DUBOIS Pierre

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The fate of the viola da gamba in England has been singular, going from undeniable popularity among the English aristocracy in the seventeenth century to an increasingly intense rejection throughout the eighteenth century. The representations of the instrument in documents peripheral to the musical sphere - letters, poems, paintings - betray the complexity of the imagination surrounding the viol. In its heyday, the viol simultaneously generated lewd images of a sensual body and of a noble instrument because of the supposed melancholy of its tone. It was then closely associated with English national sentiment, whose specificity it would crystallize. However, its decreasing popularity among the elite saw the proliferation of negative images: old age and sterility now seemed to be the prerogative of the viol, which was also ideologically distanced as a foreign instrument. The viol reappears in the second half of the eighteenth century at the time when the cult of sensitivity develops: briefly, its archaism and its unique timbre give voice to the individual and his emotions. The viol, in the cyclical paradigm of the Renaissance as well as in the linear and discursive paradigm of the Enlightenment, manages to be embodied according to very different aesthetic and ideological modalities in the English imaginary.

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