François Couperin and 'The Perfection of Music'

David Tunley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317133230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

François Couperin's contribution to the literature of baroque keyboard music has long been recognized. François Couperin and 'The Perfection of Music' updates and expands upon David Tunley's valuable 1982 BBC Music Guide to the composer, and examines the whole of Couperin's output including the organ masses, motets and chamber music, in addition to the well-known works for harpsichord. Taking as its focal point Couperin's concept of the perfection of music through the union of the French and Italian styles, this book takes a more analytical approach to Couperin's work. Early chapters outline the main contrasting features of the two schools in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries, and it becomes clear that Couperin's expressive power owed much to his fusion of the polarities of the French classical tradition with that of the Italian baroque. The book features a number of appendices, including the prefaces to Couperin's work both in the original French and in English translation, and a glossary of dances of the French baroque.

Chapter 1
Couperin and his Times

The history of European music is essentially the history of changing styles. This becomes strikingly evident with the development of polyphony which, as a uniquely European phenomenon, coincided with a new phase of Western civilisation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and from that time onwards European music has mirrored the restlessness of the European mind in its seemingly endless search for innovation and change. In a very real sense, this music is characteristically always in a state of transition.

The emergence, growth and eventual disappearance of a style is a pattern familiar enough to those who have studied the various historical periods of music and while the rate of change may vary the forward thrust of development is ever-present. The earlier phase in the development of a style is usually marked by a quickened pulse, which slackens as the style matures and the forms are consolidated. Yet strangely, in the early and middle years of the seventeenth century this momentum apparently lost so much force in French music that the art seems to have settled into a long period of calm repose; and this was at the very time when Italian music was being swiftly borne by the powerful surge of that movement now usually described as the Baroque. The tranquil waters were deceptive. There were currents that carried French music into new parts, but they were more like little eddies, soon lost in the slow drift; then, towards the end of the century, the Italian flood broke its banks and washed into the music of France. One of the composers to feel and respond to the new force was François Couperin. At the time of his birth this was still over two decades away, during which time the precocious young musician absorbed all that was around him.

He was born into an auspicious year for France. In that year, 1668, the young king Louis XIV signed the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded a war by which he had attempted to secure territories in the Spanish Netherlands that he believed were his by his marriage to the Spanish princess Marie-Thérèse. Although leading to war with the Dutch four years later, through the financial genius of his minister Colbert there ensued a twenty-year period of prosperity that enabled Louis to realise his grand plans for making France the cultural centre of Europe. Louis immediately made the momentous decision to start work on new plans that superseded earlier ones for the Palace of Versailles where Couperin was to be appointed in a part-time capacity twenty-five years later. His was the first of four court appointments in the history of the Couperin musical dynasty, which stretched from the late sixteenth- to the mid-nineteenth centuries. For the most part the Couperins worked at various churches in Paris, most notably at Saint-Gervais.

While the name of Couperin has been traced back to the fourteenth century in the region of Brie, south-west of Paris, those with musical gifts started with Mathurin Couperin, a modest landowner born in 1569, who was admitted as a maître joueur d’instruments into the company of the ménestriers, a powerful guild that François was to pillory in one of his harpsichord pieces a hundred years later. Mathurin’s musical talents were passed down to his son Charles whose musical progeny included one of the finest harpsichord composers and players of his day, Louis. He and his brother François were uncles to the ‘famous’ François, or Couperin le grand, as he was to be called. Charles’s youngest son, also named Charles, was the father of the younger François, who passed on to his daughter Marguerite-Antoinette the gifts that enabled her to gain the position at Versailles as harpsichordist, which her father had taken over from D’Anglebert. When Couperin became too ill to continue in the position he relinquished it in favour of his daughter, who became the first woman to hold the appointment. His eldest daughter Marie-Madeleine-Cécile, who entered a convent, apparently was also musical. Of his two sons, one became a soldier, the other died very young. His cousin Marguerite-Louise, daughter of his uncle François, was another woman who enjoyed the hereditary gift to such an extent that she was appointed to the court in 1702 as singer and harpsichordist. Her younger brother Nicolas was to succeed his famous cousin as organist at Saint-Gervais, in his turn followed there by his son Armand-Louis and grandsons Pierre-Louis and Gervais-François, both of whom also played at other well-known Parisian churches. Gervais-François’s daughter Célèste-Thérèse, a musician of mediocre talent, brought to an end at her death in 1860 one of the longest European musical dynasties. Paris and Versailles were thus the main scenes of activity of this remarkable family.

