WITH eighty-six surviving works featuring the gamba in solo or obbligato roles, Charles Frederick Abel is by far the most proli­c composer for the instrument after the Baroque period. We have twenty-nine pieces for unaccompanied gamba (plus four short cadenza-like passages); forty-four solos or sonatas and two separate minuets for gamba and bass; four duets for gamba and violoncello; two incomplete trios for flute, gamba and bass; a gamba part possibly from a sonata with obbligato harpsichord; a quartet for flute, violin, gamba and violoncello; two quartets for gamba, violin, viola and violoncello; and an aria with gamba obbligato. Yet much is lost, and what survives is not necessarily representative of the corpus of gamba music he composed over his working lifetime.

Virtually none of Abel’s surviving gamba music seems to have been written before he came to England in the winter of 1758–9 at the age of thirty-five. He played a trio and a fantasy on the gamba in a Leipzig concert in 1743, probably of his own composition (Ch. 5), and was employed at the Dresden court for about a decade as a gamba player, where he would have needed a good deal of solo material; it was the custom at the time for virtuosi to write their own solos provided that they were competent to do so. Abel was an established composer before he came to England: the 1761 Breitkopf catalogue lists flute solos and concertos by ‘Abel, Music[ien] de la Chamb[re] du Roy de Polo[g]n[e]’, indicating that they were written while he was at Dresden.

The only possible surviving gamba work written at that time is the Concerto in B♭, WKO 52. It survives in a set of parts, D-B, Mus. MS 252/10, with the solo part labelled ‘Violoncello Concertato’, and it also exists as a flute concerto, WKO 51, with the outer movements a tone higher, in C major, but with the Adagio a third higher in G major. The flute version is clearly the arrangement: Abel preferred the subdominant key to the dominant for slow movements; some of the solo ­guration seems more suitable for a stringed instrument than the flute; and one passage was seemingly rewritten to keep it within the range of the flute (Ex. 6.1). WKO 52 is clearly an early work.