Elisabeth Le Guin has written that “structural coherence and teleology are not among the strongest features” of Boccherini’s music. In claiming this, she was not so much making an absolute judgment as attempting to show that the standard terms of engagement for “mainstream” Austro-German composers of this time were not applicable to Boccherini. Other recent scholars have put the case in more positive terms, whether through the use of metaphors such as “montage” or “mosaic” or by drawing on concepts such as modularity.

However, while aiming to clear some discursive space for the composer, such efforts arguably collude with the exoticizing strain that has long formed part of Boccherini reception, which relies on notions pertaining to his Spanish working environment and a more general “Mediterraneanism”. I suggest, though, that the differences between Boccherini and his now-more canonical contemporaries have been greatly exaggerated. His famously hyper-repetitive “looping” phrase structures, for example, can be understood as part of a more widespread interest in musical mechanics. The basic creative problem was how to wrest continuity out of the more fragmented, pluralistic musical manner that succeeded the baroque style. For William Jones in 1784, Boccherini was often “desultory and unaccountable in [his] way of treating a Subject”, but Jones named Haydn as another guilty party, suggesting that for a contemporary critic Boccherini was not exceptional in this regard. Through a series of case studies, I investigate the various means whereby Boccherini creates – or indeed disrupts – musical continuity, whether for player or for listener.

Despite his prodigious instrumental output – including hundreds of movements in sonata form –Luigi Boccherini occupies only a marginal place in both older and newer Formenlehre traditions. Yet he was strikingly innovative in his treatment of form, manipulating formal conventions with a flexibility unmatched among his contemporaries. This paper focuses on one domain in which Boccherini rethinks sonata form with particular ingenuity: the placement and function of repeat signs. Though seemingly trivial, these decisions illuminate central tensions surrounding sonata form at the end of the eighteenth century. Was it fundamentally a two- or three-part structure? And were its governing principles harmonic or thematic?

The paper examines eighteen quartets and quintets, fifteen composed between 1790 and 1799. In these works, Boccherini undertakes systematic experimentation with repeat layouts. All feature three sections rather than the customary two, with the first two repeated. In most cases, the second repeat sign appears not at the close of the recapitulation but immediately before it: the development is thus repeated, while the recapitulation is not. This practice suggests that Boccherini conceived the development as an independent formal unit, rather than—as Heinrich Christoph Koch described it—a subsection of sonata form’s second half.

Several works complicate this strategy further, recapitulating the first theme in the second section, and the secondary theme in the third section. The second repeat thus interrupts the recapitulation in the middle. In two of these cases, the thematic return occurs offtonic, providing further evidence that Boccherini’s recapitulation is defined tonally rather than thematically. Taken together, these movements reveal not isolated curiosities but a coherent experimental field, pursued intensively over a brief period.

By foregrounding repeat signs as active formal agents rather than notational residue, this paper argues that Boccherini’s formal imagination operates at the fault lines of sonata theory. His works reconceptualize sectional articulation, tonal return, and large-scale balance, contributing both to a renewed understanding of Boccherini as a formal innovator and to a broader reassessment of late-eighteenth-century sonata form as a flexible field rather than a settled norm.

Scholars frequently mention Boccherini’s lack of interest in (or aptitude for) structural coherence and goal orientation (Le Guin 2002, Speck and Sadie 2001). These arguments conceptualize large-scale structure as the result of tonal processes and motivic development, following long-standing analytical traditions. I turn instead to Boccherini’s dynamic treatment of style and character to locate mechanisms of coherence and finality, distinct from, but no less important than tonal ones. While the relationship between topics and form has been fraught, with claims that topics display “fragile” relations to form (Caplin 2005), my analyses reveal connections between the expressive and formal domains tighter than previously acknowledged. A systematic study of topic development through troping (Hatten 2014) and topical modulation (Allanbrook 1992) elucidates an underlying logic of style change that can shape expectations about topical sequences and communicate a sense of musical beginning, middle, and end. Specifically, I argue that in certain sonata expositions the primary theme presents stylistic problems that need to be solved, triggering a process of correction that involves progressive changes of “figurae” (Rumph 2014).

My case studies integrate topic theory with metric theory, schema theory and Formenlehre to tell the tale of two gavottes. The first represents a point of expressive culmination; the second launches a process of stylistic departure and return. The String Quintet G298 opens with a metrically puzzling anacrusis in Lombard rhythms followed by a displaced Fenaroli schema Boccherini progressively solves these musical “flaws.” With a gavotte emerging as the goal of gradual growth in lyricism and metric stability. In the String Quartet G243, the gavotte topic appears at the beginning instead. This unsophisticated theme performs harmonic incompetence, modulating clumsily and prematurely, thus presenting another problematic opening that motivates intervention. A progressive shift from half-bar pickup to quarter-bar pickup to downbeat, alongside escalating dotted rhythms, creates topical modulation: gavotte-bourrée-march.

Boccherini receives much praise for his wide palette of character but little credit for large-scale planning. This paper showcases his ability to strategically draw on the former to achieve the later. More broadly, it explores the potential of topics not only to complement, but to generate formal structure.