Carl Friedrich Abel (1723 – 1787) was a German
composer of the Classical era. He was a renowned player
of the viola da gamba, and produced significant
compositions for that He Abel was born in Köthen, a
small German city, where his father, Christian
Ferdinand Abel, had worked for years as the principal
viola da gamba and cello player in the court orchestra.
In 1723 Abel senior became director of the orchestra,
when the previous director, Johann Sebastian Bach,
moved to Leipzig. The young Abel...(+)
Carl Friedrich Abel (1723 – 1787) was a German
composer of the Classical era. He was a renowned player
of the viola da gamba, and produced significant
compositions for that He Abel was born in Köthen, a
small German city, where his father, Christian
Ferdinand Abel, had worked for years as the principal
viola da gamba and cello player in the court orchestra.
In 1723 Abel senior became director of the orchestra,
when the previous director, Johann Sebastian Bach,
moved to Leipzig. The young Abel later boarded at St.
Thomas School, Leipzig, where he was taught by
Bach.
On Bach's recommendation in 1743 he was able to join
Johann Adolph Hasse's court orchestra at Dresden, where
he remained for fifteen years. In 1759 (or 1758
according to Chambers), he went to England and became
chamber-musician to Queen Charlotte, in 1764. He gave a
concert of his own compositions in London, performing
on various instruments, one of which was a five-string
cello known as a pentachord, which had been recently
invented by John Joseph Merlin.
In 1762, Johann Christian Bach, the eleventh son of
J.S. Bach, joined him in London, and the friendship
between him and Abel led, in 1764 or 1765, to the
establishment of the famous Bach-Abel concerts,
England's first subscription concerts. In those
concerts, many celebrated guest artists appeared, and
many works of Haydn received their first English
performance.
For ten years the concerts were organized by Mrs.
Theresa Cornelys, a retired Venetian opera singer who
owned a concert hall at Carlisle House in Soho Square,
then the height of fashionable events. In 1775 the
concerts became independent of her, to be continued by
Abel and Bach until Bach's death in 1782. Abel still
remained in great demand as a player on various
instruments new and old. He traveled to Germany and
France between 1782 and 1785, and upon his return to
London, became a leading member of the Grand
Professional Concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms in
Soho. Throughout his life he had enjoyed excessive
living, and his drinking probably hastened his death,
which occurred in London on 20 June 1787. He was buried
in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church.
One of Abel's works became famous due to a
misattribution: in the 19th century, a manuscript
symphony in the hand of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was
catalogued as his Symphony no. 3 in E flat, K. 18, and
was published as such in the first complete edition of
Mozart's works by Breitkopf & Härtel. Later, it was
discovered that this symphony was actually the work of
Abel, copied by the boy Mozart—evidently for study
purposes—while he was visiting London in 1764. That
symphony was originally published as the concluding
work in Abel's Six Symphonies, Op. 7.
In 2015 new manuscripts of Abel's viola da gamba music
were found in the library of the Adam Mickiewicz
University in Poznań, in a collection from the
Maltzahn family palace in the town of Milicz in Poland,
originally brought back from London by Count Joachim
Carl of Maltzan.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Abel).
Although originally written for for Viola de Gamba &
Harpsichord, I created this Interpretation of the
Sonatina in E Minor (Op. 4 No. 2) for Viola & Piano.
SHEET MUSIC