Not a great deal is known about Couperin’s life. What facts there are come from Titon du Tillet’s account in Le Parnasse françois (1743), a few archival documents and from the title-pages and prefaces to the composer’s published music. He was born on 10 November 1668 in Paris, and was only eleven when his father died. Such was the young boy’s precocity that the parish council appointed him to succeed his father when he reached the age of eighteen. Its confidence in the child was not misplaced, and a year before that birthday the church council agreed to pay him 300 livres a year until a formal contract was drawn up, suggesting that the young musician had already been Saint-Gervais’s organist for some time, even though the post officially was filled by Michel-Richard Delalande. The young Couperin’s training had been placed in the hands of Jacques Thomelin, organist at Saint Jacques-la-Boucherie, who was also one of the four organists at the Royal Chapel. A few months before his twenty-first birthday Couperin married Marie-Anne Ansault whose family enjoyed excellent business connections that were to usefully serve the young organist-composer, who, the following year, successfully obtained a six-year royal privilège to publish his compositions. Following the death of Thomelin, Couperin auditioned to become an organist at the Royal Chapel at Versailles in 1693, and was chosen by the king himself, who declared the young man to be the ‘most experienced’ of all those who auditioned.1 He filled the post as one of the four part-time organists there, the others being Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, Jean-Baptiste Buterne and Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue. While originally there had only been one full-time organist for the Royal Chapel, in 1678 the king decided that the position should be shared by four organists, each for three months. Taking over from Thomelin, Couperin, then aged twenty-five, was required to be at Versailles from January to March each year, so allowing him to serve Saint-Gervais for the remaining months. Soon afterwards he was also appointed harpsichord teacher to members of the royal family – the Dauphin (Duke of Boulogne), Anne de Bourbon, and Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon (Count of Toulouse). This appointment and other commitments at court led to an increasing presence at Versailles, particularly during the last two years of Louis’s reign when Couperin was required to be at court every Sunday evening to play chamber music for the ailing king. The Count of Toulouse, who under Couperin’s tuition became a good amateur musician and an ardent music-lover, was to maintain a group of musicians at his château at Rambouillet and at the Hôtel de Toulouse in Paris where Couperin undoubtedly performed, and he gave the composer a generous pension of 1000 livres.2 The relationship was probably strengthened in 1724 when Couperin acquired a house in the fashionable Rue des bons enfants opposite the stables of the Hôtel de Toulouse. After the king’s death in 1715 he secured the post of harpsichordist in the musique de chambre, which, for forty-three years, had been held by the now enfeebled Jean-Baptiste D’Anglebert, son of the famous seventeenth-century player and composer, an appointment, which, as we have seen, Couperin passed on to his daughter Marguerite-Antoinette when he himself began to feel the inroads of ill-health. Indeed, ill health constantly dogged him in later years. Couperin died on 12 September I733 and was buried in the church of Saint Joseph, part of the parish of Saint Eustache.

Given that the relatively few documents relating to Couperin’s life offer us a glimpse into his professional rather than personal life, we might be forgiven for imagining that Couperin’s world was bounded by church, court and teaching. Yet, as Jane Clark and Derek Connon have recently shown, other evidence points to a far more colourful life in which he undoubtedly rubbed shoulders with writers, painters and actors. Not least of these were from the ribald and racy Italian troupe which Louis XIV disbanded in 1696 for obscene jokes about himself and his morganatic wife Mme de Maintenon. Those Italian actors and tumblers who stayed in France found outlet in the large and noisy – even dangerous – fairgrounds of Paris. And the evidence for this? The titles of his harpsichord works, which ‘are in a sense a musical autobiography’.3 The breadth of references to events and to people of all kinds and qualities suggest not an onlooker, but one who took part in and enjoyed the ebullient and vital life of Paris in its many guises. Derek Connon has shown how, judging from the titles:

Couperin also shows a taste for literary works that reflect his own interest in les goûts réunis by blending the French with the Italian, whether it is French authors writing for Italian actors, the Théâtre Français stealing the use of music and dance that the Italians had made their own, or the unique blend of Italian characters and plots with French actors and authors found at the fairs.4

Clearly, the blending of French and Italian styles was not confined to music, but was ‘in the air’, so to speak.

