His son, Jean Baptiste Antoine, born on April 3, 1700, in Paris, was esteemed as the most able French gamba player of his time. He also at five years of age was heard with such favourable result before Louis XIV. that he later on became a member of the royal music society. He again had a son, whose christian name was Jean Baptiste, born about 1728, who was also a gambist and published several books of compositions for his instrument. He does not seem, however, to have made himself conspicuous as a performer.
Gerber mentions in his musical Lexicon a Parisian gambist of the eighteenth century of the name of Forcroix, or Forcroy, “whose delightful playing Quantz, who was in Paris in 1726, admired.” Possibly this artist may be identified as the A. Forqueray mentioned above.
The art of gamba playing was pursued in Germany with as great or perhaps greater zeal than in England and France. While the pursuit of music by the English and French was confined chiefly to London and Paris, there were in Germany many courts who admired and cherished with fostering care the art of music; and the result was, especially after the tumult of the thirty years’ war had subsided, a widely-spread musical life throughout the whole of the German nation.
Amongst the first German players to be mentioned is David Funk, born about 1630, in the Saxon town of Reichenbach. Gerber says of him, he was “an excellent musician and master of the violin, the viola da gamba, the angelica,[29] the clavier, and guitar”; and then goes on: “Funk was in every way a genius. His chief study, which he carried to no small degree of perfection, was that of the law. He was, besides, a wit and a poet, and was reckoned among the good German poets of that time. As a musician he was not only a virtuoso on all the above-named instruments, but he was also a composer, and won the applause of the public in a variety of styles, for the church as well as for the chamber.... How and where he had gained all these distinctions there is no account. He was first known as a composer in the year 1670, by the publication of his work on the gamba.” This enthusiastic account emanated, according to Gerber’s report, from the precentor Joh. Martin Steindorf, of Zwickau, who was personally acquainted with Funk.
In the year 1682 Funk gave up his appointment in Reichenbach and accompanied the “East Friesland Princess” into Italy as secretary, where he remained with his mistress seven years. After her death there in 1689 he returned to his native land, and, driven by the necessity of beginning again to earn his livelihood, he had no other choice but to accept, at “Wohnsiedel (Wunsiedel?), the miserable post of organist and girls’ schoolmaster.” Funk’s dissolute character led him to misuse his office as teacher to immoral purposes with the girls entrusted to his care, so that he was compelled “by night and fog to fly in order to escape the rage of the parents.”
From that time Funk led a vagabond life. He next betook himself to Schleitz, and remained three months at the Court there. Thence he was obliged to decamp as he was rigorously pursued by the police of Wohnsiedel. He made his way to Arnstadt, but did not reach that place. He was found one day lying dead underneath a hedge.
At the same time as Funk, the virtuoso August Kühnel was at work—born August 5, 1645, in the little town of Delmenhorst, in Oldenburg. From 1695 to 1700 he lived at Cassel, holding a position at the Court. During this time he published “Sonatas or Parts for one or two Viole da gamba, together with a bass, 1698.” According to Gerber, several of his works should be in the Museum at Cassel. In composition, Kühnel was a pupil of Agostino Steffani during his residence in Hanover. His successor in office appears to have been a certain Tielke,[30] for he was from 1700 to 1720 gambist in the Cassel chapel.
Another gambist of the name of Kühnel (Johann Michael) lived in the second half of the seventeenth century, and was engaged at the Berlin Court. From here he went, in 1717, to Weimar, and later on to Dresden, in the service of Field-marshal Flemming. He seems to have ended his life in Hamburg. Of his compositions there appeared at Rogers’s in Amsterdam, “Sonates à 1 et 2 Violes de gamba.”
One of the most important gamba players of Germany at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century was Johann Schenk. As he appears to have had his second work, “Konst œffeningen,” printed at Amsterdam in 1688, consisting of fifteen sonatas for the gamba and bass, it may be concluded that he was born about the middle of the seventeenth century. Towards the end of it he was chamber musician in the Elector Palatine’s service, which post however he must have given up at the beginning of the eighteenth century, for he is said to have settled in Amsterdam about that time. Whether he remained there to the end of his life is doubtful, for on the title-page of his sixth work, “Scherzi musicali, per la viola di gamba con basso continuo ad libitum,” he calls himself “Chamber Commissary and Chamberlain of the Elector Palatine.” On the other hand, Mattheson informs us that he (Schenk) was named inspector of the fish market, because he had played the gamba so well! On the whole, he published eight works, chiefly pieces and sonatas for the gamba, as well as for the violin with a bass; a copy of the one, of which the title is mentioned above, is preserved in the Royal Library at Sondershausen. This comprehensive collection, consisting of 101 musical pieces, is dedicated to the Elector Palatine Prince William, consequently to the same art-devoted Prince to whom Corelli, in the year 1712, dedicated his “Concerti Grossi.”[31]