Although Johann Christian Bach and the violin virtuoso Carl Friedrich Abel lived together in a kind of bachelor living community in London until the marriage of Bach, Bach’s OEuvre for the gamba is surprisingly small. Through the discovery of an old manuscript it was confirmed for the quartets op. 8 what Thomas Fritzsch and others had already assumed: in the first version of the quartets the viola voice was played by Abel on the viola da gamba. Together with other excellent musicians, Fritzsch shows us how the charming quartets in their original version must have sounded.