Description
Instrumentation: string quartet
Edition: score and parts
Duration: (11’24)
Difficulty: medium
Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen is a rare example in the 18th century of a woman who earned a livelihood as an independent professional musician. She grew up in the Ospedale di San Lazaro Mendicantii, a place of musical instruction for girls in Venice and was also a pupil of G. Tartini. She was highly regarded as a composer and her works with which she contributed to the change from the Baroque to the early Classical style were widely published and often retained in the repetory. The six string quartets are most innovative because, having no precedent, they „had to invent themselves on their own“.
L. Sirmen’s quartets were published in Paris in 1769. It is a signifi cant coincidence that Haydn’s Quartets op. 9 were brought out by the very same publisher in the same year. It was the early quartets by Haydn, Boccherini’s string quartets and the compositions by Lombardini Sirmen that first gave clear shape to the genre of the string quartet which was to become so important in the future.
