French Harpsichord Music: Spanning generations The founding father of the French harpsichord tradition was Jacques Champion de Chambonnières (c.1601/2–1672) who adopted the name by which he is known from the country estate of his mother’s family, possibly to distinguish himself from his musician father also called Jacques and perhaps also to bolster his pretensions to nobility. His exact date of birth is unknown but cannot have been much later than 1602 since his parents married in 1601 and he was granted the reversion of his father’s court position in 1611, by which time he must have been old enough to demonstrate a genuine musical talent. He became a gentleman of the bedchamber to Louis XIII in 1632 and by 1638, already acknowledged as ‘the ultimate master’ of the harpsichord, was sharing his father’s official duties at court where he cultivated a talent as a dancer (he was still performing at court ballets in his fifties in the company of Louis XIV). In the early 1640s he began to organise regular public concerts for which the audience paid an entrance fee, the Assemblées des honnêtes curieux, becoming perhaps the first professional promoter, but attempts to widen his horizons beyond Paris and Versailles by seeking employment with Queen Christina of Sweden and at the electoral court at Brandenburg came to nothing. He was possibly the teacher of D’Anglebert (who composed a tombeau for him) and gave valuable support to the Couperin brothers – Louis, François the Elder and Charles, who came to his notice when they had visited him in 1650 to perform on his name day. His fortunes, both professional and financial, began to decline in the 1650s: in 1657 he failed to be appointed harpsichord teacher to the young Louis XIV and in 1662 resigned his position as court harpsichordist (selling the reversionary right to D’Anglebert), having been forced out according to some accounts because he refused to play basso continuo in the court orchestra which would have entailed subordination to Lully. In 1670 he obtained a royal privilege to engrave harpsichord music and the two books he produced were the first printed volumes of harpsichord since 1531 2
(his printer Gérard Jollain pioneering the technique of music engraving). This represented a crucial development in the transmission of harpsichord music which until then had generally been through manuscript copies which were susceptible to error and deliberate alteration (something about which Chambonnières and virtually all his successors complained). Harpsichord music now moved from a fluid performative tradition to one in which the music was fixed in definitive version, including the notation of ornaments. The printed books contain sixty of his c.150 known works and are ordered into groups of between four and eight fully ornamented works in the same keys (whereas in the main manuscript in which his works survive they are arranged according to type – allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, gigues etc. – with courantes far outnumbering all the rest). Jean-Henri d’Anglebert (1629–1691) was the son of a prosperous shoemaker of Bar-le Duc in Lorraine and by 1659 was established in Paris (he is referred to as a bourgeois de Paris in his marriage contract of that year) where he was organist at church of St Honoré and in 1661 harpsichordist to Philippe, Duke of Orleans (younger brother of Louis XIV). Unlike Chambonnières, he had a good relationship with Lully, becoming godfather to his eldest son, and did not disdain to play continuo for him in the court orchestra. He purchased the reversion of Chambonnières’ post for his own son Jean-Baptiste-Henry who succeeded him in 1674 when he moved to the employment of Marie-Anna-Victoria, wife of the Dauphin. In 1689 he published a collection of Pièces de clavecin dedicated to the Princess de Conti (Louis’ daughter by his mistress Louise de La Vallière), a gifted player herself for whom many of the works may have been specially composed. His intention to publish a second volume was frustrated by his death in 1691 but many other works are preserved in manuscript including several unique arrangements of works for lute. The printed volume contains four suites in G and D major and minor (he was at pains to point out in the preface that he had composed in all the others), each (apart from the D minor) beginning with an unmeasured but precisely notated prelude followed by dance movements and 3
