Los cuartetos de cuerda de Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798) en el contexto europeoun análisis de la técnica compositiva

Abstract

Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798) worked for the Spanish court from his entry into the Royal Chapel in 1767 until his death. Violin master and court composer to the prince and future King Charles IV of Spain (1748-1819) from 1770, Brunetti became the leading musical figure at court as Director of Music of the Royal Chamber. Among his attributions, the Italian musician had to ensure the constant acquisition of the latest European musical novelties, which he complemented with compositions from his pen. This privileged situation allowed him direct and continuous contact with the works of the most prestigious composers of his time. Brunetti's compositional activity was intense in a genre, the string quartet, considered the medium par excellence for displaying satisfactory compositional technique. The fifty preserved quartets, together with ten hypothetical lost or unfinished works, generate a corpus that is only matched in Spain by the ninety quartets of Luigi Boccherini. Its gestation, which took place between 1774 and 1793, is closely linked to the emergence and consolidation of the genre in Madrid (and in Europe) in the last third of the 18th century. This paper attemps to represent the first analytical study of Brunetti's fifty preserved string quartets. Based on a multitude of examples and the study of a relevant contemporary corpus of quartets, centred on the works of the genre's main figures, Joseph Haydn and Luigi Boccherini, the structural, thematic, formal and textural study of Brunetti's quartets suggests the premise of the musician's contact with the most accomplished composers of his time. The analyses reflect the quartet quality of a repertoire which draws mainly from the traditions of Haydn and Boccherini, but also from other composers such as Johann Baptist Vanhal, François Joseph Gossec, Jean-Baptiste Bréval, Jean-Baptiste Davaux, Ignace Pleyel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Manuel Canales, whose music circulated in Madrid at the end of the 18th century. However, the Italian composer, claims a space of his own that aspires to the highest compositional heights. The approach used by Brunetti to handle the most common formal structures in European Classicism, the perfect and controlled structuring of the thematic materials, the rich palette of textures, as well as the continuous search for ad hoc solutions, place us before a repertoire that claims an idiosyncratic place among the composers who contributed to the emergence and consolidation of the genre in Spain and Europe