In the programme: Antoine Forqueray, Marin Marais, Robert de Visée
French gambist Hubert Le Blanc, noting in the mid-eighteenth century the declining popularity of his instrument and its displacement by the violin and cello, published the treatise Defénse de la basse de viole. In Le Blanc’s view, France was the ‘empire of the viola da gamba’, founded by Marin Marais and later expanded by Antoine Forqueray. However, those two musicians presented a completely different style. According to Le Blanc, Marais resembled an angel with his playing, while Forqueray resembled a devil. Le Blanc also outlined another opposition. He contrasted the melodiousness and tunefulness of the French style, comparing it to poetry, with the Italian style, in which he saw a significant role played by harmony and a musical reflection of prose writing. He regarded Marais as the master of the French style, claiming that his playing surpassed the beauty of singers’ voices. The melodiousness of a work must have been important to Marais, because he consistently avoided performing sonatas in the Italian style. Forqueray, on the contrary, looked for models for his compositions in the harmonic sound of pieces for lute, harp or guitar. His success, however, was based not on a complete rejection of the output of the French, but in its synthesis with the achievements of the Italian style. The ‘Gamba empire’ thus had two pillars at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of which, to paraphrase Le Blanc, was admired for its beauty and the other for its solidity.
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
