The standard method of writing out lute works was to use tablature notation. It was convenient for the performer, thanks to the clear indication of the string and the fret from which the sound should be made. However, tablature notation was not the most precise, as it did not stipulate the duration of notes. Johann Sebastian Bach was not a lutenist, so he could not adopt a performer’s perspective when composing his lute pieces. Consequently, he wrote them out in classical scores, and the existing tablatures of his works were certainly not written by Johann Sebastian himself. We may speculate that, in assigning a work to the lute, Bach wanted to maintain a degree of control over the musical material, as he did with works for other instruments. Moreover, some of the lute compositions are arrangements of earlier works: the Suite in G minor, BWV 995, for example, evolved from its cello counterpart BWV 1011 (then in the key of C minor). Perhaps, when writing these works, Bach was thinking not only of the lute, but also of the Lautenwerk – a keyboard instrument with gut strings whose sound imitated the lute. A document prepared after the composer’s death, in 1750, shows that he owned two such instruments. The existing lute works certainly testify that this instrument, still popular in the eighteenth century, was important to Bach.

Simply… Philharmonic! Project 4:

If one were to assign a specific instrument to each country of particular importance on the musical scene of Baroque Europe, the viola da gamba would certainly fall to France. Such an attempt to find national connections to instruments was also made by the eighteenth-century gambist Hubert Le Blanc, who opened his treatise on the instrument with the statement:

The Divine Intelligence, among its many gifts, has endowed mortals with Harmony. The violin fell to the Italians, the flute to the Germans, the harpsichord to the English, and the basse de viole to the French.

Although the roots of the French school of gamba playing can be traced to England (the first chordal compositions were written there, and the English are credited with popularising the instrument on the Continent), it was in France that some of the instrument’s greatest virtuosos worked and its construction was perfected. Foreign musicians also trained in France, such as the German gambist Ernst Christian Hesse. One instrument related to the viola da gamba is the lute, and works for lute were taken as models for gamba compositions by Antoine Forqueray, among others, a musician contemporary of Marin Marais. In their time, the eminent lute player, theorist and guitarist Robert de Visée, who was also a gamba player, worked in the ensemble of King Louis XIV at Versailles, as Jean Rousseau mentions in one of his letters.

The similarity between the gamba and the lute may also have been noticed by Johann Sebastian Bach, as is suggested by the aria ‘Komm süsses Kreuz’ from the St Matthew Passion, BWV 244, in which the composer envisaged a solo part for viola da gamba. In the original version, however, the solo instrument there was the lute.
 

Daniel Laskowski