download.pdf - 1.2Mb - Viola da Gamba Society

two sonatas and the quartet dating from any later (by 1783). 86 In comparison,
all of the other composers under discussion here wrote for the instrument
during its years of decline on a far more limited scale in terms of quantity—
but certainly not of quality—of output, with only Lidl and Hammer even
getting into double figures (ignoring Truska's and Pfchl's substantial amounts
of lost gamba music). These composers nevertheless produced between them
a collection of idiomatic music for the viola da gamba that has been
overlooked—or simply ignored-for far too long, especially by practitioners of
the instrument, one that took the bass viol into the realm of the mature
classical era and a musical style that has hitherto been regarded as
anachronistic by gamba players used to 'switching off' after the music of
Abel. 87 It must not be forgotten, either, that
it is no longer merely the 'great works' towering above the rest of
music's copious output that belong to history in the strict sense of the
word. This status also accrues to the vast amounts of 'trivial music' that
in fact go to make up the bulk of day-to-day musical reality, and should
not therefore be summarily dismissed as the rubble that remains after
the edifice of history has been erected. 88
Of course the viola da gamba did not have the dynamic capability to cope
with the expanded orchestra of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, and in consequence could not be used as either a concerto soloist
or an orchestral instrument. By careful genre selection, however, it did prove
possible to compose chamber music for the gamba in a variety of updated
instrumental combinations using current musical styles and formal
procedures, rather than continuing [54] to 'mothball' it in stylistic imitation of
past glories of the repertoire such as the works of C. F. Abel. The composers
involved were also able to continue to write idiomatically for it, even reviving
older virtuoso techniques in the soloistic figurations they employed. Anew, if
admittedly comparatively limited, 'golden age' of music for the viola da
gamba was the result, albeit with a strongly Germanic emphasis shared with
much other music of the classical era, and it is now surely high time for the
practical revival of this late-eighteenth-century repertory.
*
86 W. Knape, M. Charters and S. McVeigh, 'Abel, Carl Friedrich', Grove, I, 17, updating
Knape, Bibliographisch-the4Batisches Verzeichnis. The 42 known gamba sonatas have recently been
supplemented by an additional unaccompanied three-movement one in C major that has been
rediscovered by Dr Peter Holman. The current dating of post-1783 assigned to this quartet and
at least one of the two sonatas (if correctly identified) is now challenged by its being listed in
Cramer's 1783 edition (see note 67 above).
87 Despite the publication of the sonatas by Lidl as long ago as 1996, for example, there
appears to be a commercial recording of only one of these works: 'Musica de estilo galante'
(ARSIS 4176), with Pere Ros (viola da gamba) and Jusep Borras (bassoon), includes one sonata
each by Hammer and Lidl. No recording exists of his trios, not to mention the substantial
quantity of gamba music by various composers that involves the horn. It is to be hoped that
the recording of the complete Hammer sonatas (see note 36 above), favourably reviewed by
Alison Crum in VdGS Newsletter 113 (April 2001), 17-18, reflects a growing recognition of the
classical viol repertory.
88 C. Dahlhaus, trans. J. Robinson, Foundations of Music History (Cambridge, 1983), 8. I am
grateful to Dr Barra Boydell for bringing this apt quotation to my attention.