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Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini (February 19, 1743 – May 28, 1805) was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and "galante" style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 (G 275), and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.
Boccherini also composed several guitar quintets, including the "Fandango", which was influenced by Spanish music. His biographer Elisabeth Le Guin noted among Boccherini's musical qualities "an astonishing repetitiveness, an affection for extended passages with fascinating textures but virtually no melodic line, an obsession with soft dynamics, a unique ear for sonority, and an unusually rich palette of introverted and mournful affects." Many of his other biographers and admirers see his music quite differently and in a much more appreciated light.
Boccherini was born into a musical family in Lucca, Italy in 1743. He was the third child of Leopoldo Boccherini, a cellist and double-bass player, and the brother of Giovanni Gastone Boccherini, a poet and dancer who wrote librettos for Antonio Salieri and Joseph Haydn. Luigi received his first music lessons at age five by his father, who taught him cello, and then continued his studies at age nine with Abbé Vanucci, music director of a local cathedral, at San Martino. When his son reached thirteen, Leopoldo Boccherini sent him to study in Rome with Giovanni Battista Costanzi. In 1757 Luigi Boccherini and his father both went to Vienna, where the court employed them as musicians in the Burgtheater. In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid, entering in 1770 the employ of Infante Luis Antonio of Spain (1727–1785), younger brother of King Charles III of Spain. There, Boccherini flourished under royal patronage, until one day when the King expressed his disapproval at a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. The composer, no doubt irritated with this intrusion into his art, doubled the passage instead, which led to his immediate dismissal. Then he accompanied Don Luis (the Infante) to Arenas de San Pedro, a little town in the Gredos Mountains in Ávila; there and in the nearest town of Candeleda Boccherini wrote many of his most famous works.
Later patrons included the French ambassador to Spain, Lucien Bonaparte (1775–1840), as well as King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia (1744–1797), himself an amateur cellist, flautist, and avid supporter of the arts. Boccherini fell on hard times following the deaths of his Spanish patron (1785), his two wives (1785 and 1805), and his four daughters (1796, 1802 and 1804). He died in Madrid in 1805, survived by two sons. His bloodline continues to this day in Spain. His body lay buried in the Pontifical Basilica of St. Michael in Madrid until 1927, when Benito Mussolini had his remains repatriated and buried in the church of San Francesco in his native Lucca.