The First Professional String Quartet?: ReExamining an Account Attributed to Giuseppe Maria Cambini

This study examines an 1804 essay about string-quartet performance published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , and attributed to the Italian-born and Paris-domiciled composer/violinist Giuseppe Maria Cambini. The essay is frequently cited as evidence of the first professional string quartet, since it includes a detailed account of the rehearsal methods of an ensemble purported to have formed in Tuscany over a six-month period in the mid-1760s, and comprising Boccherini, Nardini, Manfredi, and Cambini as its members. A closer examination of the evidence reveals that this so-called Tuscan Quartet is unlikely to have existed. The essay appears to be a highly embellished translation of a passing remark from Cambini’s earlier Nouvelle méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (ca. 1795), possibly made at the instigation (and with the editorial intervention of) AmZ editor Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. Although the essay is probably an unreliable source for quartet practices ca. 1765, it offers compelling testimony to an emerging quartet ideology (especially in German-speaking lands) around the time of its publication in the early nineteenth century. It may be among the earliest articulations of several influential ideas about quartets, including (1) the string quartet as an ensemble with stable personnel, (2) string-quartet repertoire as serious concert music demanding detailed rehearsal in advance of a performance for an audience, (3) unity of expression—four players sounding as one—as a goal of such rehearsal, and (4) extensive study and performance of quartets as foundational artistic training for all developing string players.