II
The art of Couperin is flawless, the charm of his music not to be described. It has that quality of perfection with which Nature marks her smallest flowers. It is the miniature counterpart in music of a perfected system of living, of the court life of France under Louis XIV.
Scarlatti was a rover. He tried his fortune in Italy, in England, in Portugal and Spain. He won it by the exhibition of his extraordinary and startling powers. He was on the alert to startle, his tribute the bravas and mad applause of his excited hearers. He was the virtuoso in an old sense of the word, the man with his powers consciously developed to the uttermost. Bach, on the other hand, was an introspective, mighty man, immeasurably greater than his surroundings, fathomless, personal, suggestive. Between them stands Couperin, for the greater part of his life in the intimate service of the most brilliant court the world has ever seen, delicate in health, perfect in etiquette, wise and tender.
Of his life little need be said. He was born in Paris on November 10, 1668, the son of Charles Couperin, himself a musician and brother to Louis and François Couperin, disciples of the great Chambonnières. The father died about a year after his son was born, and the musical education of the young François seems to have been undertaken by his uncle, François, and later by Jacques Thomelin, organist in the king’s private chapel in Versailles. Practically nothing is known of his youth, and, though it is certain that he was for many years organist at the church of St. Gervais in Paris, as his uncle and even his grandfather had been before him, the time at which he took up his duties there has not been exactly determined. There is on record, however, the account of a meeting held on the twenty-sixth of December, 1693, at Versailles, at which Louis XIV heard Couperin play and chose him from other competitors to succeed Thomelin as his private organist. Thenceforth he passed his life in service of the king and later of the regent. He died in Paris in 1733, after several years of ill health.
The great François was, no doubt, an unusually skillful organist, but his fame rests upon his work for the clavecin, the French harpsichord, and his book of instruction for that instrument. His duties at court were various. He says himself that for twenty years he had the honor to be with the king, and to teach, almost at the same time, Monseigneur le Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, and six princes or princesses of the royal house.
In his preface to the Concerts royaux he informs us that chamber concerts were given in the king’s presence on Sunday afternoons at Versailles, and that he was commanded to write music for them and that he himself played the clavecin at them. His book on the art of playing the clavecin, written in 1716, was dedicated to the king. By all accounts he was a beloved and highly prized teacher and performer. And neither his pupils nor his fame were confined solely to the court.
There is no doubt that he was a public favorite and that he published his pieces for the clavecin to satisfy a general demand. Also in a measure to safeguard his music. For at that time instrumental pieces were not often published, but were circulated in manuscript copies in which gross errors grew rapidly as weeds; and which, moreover, were common booty to piratical publishers, especially in the Netherlands. So Couperin took minute care in preparing his music for his public. Each set of pieces was furnished with a long preface, nothing in the engraving was left to chance, the books were beautifully bound so that all might be in keeping with the dainty and exquisite art of the music itself. Since his day his pieces were never published again until Madame Farrenc included the four great sets in her famous Trésor des Pianistes (1861-72). This edition was, according to Chrysander,[16] very carelessly prepared and is full of inaccuracies. Chrysander planned a new, accurate and complete edition, to be edited by Brahms, of which unhappily only one volume, containing Couperin’s first two books, ever came to print.
The original editions being now rare and priceless, and hardly serviceable to the average student on account of the confusing obsolete clef signs, it is to be hoped that before long Chrysander’s plan will be carried out and the almost forgotten treasures of Couperin’s clavecin music be revealed in their great beauty to the lover of music.
Couperin published in all five books of pièces de clavecin. Of these the first appeared early in the century and is not commonly reckoned among his best works. The other four sets appeared respectively in 1713, 1716, 1722, and 1730.
Each book contains several sets of pieces grouped together in ordres, according to key.[17] The canon of the suite is wholly disregarded and there is very little of the spirit of it. The first ordre, it is true, has as the first six pieces an allemande, two courantes, a sarabande, a gavotte, and a gigue; but there are twelve pieces in addition, of which only three are named dances. The second ordre, too, has an allemande, two courantes, and a sarabande at the beginning; but there follow eighteen more pieces of which only four are strictly dances. The fourth ordre is without true dance forms; so are the sixth, the seventh, the tenth, and others. Even the orthodox dances are given secondary titles, or the dance name is itself secondary. In fact, not only by including within one ordre many more pieces than ever found place within the suite, but by the very character of the pieces themselves, Couperin is dissociated from the suite writers.
