Abell, John (i)

(b Aberdeenshire, 1653; d ?Cambridge, after

1716). Scottish countertenor, composer and lutenist. The first
occurrence of his name in official records is on 1 May 1679, when he
was admitted extraordinary then in ordinary to the Chapel Royal.
From the same time he is listed among the musicians of the Kings
Private Musick as one of the lutes and voices and also as a violinist,
though the latter post was probably a sinecure. Between 1679 and
1688 he received considerable sums of bounty money for
undisclosed services to the king while travelling abroad. Evelyn
recorded (27 January 1682):
After supper came in the famous Trebble, Mr Abel, newly
returnd from Italy, & indeed I never heard a more
excellent voice, one would have sworne it had been a
Womans it was so high, & so well & skillfully managd.
He graduated MusB at Cambridge in 1684. His marriage to Lady
Frances Knollys on 29 December 1685 caused something of a
scandal, and he left the country after the revolution in 1688, his
sympathies being strongly Catholic. He had been a singer in James
II's Catholic Chapel, and a Groom of the Queen's Privy Chamber.
For the next ten years or so he was with the exiled court at SaintGermain as Page of the Queen's Bedchamber (168997), but was
allowed to travel widely on the Continent, visiting France, Germany,
Italy, the Low Countries and Poland. There are many anecdotes
referring to this period of his life. Hawkins quoted the following:
Upon his arrival at Warsaw, the king having notice of it,
sent for him to his court. Abell made some slight excuse
to evade going, but upon being told that he had
everything to fear from the kings resentment, he made
an apology, and received a command to attend the king
next day. Upon his arrival at the palace, he was seated in
a chair in the middle of a spacious hall, and immediately
drawn up to a great height; presently the king with his
attendants appeared in a gallery opposite to him, and at

the same instant a number of wild bears were turned in;

the king bade him then choose whether he would sing or
be let down among the bears: Abell chose the former,
and declared afterwards that he never sang so well in his
life.
Towards the end of the century he hankered after a return to
England (his wife had apparently already returned), but heavy debts
there delayed him until he could be sure of his financial situation.
After some bargaining with the Drury Lane Theatre, in the course of
which he lowered his terms from 500 to 400 a year, he was back
in London by January 1699. Congreve wrote on 10 December 1700:
Abell is here: has a cold at present, and is always
whimsicall, so that when he will sing or not upon the
stage are things very disputable, but he certainly sings
beyond all creatures upon earth, and I have heard him
very often both abroad and since he came over.
He immediately set about restoring his fortune by giving concerts. He
took the title role in Daniel Purcell's The Judgment of Paris(1701)
and performed in numerous musical entertainments in London and
the provinces. He also set himself up as a teacher. His coronation
song for Queen Anne (Aloud proclaim the cheerful sound) was
performed and published in 1702; his masque-like
entertainment Hark, Britain, hark was given the following year (6
February) at St James's in honour of the queen's birthday (the score
(GB-Ob) is attributed erroneously to John Eccles). Later that year he
went to Ireland in the household of the Duke of Ormonde, but
returned to London in 1704. Newspaper advertisements report
concert tours in Britain as far afield as Scotland in 1705; later there
are suggestions that he spent further periods on the Continent,
though he was back in London by 1715. Mattheson stated that Abell
possessed some secret that preserved the purity of his voice into old
age. He published in London A Collection of Songs in
English (1701), dedicated to the English Nobility and Gentry, and in
the same year A Collection of Songs in Several
Languages dedicated to the king, who had been so Gracious as to
hear em both in Holland, and on my return Home. The pieces in A

Choice Collection of Italian Ayres (1703) were sung to the Nobility

and Gentry in the North of England; and at both Theatres in London.
Roger of Amsterdam published a small collection of Airs pour le
concert de mecredy, le 12 decembre, au Doule, composes par Jean
Abell Anglois (n.d.), presumably a memento of a concert Abell gave
in Doullens on one of his continental tours (12 December was a
Wednesday in 1694, 1705 and 1711).
Abell is remembered principally as a singer, and is usually regarded
as a countertenor; however, Evelyn called him a treble, and Jakob
Greber in 1704 referred to him as a tenor (H. Samuel: A German
Musician Comes to London in 1704, MT, cxxii, 1981, p.592). His
range appears to have been from (written) g to d'', but at flat pitch
this may have been as much as a tone lower by modern standards.
His songs were influenced by the Italian style but are short-winded
and hardly rise above the trivial.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AshbeeR, i, ii, v, viii
BDA
BDECM
HawkinsH
SpinkES
T. Brown: Letters from the Dead to the Living (London, 1703)
J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene
Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R), 95
H.G. Farmer: John Abell, HMYB, vii (1952), 44559
E.S. de Beer, ed.: The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955)
M. Tilmouth: A Calender of References to Music in Newspapers
Published in London and the Provinces (16601719), RMARC,
no.1 (1961), 1107
A. Davidsson: John Abell den musikalske vagabonden:
commentary to Airs pour le concert de Mercredy, le 12
Decembre, au Doule, av John Abell [facs.] (Norrkping, 1967),
1016
R. McGuinness: An Eighteenth-Century
Entertainment, Soundings, iii (1973), 6684
L. Merians: John Abell's Return to England, ML, lxvi (1985),

2414
E.T. Corp: The Exiled Court of James II and James III: a Centre
of Italian Music in France 16891712, JRMA, cxx (1995), 216
31
IAN SPINK