arrangements of orchestral works by Lully (which are played here separately, on CD3). Its most remarkable feature is the comprehensive table of ornaments and their notation marks which was to be more or less copied by Bach. Gaspard Le Roux (?–c.1707) is a shadowy figure of whom not much is known prior to the publication of his only volume in 1705, around two years before his death. This contains seven groupings of dance movements in the same key, four of which open with an unmeasured prelude, with each grouping of different length and composition. Unusually, he includes at the foot of the page (apart from for the preludes) an alternative version of the music in three staves, thereby offering performance options of the pieces as an instrumental trio, for two harpsichords (at the end of the book there is gigue fully written out as such together with contrepartie lines for some of the pieces) or, as suggested in the preface, for the player to sing the top line while playing the bottom two. The book contains the first examples of harpsichord works with nonspecific fanciful titles, a practice derived from the lute tradition, in which the subject is always feminine regardless of contextual gender. Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676–1749) was the son of Dominique Clérambault, a member of the 24 violons du roi of Louis XIV whose family had served as musicians to the French royal family for generations. In 1707 he became organist at the Grands Augustins in Paris and through his association with Mme de Maintenon, whose concerts he supervised, was appointed organist in 1714 at the girls school she had established at Saint-Cyr, where he trained the choir. He is best known for his organ works and cantatas and published one book of harpsichord music in 1704 containing two suites. Louis Marchand (1669–1732) was born in Lyons and arrived in Paris sometime before 1689, where he apparently carried all before him, reputedly being offered every available vacant post in the city, drawing large crowds wherever he played and acquiring his court position without undergoing the usual selection procedure. Even if such stories exaggerate reality, he was certainly a virtuoso performer, if not a very 4
sympathetic character, who had difficult relationships with his fellow musicians (against whom he intrigued) and his wife. After she had left him on the grounds of infidelity and assault, she was awarded half his official salary whereupon Marchand is said on one occasion to have stopped playing halfway through a mass, telling Louis XIV that if she was to receive half his salary she could play half the service. This may have been the reported ‘impertinence’ which led to his being ‘banished’ from France in 1713, but it is more probable that he left voluntarily to escape his financial difficulties. He spent the next four years touring Germany but left the country hurriedly in 1717, supposedly to avoid meeting Bach in a harpsichord duel which was due to take place in Dresden in September of that year (although the precise circumstances surrounding this event, if in fact it was ever actually arranged, remain unclear). He returned to France where he held a post at the Église des Cordeliers until his death in 1732. Little of Marchand’s music – vocal or instrumental – survives, as he seemed to have had little interest in posterity, publishing only two volumes of harpsichord music in 1702 and 1703 respectively, each containing a single suite in what had become the standard configuration, with preludes to each written out with precise note values. François Couperin (1668–1733) known as Le Grand to distinguish him from his uncle, but also in recognition of his stature and the vast range and number of his surviving works (unlike Marchand, Couperin ensured the publication of virtually all his harpsichord works) was born into a musical dynasty stretching back to his greatgrandfather in the 1580s. His father Charles was organist at St Gervais in Paris, succeeding his brother Louis, and when Charles died aged forty in 1679, the churchwardens reserved the position for the 11-year-old François to take up when he reached 18 (although records show that he was in fact only 15 when he formally assumed his duties). He was taught by Jacques Thomelin, one of the organists at the Chapelle Royale, and succeeded him in that position in 1693, having been personally selected by Louis XIV. The following year he became tutor to the Dauphin who was to remain his pupil until his death in 1707, and also taught the children of the royal 5
household. In 1717 he assumed the duties but not the title of court harpsichordist (which was retained by the ineffective Jean-Baptiste-Henry d’Anglebert) and retained the post for his daughter Marguerite-Antoinette. She took it up in 1730 although the official title only became hers on the death of D’Anglebert in 1737, three years after her father. As he grew older Couperin was dogged by ill health (possibly hereditary – both his father and uncle died relatively young) and in 1723 he passed on his position in the organ loft at St Gervais to his cousin, whose descendants continued to hold it in unbroken succession until 1826. Couperin published nothing apart from a couple of early organ masses until 1713, when he was 45. He commented in the preface to the first Livre of harpsichord works that he had been prevented from doing so by a combination of ‘various enterprises too glorious to give me reason to complain’ (by which he meant his several royal duties), ill health and a ‘concern for exactitude’. His desire to achieve accurate reproduction of his works was equalled by a demand that the player remain faithful to the printed score: in the preface to the third Livre