The Dutch violoncellist, gamba player and composer Johan Arnold Dahmen spent the latter part of his life in England. Like many Continental musicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he was drawn to London by the ample opportunities for employment afforded by the lively and diverse musical climate of that city. Favourable economic conditions meant that the upper classes of British society could indulge themselves in a variety of extravagances, musical entertainments prominent among them. The robust concert life of the city manifested itself in an assortment of categories, from subscription and benefit concerts, both of which featured sizeable orchestras as well as solo performers, to smaller concerts in private homes. These latter affairs were organized informally by the host and often featured a mixture of amateur and professional performers (Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 44ff).
By the last decades of the eighteenth century, the city's concert life was such that there were not enough sufficiently trained native musicians to fill all the jobs available, and this was an attraction for Continental musicians. Dahmen arrived in England in the latter part of 1790 with his elder brother Peter, who seems to have found employment on the London musical scene first. A violinist, Peter is listed as a player in one of Johann Peter Salomon's subscription concerts at Hanover Square on 18 March 1791, performing a ‘New Quartetto’ by Joseph Haydn (H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, five volumes, volume 3: Haydn in England 1791–1795 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 60). Salomon was himself an emigré, a native of Bonn and a virtuoso violinist; he famously established one of the more successful series of subscription concerts in London, even more famously securing visits from Haydn during the seasons of 1790–1791, 1791–1792 and 1794–1795, at which the two sets of London symphonies were premiered.
Johan Arnold seems to have come to the attention of local employers somewhat later, apparently through a private concert given by the brothers at Cambridge Town Hall in November of 1791, which was attended by both Salomon and Haydn (Peter Holman, Life after Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 284). Johan Arnold is subsequently listed as performing a Pleyel cello concerto at another Hanover Square concert sponsored by Salomon, on 2 March 1792, a performance that is advertised as ‘being his first appearance in this country’ (Landon, Haydn in England 1791–1795, 139), by which is meant, presumably, his first appearance in a public concert venue.
Holman, echoing remarks by Carl Ferdinand Pohl (C. F. Pohl, Mozart and Haydn in London (Vienna: Carl Gerold's Sohn, 1867), two volumes, volume 1, 52), gives Johan Arnold the distinction of being ‘the last professional gamba player in Britain in the continuous tradition’; there are contemporary reports of him performing on the viola da gamba in concerts in London and nearby environs (Holman, Life after Death, 284–286). Though described in some documents as a violinist, he seems to have been most frequently and definitively identified as a violoncellist. He was also an accomplished composer, with publications numbering to Op. 45 as well as several unnumbered works in a variety of genres. Some of these may have been in fact by the celebrated flautist Arnold Dahmen of Amsterdam, but many are by Johan Arnold, a good number of them for solo cello or some combination of a soloistic cello part and accompanying instruments (Holman, Life After Death, 285).
The Three Cello Sonatas edited by Steven K. Gerber for A-R Editions are excellent examples of this category of works, and one can easily envision these pieces being performed at some of the concerts mentioned above. The source material for the edition comes from an autograph score currently housed in the George Mason University Libraries; a high-resolution, digitized version of this can be accessed through the George Mason Libraries’ website. In the ‘Editorial Methods’ section of the Introduction Gerber states that he is presenting ‘primarily, but not exclusively, a diplomatic transcription of [this] manuscript with ambiguities and inconsistencies of articulation, slurring, dynamics, and repeat signs’; he further states that he has made no attempt to ‘normalize or reinterpret’ these features (vi). A small number of adjustments made in the edition along these lines are enumerated in the ‘Critical Notes’ section, which occupies scarcely a full page's worth of space in the Introduction. Thus the musical notation is presented very much as it appears in the manuscript, including the retention of various ornaments that are utilized throughout the works.
However, some notational elements (stem, beams, clefs, and so forth) have been altered slightly in accordance with modern conventions, rather than rendered as they appear in the original. For example, in the manuscript, bass clef is utilized almost exclusively throughout these works in both parts, with rare instances of tenor clef. Gerber follows this notation faithfully, except for a section in the first movement of the second sonata (bars 86–93), in which Dahmen had employed bass clef with an 8va sign above a particular passage; Gerber renders this section in tenor clef. This is duly remarked upon in the ‘Critical Notes’. It is interesting to note, as Gerber does (v), that Dahmen's use of the bass clef for the solo part in these sonatas does not follow the common contemporary practice of notating solo violoncello music – or, indeed, music for other soloistic bass-clef instruments – in the treble clef, sounding an octave lower (the violoncellist and pedagogue Jean-Louis Duport describes this convention in his Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle et sur la conduite de l'archet of 1806). Gerber states that Dahmen had used this notation in other works for solo violoncello; however, this manuscript eschews the practice.
The frequent appearance of pencilled-in fingerings and the indication ‘volti subito’ (or, in one instance, ‘volti poloneso’) at the bottom of certain recto folios in the manuscript are clear signs that Dahmen (or someone else) used these works for performance; however, these indications are not included in the edition. Nevertheless, as Gerber points out, actual performance circumstances for these pieces are unknown. The same can be said for a definitive date of composition, though from the available biographical material Gerber surmises this to have been between 1794 and 1812, thus during his time in Britain (v).