We know something of his reading habits through the inventory drawn up after his death. The two hundred or so books listed in it were, on the whole, in the genres of satire, theatre and novels.5

As a young man Couperin had eagerly sought honours and titles. His first publication in 1692 describes the composer as Sieur de Crouilly (the area from where his father came), and about 1702 he was made a Knight of Rome and also received the Cross of the Knights of Latran, this giving him the right to call himself Chevalier Couperin. Yet the portrait we have of him shows no hint of arrogant bearing, and his many witty and playful pieces suggest a man of great charm and good humour. However, despite his great gifts as a performer, Couperin did not have the field to himself. His greatest rival as organist and harpsichordist was Louis Marchand (1669–1732), the brilliant but personally unattractive performer whom history remembers as disappearing from a contest at Dresden that was to be held between the Frenchman and J.S. Bach. According to D’Aquin du Châteaulyon – writing some twenty years after Couperin’s death – Marchand enjoyed the greater following in Paris and that for every two ‘defeats’ suffered to Marchand’s reputation at the hands of Couperin he gained twenty ‘victories’. Comparing these two leading performers of their day, both of whom had been child prodigies, connoisseurs considered Marchand to be the more brilliant and more naturally gifted, Couperin the more profound musician and a true man of genius.6

What effect did this have on Couperin? Certainly, one detects a degree of personal insecurity in some of the prefaces to his works. In that to his third book of harpsichord pieces, for example, he hopes that ‘grammarians and purists’ will forgive the style of his prefaces – and indeed, his writing is often cumbersome and unclear – while that of L’Art de toucher le clavecin has been described by Pierre Citron as giving the impression that Couperin’s comments, while often valuable, have been hastily thrown together.7 Couperin would, indeed, not have been the first child prodigy to have had a neglected general education and when moving from notes to words he may have felt at a disadvantage. As far as criticism of his music is concerned Couperin was very defensive, taking issue with those whom he describes as despicable ‘fault-finders’.8 Almost as though to bolster his self-esteem, on several occasions he points to his position as a court musician and his easy relationship with the king and members of the royal family.

Couperin seemed as much at home in organ loft as in royal apartment, between the city of Paris and the palace of Versailles. Yet while the construction of the new palace had began in the year of Couperin’s birth it was to be fourteen years before Versailles was able to accommodate the whole court, which moved there permanently in 1682, and eleven years after that before Couperin was to work there. In the meantime Louis, as well as visiting his royal residences outside the capital, lived at the Louvre and the Tuileries, both palaces having undergone considerable renovation to make them attractive enough for a king who disliked Paris and who sought every opportunity to visit Versailles to inspect what was to be the most enduring monument to his long reign. What we associate with musical life at Versailles – its ballets, operas, balls, and other diversions – had already been rehearsed, so to speak, in Paris, the difference being one of greater splendour in the new surroundings and, as the years passed, of increasing formality and insularity.

The decade into which Couperin was born had witnessed the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal reign (Mazarin having died in 1661, the young monarch decided to rule without a First Minister) and the proliferation of those royal academies that were to be the chief propagators of the king’s image as conquering hero, benign and wise ruler, God’s chosen instrument, and patron of all the arts and sciences. Medals and inscripti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Couperin and his Times
• 2 The French Lyrical Style
• 3 Italian Influences on the French Classical Style
• 4 Sacred Music
• 5 Chamber Music
• 6 Works for Harpsichord
• A List of Works by François Couperin
• B Prefaces to Couperin’s Works
• C Entry on François Couperin in Titon du Tillet’s Le Parnasse françois (Paris, 1732, Suppl. 1743) pp. 664–6
• D From Chapter 6 of Paris Ceremonial: Of organists and organs, for the use of all collegiate, parish and other churches of the city and diocese of Paris, by Martin Sonnet, Priest, Paris 1662, pp. 534–9
• E Text and Translation of the Lessons from the First Nocturn of Matins for Maundy Thursday
• F Dance Forms in Couperin’s Music
• G Couperin’s Table of Ornaments
• Bibliography
• Index