Chapter 5 - ‘A Solo on the Viola da Gamba’: Charles Frederick Abel as a Performer

Summary

WHEN Carl Friedrich (Charles Frederick) Abel made his debut at the Great Room in Dean Street, Soho on 5 April 1759 he was apparently the first gamba player to appear in public in London for more than twenty­five years – since Jean-François Sainte-Hélène played at Hickford’s Room in nearby Panton Street on 10 May 1732 (Ch. 3). Abel belonged to a dynasty of gamba players. His grandfather, the organist and viol player Clamor Heinrich (1634–96), worked at Celle, Hanover, and Bremen, and published several collections of instrumental music, including Dritter Theil musicalischer Blumen (Frankfurt am Main, 1677), consisting of suites for violin, scordatura bass viol and continuo; his sonata ‘sopra CucCuc’ for violin, bass viol and continuo is in several English sources. His father, Christian Ferdinand (1682–1761), worked at the Cöthen court as a violinist and gamba player from 1714 to 1737, and was probably the person for whom J. S. Bach wrote gamba parts in the sixth Brandenburg concerto and the Cöthen revision of ‘Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut’, BWV199.

Early Life

CARL Friedrich Abel was born in Cöthen on 22 December 1723, the fourth child of Carl Ferdinand. Presumably his father taught him initially, and he seems to have studied with J. S. Bach in Leipzig, though there is no documentary evidence of his presence at the Thomasschule. According to Charles Burney he was ‘a disciple of Sebastian Bach’, while Ernst Ludwig Gerber thought that he was ‘probably the pupil of the great Sebastian Bach’ (‘wahrscheinlich den Unterricht des großen Sebast. Bach’). In Leipzig Abel would have come into contact with Bach’s youngest son, Johann Christian, his future business partner in London, and the lutenist and harpsichordist Rudolf Straube, a Bach pupil from 1733 to 1747 who also settled in London (Ch. 7). J. S. Bach’s three sonatas for gamba and harpsichord are now dated 1736–41, and therefore could have been written for Abel, and Abel may have played one of the gamba parts in the late version of the St Matthew Passion, probably performed in 1742.

Abel was still in Leipzig on 13 October 1743 when he played in a concert put on by the newly founded Grosses Concert:

All [the other] soloists received applause, but especially Monsieur Abel, playing the viola da gamba.