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Continuity and Change in English Bass Viol Music:
The Case of Fitzwilliam MU. MS 647
PETER HOLMAN
When did the viola gamba pass out of use? It is clear that the instrument was
cultivated in France until at least the 1740s – as the music written for it by
Forqueray, Caix d’Hervelois, Rameau and Louis-Gabriel Guillemain shows 1 – and
in Germany and Austria until at least the end of the eighteenth century: Franz
Xaver Hammer (1741-1817) and Joseph Fiala (1748-1816) are two examples of
German-speaking gamba players and composers who lived into the nineteenth
century. 2 It used to be thought that the viol dropped out of use in Italy early in the
seventeenth century, but recent research has shown that a number of Italian
eighteenth-century violin makers made gambas, including Giuseppe Guarneri,
father of ‘del Gesù’, Giovanni Grancino, Francesco and Vincenzo Rugeri,
Gennaro and Giuseppe Gagliano, Matteo Gofriller and Antonio Stradivari. 3 Also,
there were gamba players in several northern Italian cities in the early eighteenth
century, including Venice: Michael Talbot and Vittorio Ghielmi have argued that
the viola all’inglese and the violoncello all’inglese, taught, played and written for by
Vivaldi, were ordinary members of the viol family. 4
The situation is rather more complex in England. England was the centre of
viol playing in the seventeenth century, but it seems that composing for, and
performing on, complete consorts of viols came to an end there in the 1670s.
Roger North, who knew Henry Purcell well, stated that Matthew Locke’s Consort
of Four Parts, probably written in the 1660s, was ‘worthy to bring up the ’rere,
after which wee are to expect no more of that style’. 5 This suggests that Purcell’s
1 For overviews of the French eighteenth-century repertory, see H. Bol, La basse de viole du temps
de Marin Marais et d’Antoine Forqueray (Bilthoven, 1973); J.A. Sadie, The Bass Viol in French Baroque
Chamber Music (Ann Arbor, 1980).
2 For the German eighteenth-century repertory, see F. Flassig, Die soloistische Gambenmusik in
Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1998); M. O’Loghlin, ‘The Viola da Gamba Music of the
Berlin School, 1732-1772’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Queensland, 2002); D.J. Rhodes, ‘The Viola
da Gamba, its Repertory and Practitioners in the late Eighteenth Century’, Chelys, 31 (2003), 36-63.
3 For Italian gamba makers, see esp. C. Chiesa, ‘The Viola da Gamba in Cremona’, The Italian
Viola da Gamba: Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Italian Viola da Gamba, Magnano, Italy,
29 April-1 May 2000, ed. S. Orlando (Solignac, 2002), 87-96; T.G. MacCracken, ‘Italian Instruments
in a List of Extant Viols Made before 1900’, The Italian Viola da Gamba, ed. Orlando, 127-144; M.
Herzog, ‘Stradivari’s Viols’, The Galpin Society Journal, 57 (2004), 183-194.
4 V. Ghielmi, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Italian Treatise and other Clues to the History of the
Viola da Gamba in Italy’, The Italian Viola da Gamba, ed. Orlando, 73-86; M. Talbot, ‘Vivaldi and
the English Viol’, Early Music, 30 (2002), 381-394. For an alternative argument, that the violoncello
inglese was related to the viola d’amore and had sympathetic strings, see B. Hoffmann, ‘Il violoncello
all’inglese’, Studi Vivaldiani, 4 (2004), 43-51.
5 Roger North on Music, ed. J. Wilson (London, 1959), 301; see also ibid., 349. The Consort of
Four Parts is edited in M. Locke, Chamber Music: II, ed. M. Tilmouth, Musica Britannica, 32
(London, 1972), 57-97.
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