A Viola da Gamba Miscellanea (review)

There has recently been a revival of interest in late viola da gamba music. For instance, dissertations by Fred Flassig, published as Die solistische Gambenmusik in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1998); Michael O'Loghlin, 'The Viola da Gamba Music of the Berlin School, 1732–1772' (University of Queensland, 2002); and Marc Strümper, published as Die Viola da Gamba am Wiener Kaiserhof (Tutzing, 2004), have revolutionized our knowledge of its repertory in German-speaking areas of Europe during the eighteenth century, when the gamba had ceased to be a consort instrument and was mainly used to play solos rather than bass lines.

Much of the revival has been led by virtuoso players on the lookout for new music, such as Vittorio Ghielmi and Christophe Coin. Coin, the director of L'Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, has also organized a number of conferences on the viol and related instruments, two of which have resulted in published volumes of proceedings. 'Amour et Sympathie': Actes des recontres internationals autour des instruments à cordes sympathiques, Limoges 28, 29 novembre 1992 (Limoges, 1995) is a useful survey of instruments with sympathetic strings such as the baryton, the viola d'amore, and the Hardanger fiddle, in European art music and beyond. The Italian Viola da Gamba: Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Italian Viola da Gamba, Magnano, Italy, 29 April–1 May 2000, edited by Susan Orlando (Solignac and Turin, 2002) contains several contributions that help to dispel the mistaken impression that the gamba fell out of use in Italy in the early seventeenth century, notably Ghielmi's important paper 'An Eighteenth-Century Italian Treatise and Other Clues to the History of the Viola da Gamba in Italy' (pp. 73–85).

The present volume, another product of the Limoges team, is also largely concerned with the viol's later solo repertory, with one notable exception: David Pinto's 'The Madrigal-Fantasia: Italian Influences in Early Seventeenth-Century England' (pp. 95–127). A pair of articles by Jonathan Dunford, 'The Sainte Colombe Enigma: Current State of Research' (pp. 13–33) and 'Dietrich Stöeffken: A Brief Introduction' (pp. 34–41) are followed by Stuart Cheney's 'Hotman and Dubuisson' (pp. 42–61). Then come Richard King's 'Handel and the Viola da Gamba' (pp. 63–79) and Pierre Jaquier's 'Une Dispute aux Tuileries: Petit divertissement d'après Hubert La Blanc' (pp. 80–93). Annette Otterstedt's '"It is said that smaller specimens also existed": The Descant Viol in Germany' (pp. 128–53) is followed by five papers largely on instrument making and restoring: Jaquier's 'Les Sept Planets: Un consort de violes anglais' (pp. 155–65), 'Restauer: Le travail d'un atelier' by Ingo Muthesius (pp. 167–93), Dietrich Kessler's 'The Restoration of Two English Viols by Henry Jaye and Richard Meares' (pp. 194–209), 'The Restoration of a Bass Viol by Nicolas Bertrand, Paris, Beginning of the Eighteenth Century' by Charles Riché (pp. 210–27), and Marc Soubeyan's 'Restoration Matters: An Interview with John Topham' (pp. 228–39). These are matters rather outside my area of expertise, so I will largely pass over them in silence—a silence that should not, of course, be taken as disapproval.

In her introduction the editor, Susan Orlando, is rather coy about the precise origin of the contents, merely stating that they are 'a sampling of articles from symposiums which took place at La Borie, in Limoges, in the 1990s'. She claims that many of them have been updated for the volume, but some of them are seriously out of touch with modern scholarship, as we shall see. Another problem is consistency of style and editorial policy. Some of the papers are in French as well as English, some just in English, some just in French, and one (Muthesius) in French and German; the list above gives the English title where one exists. I appreciate that coping with contributions in several languages can be difficult, but I have to...