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“If God wanted to speak to man through music, he would do so through Haydn’s works; if, however, He wished to listen to music himself, He would choose the works of Boccherini.” So wrote the French violinist and composer Jean Baptiste Cartier in his 1798 anthology L’art du violon. Starting in 1818, the Parisian firm Janet et Cotelle began to issue a monumental collection of 93 Boccherini quintets for two violins, viola, and two celli. Later, Boccherini’s name surged into prominence when, beginning in Paris about 1874, a certain minuet—heard in the sample below—began to enjoy unprecedented popularity, evidenced in the myriad guises in which it was published, which ranged from simple piano transcriptions to arrangements for two mandolins, for accordion, for a cappella choir (with Latin text), and even for saxophone. 

—from Kenneth Slowik’s liner notes