He wrote in the preface to his first book of pieces,[18] that in composing he always had a particular subject before his eyes. This accounts for the titles affixed to most of his pieces. We have already referred to ‘battle’ pieces of earlier composers, and to Kuhnau’s narratives in music. Couperin’s music is not of the same sort. The majority of his titled pieces are pure music, admirable and charming in themselves. They are seldom copies. They make their appeal, or they are intelligible, not by what they delineate, but by what they express or suggest. The piece as a whole gives an impression, not the special figures or traits of which it is composed.
Let us consider a few of many types. Take what have been often called the portraits of court ladies. In these we cannot by any effort of the imagination find likenesses. It would be ludicrous to try. As ladies may differ in temperament from each other, so do these little pieces differ. There is the allemande L’Auguste, which is a dignified, somewhat austere dance piece in G minor; another, La Laborieuse, in a complicated contrapuntal style unusual with him. There are three sarabandes called La Majesteuse, La Prude, and La Lugubre, impressive, meagre, and profound in turn. These pieces are hardly personal, nor have they peculiar characteristics apart from the spirit which is clear in each of them.
Another type of portrait fits its title a little more tangibly. There is La Mylordine, in the style of an English jig; La Diane, which is built up on the fanfare figure always associated with the hunt; La Diligente, full of bustling finger work. Les Nonnettes are blonde and dark, the blondes, oddly enough, in minor, the dark in major.
Many others are so purely music, delicate and tender, that the titles seem more to be a gallant tribute to so and so, rather than the names of prototypes in the flesh. La Manon, La Babet, La fleurie, ou la tendre Nanette, L’Enchanteresse, La tendre Fanchon, and many others are in no way program music; nor can they ever be interpreted as such, since no man can say what charming girl, two centuries dead, may have suggested their illusive features.
It is these ‘portraits’ particularly which are Couperin’s own new contribution to the art of music. So individual is the musical life in each one, so special and complete its character, so full of sentiment and poetry, that, small as it is, it may stand alone as a perfect and enduring work of art. It has nothing to do with the suite or with any of the cyclic forms. Here are the first flowers from that branch of music from which later were to grow the nocturnes of Field, the Moments musicals of Schubert, the preludes of Chopin.
Between these and the few pieces which are frankly almost wholly dependent upon a program are a great number of others lightly suggestive of their titles. Sometimes it is only in general character. Les vendangeuses and Les moissoneurs do not seem so particularly related to wine-gathering or harvesting that the titles might not be interchanged; but both have something of a peasant character. In Les abeilles and in Le moucheron the characterization is finer. The pleasant humming of the bees is reproduced in one, the monotonous whirring of the gnat in the other. Les bergeries is simply pastoral, Les matelots Provençales is a lively march, followed by a horn-pipe. Les papillons is not unlike the little piece so named in the Schumann Carnaval, though here it means but butterflies. There are some imitative pieces which are in themselves charming music, such as Les petits moulins à vent, Le réveille-matin, Le carillon de Cythère, and Les ondes, with its undulating figures and fluid ornamentation.
Finally the program music is in various degrees programmistic. A little group of pieces called Les Pèlerines (Pilgrims) begins with a march, to be played gaily. Then comes a little movement to represent the spirit of alms-giving, in a minor key, to be played tenderly; and this is followed by a cheerful little movement of thanks, to which is added a lively coda. The whole is rather an expression of moods than a picture of actions. Les petits ages is in some respects more literal. The first movement, La muse naissante, is written in a syncopated style, the right hand always following the left, which may well express weakness and hesitation. L’adolescente, the third movement, is a lively rondo in vigorous gavotte rhythm.
Two sets are entirely program music. One of these, Les Bacchanales, has a march (pésament, sans lenteur) of the gray-clad ones; then three movements expressive of the delights of wine, the tenderness to which it warms and the madness to which it enflames. The music is not of itself interesting. More remarkable, though devoid of musical worth save a good bit of the comical, is Les fastes de la grande et ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx. These records or tales are divided into five acts, which represent the notables and judges of the kingdom, the old men and the beggars (over a drone bass), the jugglers, tumblers and mountebanks, with their bears and monkeys, the cripples (those with one arm or leg played by the right hand, those who limp played by the left), and, finally, the confusion and flight of all, brought about by the drunkards and the bears and monkeys.