in the same volume was a ‘Duetto accademico’ dating from September 1792, which assisted in establishing the composition dates of the concert arias.

The first critical edition of Clementina, the only zarzuela composed by Boccherini, and one of the small number of works by him written for the theatre, was published in 2013, edited by Miguel Ángel Marín. Composed in 1786 on a libretto by Ramón de la Cruz (1731–1794), both music and text were commissioned by the Countess-Duchess of Benavente María Faustina Téllez Girón y Pérez de Guzmán (1724–1797), issuing from the close relationship that both composer and playwright enjoyed with the houses of Osuna and Benavente.

In 2016 a very important volume was issued, the product of a number of years of research: it contains the first critical edition of the versions for one (1781) and three voices (1801) of the Stabat Mater, edited by Luca Lévi Sala. One of the most familiar of Boccherini's works, even amongst non-specialists, the Stabat Mater can be considered the most representative work of the notoriously small sacred output of the composer. The edition is ground-breaking on many fronts. Via study of the handwriting, it provides evidence that the most important sources – the manuscript in Washington, the only source relating to the first version of 1781, and the manuscript of the second Spanish version, Op. 61, preserved in Lucca and dating back to 1801 – are not autographs. Consequently, these and other sources can now be dated almost definitively. Finally, three new manuscript sources (preserved in Washington, Paris and Rome, mentioned neither in RISM nor in the related literature) have been found, together with new specimens of the Amiconi edition published in Naples, the first French edition by Sieber, and of those of Guidi and Breitkopf. The 1781 edition, printed in a performing version in 2015, has provided the basis for a recent recording by the Ensemble Symposium with soprano Francesca Boncompagni, under the auspices of the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini in Lucca (Brilliant Classics 95356).

To date, the opera omnia has published more than seventy volumes of performing editions, consisting of chamber-music scores, reductions for voice and piano and sets of parts. In two cases these publications include chamber works to be issued in a critical edition in 2017: the Six Sextets for Strings Op. 23, g454–459, edited by Fabrizio Ammetto, and the Eight Quintets for Guitar, Two Violins, Viola and Violoncello g445–450, 451, 453 and Twelve Variations on ‘La Ritirata di Madrid’ in C major (g deest), edited by Fulvia Morabito and Andrea Schiavina.

Also to be mentioned is a work discovered by Fulvia Morabito, the Divertimento in E flat major for Two Violins, Two Violas and Violoncello, g406. This was published in 2012, and will be included as Volume XXV.4 of the critical edition (Seven Quintets for Two Violins, Two Violas and Violoncello, g385–390 and 406; in preparation). Mentioned by Louis Picquot but considered lost by Yves Gérard, this is the thirteenth item of a miscellaneous codex containing seventeen quintets by the composer preserved at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. This codex has also provided a primary source for the critical edition of the quintets for guitar cited above. Although they have come down to us through three non-autograph manuscripts and three unauthorized printed editions from the early twentieth century, it has been possible to establish their authorship and dating, and to discover new evidence about their musical sources.

For further information go to <www.luigiboccherini.com>.