Life after Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch by Peter Holman (review)

Strikingly titled, Life after Death traces the history of the viol in England following its presumed demise in the late seventeenth century. Once the Golden Age of the Jacobean and Carolingian consort repertories had come to an end, the new fashion was for the sprightly Restoration violin. It was evident that the bass member of the family would still be useful for continuo work, but as an ensemble instrument the English viol appeared for all practical purposes to be moribund, even if it had quit the stage on a high note with the sublime fantasias of Purcell. A handful of awkward facts remained to puzzle anyone who cared to examine this generally accepted narrative more critically. Why, for example, was the London instrument maker John Friedrich Hintz still selling tenor viols in the 1750s and 1760s? From whom did the artist Gainsborough, an ardent admirer of the viol, acquire his extraordinary collection of antique instruments? After a brief revival as a solo instrument in the 1770s stimulated by the London career of the German virtuoso Karl Friedrich Abel, the viol gradually fell out of use again, until in the Victorian age only its name retained some currency. Readers of Thomas Hardy could hardly avoid noticing that the ‘base viol’ (often a rustic cello) was an indispensable member of the rural parish band. Not the least achievement of Holman’s fine study is its demonstration that these, and many other apparently isolated episodes, form part of a coherent ‘after-life’ for the instrument, a narrow but rich seam of viol playing that persisted unbroken throughout the eighteenth century and, more tenuously, into the nineteenth.

Life after Death is based on an impressive array of factual evidence garnered from private correspondence, account books, newspaper reports, musical scores, paintings, and surviving instruments. As Holman acknowledges, the detective work required to construct such an extensive compilation of detailed evidence benefitted greatly from advances in information technology, notably the searchable database. In the past a scholar in pursuit of references to an instrument might need to spend half a lifetime trawling through newspaper archives guided by little more than instinct, but occurrences of a term (and plausible spelling variants thereof) can now be retrieved in a matter of seconds. The consequent enrichment of the field of information is remarkable, and though Holman’s study is dense in its inclusion of detail—some-thing that its main readership will welcome—it also succeeds in presenting a coherent narrative, situating the English viol in its social and cultural context. Some over-arching themes quickly become apparent. One is the diversity of the men and women who were attracted to the instrument—scientists, artists, writers, poets, lawyers, and antiquarians. Another is the level of their professional attainment outside music: painters like Gainsborough, novelists such as Defoe and (perhaps) Sterne, and even the clockmaker John Harrison. Also very distinctive is the curiously episodic nature of the instrument’s continuing appeal, one phase of interest springing up before dying away, seemingly unconnected to the next. The viol’s alluring but retiring character would neither let it fade away completely, nor allow it to be swept once again into the mainstream. In this sense, Holman’s metaphor of an ‘after-life’ is appropriate.

The centrepiece of the study is an account of the viol at the height of its fashionable revival in eighteenth-century London. The renewed interest was in part sparked by the visual beauty of the instrument, the aspect which perhaps attracted the attention of Gainsborough. Expressing the desire to retire from busy metropolitan life, he yearned for a viol-playing nirvana: ‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol de Gam [sic] and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and...