String Quartet in C

Joseph de Boulogne, le Chevalier de St.-George, must surely be one of the most colorful and underestimated figures in music history. Naturally gifted—to say the least—and thoroughly at home in the European galant idiom, Boulogne has been compared to Mozart. A closer parallel would be Alexander Hamilton. Born in 1748 in the French Caribbean to a white landowning father and an African slave mother, Boulogne sailed for Paris at age 11 to complete his schooling. By all accounts his abilities in swordplay, horsemanship, and all manner of sports had already emerged. This gifted musician earned first acclaim as a genuine Musketeer and was soon without equal among European fencers. At the same time, he began formal violin studies with the famed Jean-Marie Leclair. By his twentieth year Boulogne had achieved preeminence in a Parisian orchestra, which afforded him opportunity to perform his own compositions in public. Around the time Mozart was writing his first set of quartets, Boulogne published his own opus 1: six string quartets (1773), among the first composed by a Frenchman. His grasp of the vernacular style may not always reach great heights of expressive intensity, but Boulogne’s melodic sense and rhythmic vitality are beyond reproach.

(c) Jason Stell