Review of the imaginary Great Universal History of the String Quartet

This important, imposing, powerful and ponderous work (more than two thousand pages divided into six tomes of encyclopedic format, published by Qp Editore) represents perhaps the highest peak of musicological research of the great Algesio Erbi. It is impossible to list here the merits with completeness of detail, the particular, incisive operations of research and rediscovery transfused therein. We limit ourselves to pointing out only a few of the many merits of the work. Starting from the origins of the string quartet as a form of entertainment, explored down to the smallest details, the author rightly (and how could it be otherwise?) finds its roots in Haydn, with particular emphasis on the too often neglected Op. 9, so pervaded with tensions in pure Empfindsamer Stil, not forgetting the contemporary production of Boccherini, too often left in the shadows or the object of only generic praise and lacking in detailed analysis. On the subject of national schools, it is worth remembering the ample space reserved by the Author to Sostakovic, often belittled for the presumed political influences on his work: the Author is not forgetful of the tradition also of Prokofiev and above all of Janacek, the only one of the three - according to him - who in his quartets never reproduced, in their integral banality, popular dances taken by weight from folk music and also the only one who, while expressing an expressionistic poetics of the finest water, suggested an alternative to Schoenbergian atonality and dodecaphony. He notes, of Dvorak, the unusual length of Quartet No. 3. He blames the romantic Schubert for the excessive dynamic jumps between piano and forte and Bartok for the wild rhythm. He relegates the quartetist Martinu among the manifestations of regional eclecticism, like the New Zealander-Australian Alfred Hill, with in addition, for the latter, the honor of positive judgment in terms of exoticism. He welcomes the fact that even a great melodic genius like Tchaikovsky cannot escape the complexity of the quartet genre and its experimental research character. Important (but, apparently, the subject of discussions with the editor) is his attempt to re-evaluate as quartet composers some great Italian opera composers, such as Cherubini and Donizetti. However, we can judge as unsuccessful the author's attempt to evaluate as superior the instrumental production of such composers, with respect to their operatic production (the Belcantistic Arbitration Commission censored the chapter that the author had dedicated to this bizarre thesis).