Chapter 3 - ‘Per la Viola da Gamba’: Immigrants in Early Eighteenth-Century London

Summary

ENGLISH musical culture changed decisively with the establishment of an Italian opera company in London. The process began in 1705 with the opening of the Queen’s (later King’s) Theatre in the Haymarket, built by John Vanbrugh for the production of operas. In the event, the first Italian-style opera was Thomas Clayton’s Arsinoe, put on by Vanbrugh’s rival Christopher Rich at Drury Lane on 16 January 1705. The first Italian opera was Jakob Greber’s Gli amori d’Ergasto, which opened the Queen’s Theatre on 9 April. Over the next two years the two theatres underwent a bewildering series of changes of management and artistic policy, which was only resolved at the end of 1707 when the Lord Chamberlain decreed that the Queen’s Theatre should put on operas and Drury Lane plays. The opera company failed at the end of the 1717 season and was replaced in 1720 by the Royal Academy of Music. The Haymarket Theatre (and its successor built on the same site after the 1789 fire) remained the home of Italian opera in London until 1867.

The Queen’s Theatre orchestra in its first phase was twenty-five to thirty strong, a mixture of native Englishmen and immigrants from Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere. The bass section seems to have consisted of one or two double basses, three bassoons and three to ­ve instruments variously described as ‘Violoncelli’, ‘Bass Viols’, or just ‘Bases’. The musicians concerned are unlikely to have played the violoncello on some occasions and the gamba on others, and it is also unlikely that they would have used gambas instead of violoncellos in the bass section of an Italian opera orchestra. It is clear that the players concerned, including Nicola Haym, James Paisible, François Goodsens, and Giovanni Schiavonetti or Zanetti, were cellists or bass violin players first and foremost, and that these are more examples of ‘bass viol’ used to mean violin-family instruments. Nevertheless, it is possible that several of them did play the gamba outside the orchestra, and this may also be true of some Italian cellists who subsequently joined it, such as Filippo Amadei and Giovanni Bononcini.