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  • Die Viola da gamba am Wiener Kaiserhof: Untersuchungen zur Instrumenten- und Werkgeschichte der Wiener Hofmusikkapelle im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert
  • Samantha Owens
Die Viola da gamba am Wiener Kaiserhof: Untersuchungen zur Instrumenten- und Werkgeschichte der Wiener Hofmusikkapelle im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. By Marc Strümper. pp. 420. Publikationen des Instituts für Österreichische Musikdokumentation, 28. (Schneider, Tutzing, 2004, €75. ISBN 3-7952-1141-7.)

'The whole imperial family is musical; the Emperor just enough for a sovereign prince, that is, with sufficient hand, both on the violoncello and harpsichord, to amuse himself; and sufficient taste and judgement to hear and receive delight from others.' Long before 1775, when Charles Burney published this somewhat tentative evaluation of Joseph II's musical abilities, the Habsburgs had sustained a reputation for being gifted in this particular sphere. This is certainly true of Emperors Leopold I (r. 1658–1705) and Charles VI (r. 1711–40), the two monarchs whose reigns delineate Marc Strümper's study on the role of the viola da gamba at the imperial court.

As Strümper rightly points out in his introduction, while much research has been undertaken on the role of the viol in the seventeenth century—in English consort music, French solo repertory, and German chamber music in particular—its use in Austria has been largely overlooked. His central premiss is that the viol enjoyed a long and late flowering at the imperial court despite the dominance of Italian musicians, due, at least in part, to the personal tastes of Leopold and Charles.

A number of European instrument collections (above all, those of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the José Váquez collection in Vienna) bear witness to the fact that Austrian and Italian luthiers continued to manufacture viols until well into the eighteenth century. Strümper questions the nature of the repertory written for these instruments, through an examination of scores held by the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Archiv der Musikfreunde in Vienna, the Knihovna Arcibiskupského Zámku (Kromfríž , Czech Republic), as well as a handful of other religious institutions spread throughout the former Habsburg territories.

In an initial chapter that focuses on music at various Austrian courts (among them Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and Graz), Strümper outlines the importance of music to the Habsburgs as a crucial component of their representational court culture. Somewhat surprisingly, no reference is made to Norbert Elias's and Volker Bauer's seminal works on the German court system, nor to the particular importance of the imperial court within this hierarchy as argued by most recently by Jeroen Duindam (who challenged the widely held idea that German princes looked primarily to Versailles for inspiration on matters of court ceremonial).

A discussion of the historical development of court music is followed by sections on the duties of the court music establishment and the composition of its various parts, the social position of court musicians, and a general look at repertory and instruments (the latter largely seen though inventories). Finally, gambists employed at a number of Austrian courts are identified, including William Young, Johann Franz Rainer, and Gottfried Finger at Innsbruck and Albert Anton Urspringer at Salzburg. Unfortunately, a table presenting details of viol players in Vienna from 1635 to 1737 is set in type so small as to be barely legible, and no legend is provided to explain the difference between normal and bold type, or dotted and bold lines (p. 54).

By far the majority of the information in this introductory chapter is taken from secondary sources, which makes one wonder whether a return to, and re-evaluation of, the original source material would have brought forth fresh insights. A series of tables detailing the singers and instrumentalists employed in the imperial Hofkapelle between 1705 and 1721 (pp. 28–31, drawn largely from studies by Hermine Weigel Williams and Eleanor Selfridge-Field) is reproduced with no mention of the possibility that musicians may have routinely performed on more than one instrument, as was common at other courts around this time. This custom is acknowledged only for the Salzburg court, in the light of Leopold Mozart's admission that all the trumpeters and kettledrum players could also be used...

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