Chapter 7 - ‘The Heart of Sensibility’: Writers, Artists and Aristocrats

Summary

WE have seen that Charles Frederick Abel was described as ‘the Sterne of Music’, thereby linking him to Laurence Sterne (1713–68), the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). This was not hyperbole: there is a description of Abel improvising on the gamba using as a subject the famous deathbed scene of Lieutenant Le Fever in Tristram Shandy, bringing ‘Tears into the Eyes of his Hearers’ (Ch. 6), and in a spurious letter about sensibility Sterne is made to say that ‘there is an amiable kind of cullibility, which is as superior to the slow precaution of worldly wisdom, as the sound of Abel’s Viol di Gamba, to the braying of an ass on the other side of my paling’. This chapter will examine the gamba as an emblem of sensibility, and Abel’s role in inspiring a revival of the instrument in the 1760s and 1770s among writers, artists and aristocrats.

Laurence Sterne

IT is appropriate to start with Sterne, since he was extremely musical, seems to have been an admirer of Abel, and may have played the gamba. Like other eighteenth-century clergymen, he probably learned music at university; he was at Jesus College, Cambridge from 1733 to 1737, where he would doubtless have encountered Conyers Middleton, the University Librarian and a bass viol player (Ch. 2). Sterne remembered in his memoirs that ‘Books, painting, fiddling, and shooting’ were his amusements when he was an obscure Yorkshire clergyman in the 1740s and 50s. He borrowed sonatas by Albicastro and Carlo Marino and concertos by Vivaldi from York Minster Library in 1752. An anecdote told to William Hazlitt by a Dr Marriott has him leaving his daughter Lydia in the middle of an epileptic fit because he was ‘engaged to play the first fiddle at York that night’ – probably in the music club that met at the George in Coney Street. According to another anecdote relating to this period, he ‘performed on the bass-viol to his friends; and his wife, who “had a ­ne voice and a good taste in music,” sometimes contributed to the entertainment by accompanying her husband on his favourite instrument’.