of 1722 he condemns liberties taken with the ornaments and markings as ‘an unpardonable oversight’ and requires performers to ‘observe to the letter all that I have marked, adding and removing nothing’. The days of free improvisation were well and truly over! Between 1713 and 1730 Couperin issued four Livres of pieces arranged in a total of 27 Ordres, a term he used in preference to ‘suite’ in recognition of their departure from the pattern set by his predecessors. As he jokingly remarked: ‘You want an order? Here is an Ordre, although you might call it a Désordre just as well’. The first Livre, which collects works written over the previous 20 years, contains dance movements together with several descriptive character pieces of a type which had been used sparingly if at all by his predecessors, but were to become the predominant feature of his harpsichord music. These titles are often regarded as labels unrelated to the inherent properties of the piece but Couperin stated explicitly: ‘I always had a subject in mind when composing these pieces … thus the titles correspond to the ideas I 6
had’. Some are obvious references to individuals – friends, colleagues pupils, wellknown contemporaries – whose identities may not be obvious to modern eyes: one has to know that the Duke of Burgundy was also Seigneur d’Ausone to know who is meant by L’Ausoniéne (II Livre/8ême Ordre). Not all such pieces attempt to capture the personality of the person concerned (in the manner of Elgar’s Enigma Variations) and many no doubt have a simple dedicatory purpose; but others, such as La Superbe ou la Forqueray (III/17) may indeed have been intended as musical portraits. La Fine Madelon and La Douce Jeanneton (IV/10) probably refer to Jeanne Beauval, actress at La Comédie-Française and the part of Madelon in Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules, the markings affectueusement for the former and plus voluptueusement the latter indicating the respective characteristics of the role and the person playing it. Contemporary idiom and vernacular now obscure many potential meanings or double meanings – are Les Nonèts (I/1), Les Vestales (III/16) and Soeur Monique (III/18) spotless virgins or their exact opposites? Easier to access are those which are clearly representational: Le Moucheron (II/6) evoking the buzzing of a fly, Le Réveil-matin (I/4) the ringing of a bell and Les Moissonneurs (II/6) the rhythmic action of the reapers. However, the meanings of many pieces are and must remain enigmatic – what exactly are Les Baricades mistérieuses (II/6) and what is the significance of La Bandoline (I/5), a hair-styling gel made from quince seeds? Sometimes it may be better to take Couperin’s declaration that there is an idea behind each work with a pinch of salt and accept that some titles are simple jeux d’esprit in which the lack of point is the point. Not every piece is an isolated miniature – Les Folies françoises (III/13) is an elaborate multilayered sequence in the form of passacaglia variations in which each section represents a coloured cloak worn at a costumed masquerade which in turn characterises a different quality or temperament. Les Fastes de la grande et ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx (II/11) is a mini-drama in four acts depicting the dispute in which Couperin was himself caught up in 1693 between the Ménestrandise, the ancient guild of musicians (which now included all kinds of low street performers) and the more 7
refined harpsichord players over their respective rights. None of the Ordres contains a prelude but following Couperin’s suggestion, the eight measured examples he included in his instructional manual L’Art de toucher le clavecin of 1716 are included at the beginning of the first of the Ordres that shares their key. Antoine Forqueray (1672–1745) and Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699–1782), father and son, were both viola da gamba virtuosi and successively musicians to the royal household on that instrument. Their relationship was tempestuous: Antoine arranged for Jean-Baptiste to be first imprisoned and then banished in 1725, but they were later reconciled, and Jean-Baptiste took over Antoine’s official position in 1742 three years before his death. In 1747 he published a set of suites of his father’s viol works (none of which have survived independently under Antoine’s name), adding his own figured bass accompaniment. As the Third Suite was apparently ‘incomplete’ he included three of his own compositions – La du Vaucel, La Angrave and La Morangis ou La Plissay, although since the other suites are of unequal length the reason for this is obscure. He simultaneously published an arrangement for harpsichord, fleshing out the viol line with occasional harmonies and elaborating the continuo with arpeggios and bass octaves. Jean-Baptiste is not known to have played the harpsichord so it is possible that his second wife Marie-Rose Dubois, who like his first wife (and his mother) was proficient on the instrument, may have assisted him in the process. No allowances were made when transcribing the viol works for the different nature of the two instruments, so as Jean-Baptiste points out in the preface many of the pieces sit rather low in the harpsichord’s range. It was said of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) that ‘his heart and soul were in his harpsichord; once he had shut its lid, there was no one home’ so it comes as a surprise that he left relatively little music for that instrument. He published a volume in 1706 on the strength of which he succeeded Marchand as organist at the church of the Jesuits where he stayed for three years before returning to his native Dijon in 1709. He spent the next twenty years working in provincial towns and cities as an organist 8
