Carl Friedrich Abel, ca. 1777 (Image © Huntington Art Museum); Amy Domingues and Matt Zucker (Photos by Lawrence Sumulong for The Frick Collection)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788)’s 1777 portrait of composer and viol player Carl Friedrich Abel (1725–1787) is a snapshot of a musical landscape in flux. Only a decade before, Abel had, with fellow composer Johann Christian Bach, inaugurated the Bach-Abel Concerts, the first public subscription series in England. This was a groundbreaking moment in European life and marked a turning point in the democratization of music performance: for the first time, civilians of mixed social classes and professions were exposed to chamber music, heretofore restricted to domestic or courtly rooms. Held in spaces like Carlisle House and the Hanover Square Rooms, this series of performances brought together composers, virtuosi, and a paying public in a new setting, one that bridged both the salon and the concert hall.
As this and other public concert series grew in popularity, music began to acquire a new, institutional self-consciousness. Through the simultaneous commissioning of new music and preservation of older works for public consumption (and shaped by a complex network of patrons, reviewers, and music publishers), we witness at this time the emergence of what we might call a musical canon. While the prevailing view, defined by the French as les progrès de la musique, assumed a natural, forward-moving evolution of taste, the emerging practice of exhuming and reviving older compositions alongside newer music began to challenge this trajectory. Ultimately, within the social space of the concert society, this canon of great works would be repeated, preserved, and immortalized. Music’s fashion for public consumption was assured.
Tonight, in our final concert on our season as the Frick’s ensemble in residence, we take this as an opportunity to show off the composers in the age of Gainsborough, while programming some of the older music most dear to us. We will hear from composers like J.C. Bach who experimented with graceful new styles reflecting a public taste for light, simple, elegance; his gallante works reveal prominent melodic content with accompaniment, markedly different from his father’s denser baroque counterpoint. Rudolf Straube was a student and copyist of J.S. Bach who, like Abel and J.C. Bach, immigrated from Germany to London. A keyboardist by training, Straube ultimately became a central figure in the London lute and guitar world, likely making a gift of a lute to Gainsborough—perhaps the very instrument that the artist’s daughter Margaret was known to have played as something of a virtuosa. The viol remained popular in England well into the eighteenth century and many of our selections reflect its continued life in the hands of composers and performers alike. Gainsborough, himself, was an avid amateur player, and through his extensive correspondence with Abel we learn of his love of the instrument, specifically his desire to “take [my] Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village when I can print Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.”
It has been a privilege—and a tremendous amount of fun—to take our inspiration from the Frick’s unrivaled permanent collection and exhibitions this season. We owe so many people enormous thanks, chief among them Jeremy Ney, Bria McCarty, Aimee Ng, and Axel Rüger. And to our public, thank you, for helping fashion a future for historically informed performance in New York.
Elizabeth Weinfield