The Introduction, which offers a section on ‘The Composer and the Manuscript’ alongside ‘Editorial Methods’ and ‘Critical Notes’, contains a good deal of the background information provided above. Gerber presents this biographical and editorial data succinctly, in only three pages. The rest of the edition is devoted to the music itself, which is presented in score form in the main component of the edition (bound together with the introductory material) and also in two separate performance parts.
The precise identity of the lower instrument has occasioned some confusion. As reported in the Introduction, the title-page of the autograph reads ‘Thre [sic] Solos / for the Violoncello / With Accompaniment / for a Bass / Bij J: A: Dahmen’. Gerber believes that the upper part is unambiguously for violoncello, and he states that the accompaniment part is ‘apparently for a second cello (or a violone in cello tuning)’ (v). Similarly, the George Mason website refers to the works as ‘Sonatas (Violoncello and Double Bass)’ (http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps∼34∼34∼39355∼101967:Three-solos-for-the-violoncello-wit). Neither of these suggested instrumentations seems likely. The use of a sixteen-foot double bass – commonly referred to by the term ‘violone’ in many areas of Europe during this period – for this accompaniment seems improbable; the double stops that appear frequently throughout these sonatas – sounding an octave lower for a sixteen-foot instrument – would produce an ungainly effect. The terms ‘Bass’ on the title-page and ‘Basso’ on the first page of music in the manuscript are merely a contemporary reference to a generic basso part; this designation carries none of the implications that our modern – particularly American – terminology suggests for a sixteen-foot double bass. Similarly, it seems a stretch to think that this second part might have been intended for an eight-foot (or, as it has been called by viol scholar Annette Otterstedt and others, a twelve-foot) violone, or what we today generically refer to as a ‘G violone’; again, the double stops, while perhaps manageable on such an instrument, would be problematic, even with the adjusted tuning that Gerber suggests. These would be the two types of instruments most associated with the term ‘violone’ during this period; therefore, it seems that Gerber's first choice (that is, accompaniment by a second violoncello) is the correct option here.
The works themselves demonstrate clear elements of later eighteenth-century style. All three sonatas have a three-movement format: a sonata-form Allegro for the first movements, followed by an Adagio second movement and fast finale; the closing movement is in a rondo form in all three sonatas. As was occasionally the case in sonatas from this period, some of the movements carry descriptive titles: the second movement of the first sonata is designated ‘Romance’, while the third movements of the first and third sonatas are entitled ‘Rondo poloneso’ and ‘Pastorado’ respectively. The style would have been considered ‘modern’ in the musical society of late eighteenth-century London, as opposed to the ‘ancient’ style of Handel, Geminiani and earlier composers, which was still actively cultivated in the city at the end of the eighteenth century. Both styles were represented in concerts such as those described above, and musicians frequently participated in both types of performances. The vogue for works in the modern style was greatly enhanced by Haydn's visits, and a composer/performer wishing to appeal to less staid segments of the London concert scene at the turn of the nineteenth century might have done worse than to employ the elements that Haydn so masterfully put before his British audiences.
The two violoncello parts complement each other admirably, with frequent motivic interplay between voices. In the Introduction, Gerber describes the solo cello part as ‘virtuosic’ (v). I would suggest ‘soloistic’ as an alternative term: the technical challenges of this solo line, while great in spots – for example, the somewhat challenging bariolage section in the Adagio of the second sonata (bars 17–19) and a similar section in the ‘Rondo poloneso’ of the first sonata (bars 13–16) – do not generally rise to the level of difficulty of some of the early nineteenth-century representatives of the genre, keeping more to the eighteenth-century model of the instrumental sonata, which was often aimed at students or talented amateurs, as, indeed, these works may have been.
For reasons that are not clear, the manuscript pages were collated out of order when bound together. These pages are not numbered, but, as Gerber points out, it is evident from the music itself what the proper order should be. More problematic is the fact that a section of one of the pages, containing brief passages from movements one and two of the third sonata, has been torn off (Plates 1 and 2, on unnumbered pages at the end of the Introduction, reproduce both sides of the torn manuscript folio). Gerber has supplied ‘reconstructed’ passages (see ‘Editorial Methods’, vi) for this missing material. In the edition, these passages appear in ‘cue-size notes’ in both the score and the performance parts. In arranging these reconstructed sections, Gerber relies on ‘parallel passages’ in the sonata to arrive at musically logical and artistically satisfying substitutions. For example, the excised section at bars 25–28 of the Adagio movement of the third sonata is filled in using material from that movement's opening (bars 3–6) for this analogous place in the form; similar processes and techniques are used for the other missing passages. These reconstructions all work quite nicely, and seem to be in perfect accord with the surrounding music.
The various minor adjustments to the manuscript made by Gerber have produced an excellent performing edition of these delightful works. The bound score, with the introductory and editorial information, makes an admirable performance guide. Further, the separate parts (‘Violoncello’ and ‘Basso’) are arranged for optimal performance efficiency; easy to read, with no awkward page turns. I am certain that this edition will enable modern performers to engage with these works in an informed manner, and thereby add to the current soloistic violoncello repertory vibrant and meaningful music that has long been silent.