and orchestral musician before settling permanently in Paris in 1722, the year he published the Traité de l’harmonie, the first of his important and often controversial theoretical works. Despite his reputation, he failed to obtain a prestigious organ post and did not achieve a position at court until 1745 but was fortunate to be supported for many years by a wealthy and cultured patron of the arts, Popelinière, whose private orchestra he directed. In 1733 aged 50 he wrote the first of the operas on which his reputation now rests. While the 1706 harpsichord volume followed the convention of the period in structure and content, that of 1724 includes several character pieces (the second suite entirely made up of them) containing some remarkable depictions of emotions and natural phenomena – Le Rappel des Oiseaux, Les Tourbillons (the whirlwinds) – as well as some of the most technically difficult writing for harpsichord in the Baroque repertoire (e.g. Les Cyclopes, Les Niais de Sologne). The Nouvelles Suites of 1726–7 continue to mix dance and character pieces including Rameau’s most famous work La Poule and the revolutionary L’Enharmonique whose chromatic modulations expressed in enharmonic chord notation were as Rameau pointed out in the preface, entirely deliberate and ‘based on logic – it has the sanction of Nature herself’. In 1741 he produced the Pièces de clavecin en concerts for a trio of harpsichord plus violin/flute and viol/violin (here performed on the violin and viola da gamba), deliberately following the example of Mondonville who in 1731 had issued a set of pieces for harpsichord and violin in which the harpsichord rather than the violin plays the principal role. Rameau stated that the works in this volume would be equally effective on harpsichord alone and included four transcriptions for the solo instrument. Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (c.1705–1755) was born in Turin, where his father was on secondment from Versailles to the Court of Savoy as overseer of the gardens and the fountains, and only became a naturalised French citizen in 1751. He came to Paris in 1725 where he was involved in the theatre, working at the Opéra as master of music between 1730 and 1733 and later inspector general from 1753 and from 1748, at the Concert Spirituel as its director and at Court, where he was master of the music 9
of the royal chamber and tutor to the royal children. His only book for harpsichord was published in 1746 and contained works which, as he commented in the preface, are ‘capable of an enormous variety passing from tender to lively, from unaffected (simple) to grandiloquent (grand bruit), often in the same phrase’, as well as several operatic arrangements from Zaïde and Le Pouvoir de l’amour (that of La Chasse from Zaïde derives from a manuscript). Jacques Duphly (1715–1789), originally from Rouen, held several provincial organist posts before moving to Paris in 1742, where he gave up the organ to devote himself to the harpsichord, becoming a highly respected teacher of that instrument. He published four volumes of music (in 1744, 1748, 1756 and 1768 respectively); they contain material that sits recognisably within the tradition in which Chambonnières worked a century and a half before, and is equal in mastery to that produced by his more illustrious predecessors but which also includes features unknown to them in the 1768 volume, such as the Alberti bass. The 1756 volume includes pieces with an ad libitum part for violin which may have been intended as three movement ‘sonatas’, as well as a work – Les Grâces – in which the slight discontinuity between the hands, a well-established harpsichord technique, is unusually precisely notated in the music. After publication of the 1768 volume Duphly seems to have faded into obscurity and he died the day after the fall of the Bastille, which ushered in events that were to sweep away the world in which he and his predecessors had lived and worked, and in which the French harpsichord tradition had thrived. 훿 David Moncur
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More harpsichord music on Brilliant Classics
Neopolitan Keyboard Music 94992
Nichelmann: Harpsichord Sonatas 94809 2CD
Fitzwilliam Virginal Book Vol. 4 95254 2CD
Alberti: Complete Keyboard Music 95161 4CD
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