The clavier-players adopted this custom all the more willingly as their instrument, so full of resource and so capable of expressing shades of meaning, allowed them to raise these titles from their decorative and shadowy existence into genuine programme-inscriptions. We see this remarkable process clearly exhibited in Chambonnières, a clavier-player who towers in solitary grandeur, and marks an epoch by his introduction of the clavier suite, by the clear adaptation of his dances to the clavier, by the first realistic use of these titles, and by the establishment of a precise character in the clavier-piece, which holds its ground even to-day. He is not, like William Bird, the original of modern clavier-music, but its actual father, from whom a straight unbroken line stretches down to the present day.
Jacques Champion de Chambonnières sprang from an old family of organists, and was born at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The year of his death seems to be fixed as 1670. Titon des Tilliers, who in 1732 wrote his “Parnasse Français,” a work of great antiquarian research, says of Chambonnières that he played the organ very well, but the clavier with special genius, and that his pieces as well as his execution gained a considerable renown. His fame increased until Louis XIV. appointed him his chief clavier-master; and his compositions appeared in two volumes. In Titon’s times these pieces were still admired. Copies of these works are very rarely to be found to-day; but the great French historian, Farrenc, had the good luck to get possession of one of them, and he has freshly edited it in his famous collection of old clavier-music, “Le Trésor des Pianistes.” While Attaignant still bound his dances together according to their classes, there are here mixed sets of dance-pieces after the example of the lutenists, in simple setting, but with the adornments of the time. The succession is not yet so elaborate as in later suites, and courantes stand often one on top of another. The construction of the melodies has still a certain gentle, unforced charm, which gains our attention though its influence is scarcely irresistible. The canonic element appears strongly only in the Gigues, three-time dances with a lively movement. Every piece has its dance-inscription, and some have in addition their special titles, as La Dunkerque, La Verdinguette, la Toute Belle, Iris; or more distinct indications as the Slider, the Barricades, the Young Zephyrs, the Peasant Girl. A Pavan with slow conclusion in three sections is called “The Conversation of the Gods.” Here the sliding, the zephyr, and the peasant, are easily to be recognised in the music. Nevertheless, complete liberation from the merely decorative framework of the fantastic title was not yet attained.
The man to accomplish the great work was François Couperin, called by his time “the Great.” The piano-player of to-day hardly knows his name; and yet it is only two hundred years since men spoke of him in the same breath with Molière and Watteau. A genial, smiling, clean-shaven man—so the somewhat unsatisfactory portraits depict him—with half-length peruke, polite and yet slightly subtle, with a certain priestly sobriety of demeanour, his light fingers run over the hundred adornments of his spinet-pieces. He seems half astonished at his fame, and wholly ignorant that a whole art is one day to rear itself on his shoulders. It was only with difficulty that the pressure of his friends induced him to print his dances, which he wrote for himself in memory of his experiences, or the preludes which he wrote as exercises for his numerous pupils, or the concertos which he composed for Louis XIV.’s Sunday musical evenings. He watched with painful anxiety the tedious process of engraving. As we to-day inspect these prints, we are struck by the joyous naïveté of the art, by the graphic awkwardness with which the notes overflow the five-lined limits of the clef, and by the soul which breathes from the delicately-engraved prefaces. He thinks that his portraits are accurate pictures, and thankfully acknowledges his indebtedness to the intimate character of his instrument. His notes as to execution, his “gaiement,” “tendrement,” and “sans lenteur” (he is always warning the performer against slowness) and all the other guides to interpretation which he inserts, he excuses by saying that the pieces seemed to express something which could not be embraced in accurate language. In spite of all this pedantry of teaching he appeals to the sensitive musical appreciation which will find the right way of interpretation; and in spite of all this reference to the spiritual momentum of music he is a stern disciplinarian in form and technique. In the midst of the utmost freedom of movement we discern a strong feeling for style, just as in the contemporary architecture the most playful license of the rococo is strangely mingled with the most sober attention to classical rules.
François Couperin, “Le Grand.”
The Couperins, like the Chambonnières, were a widely spread musical family. It was old Chambonnières who, in a noteworthy fashion, had discovered Louis Couperin, the uncle of François. One morning the father of François and his two brothers who lived in the neighbourhood of the old master, brought a serenade for his inspection. Chambonnières was struck with it, asked after the composer, brought him to Paris, and thus laid the foundation of the fame of the family from which the great perfecter of his work was to spring. François was born in 1668. He lost his father when he was ten years old, but in Tomelin, the organist of St Jacques-la-Boucherie, he found a teacher and a second father. His life, as its details have come down to us, was simple and uneventful. He became organist of St Gervais and chamber-clavierist to the king, and died in 1733. But the dedications of his works enable us to conceive him more definitely. He appears in them as the professional artist and man of the world, pampered by noble ladies, and kissing their hands with graceful flatteries. We see him as he moves in the salons of Paris, which were then beginning to realise their mission. He is the admired artist of the court which he charms with his chamber-music; the intimate of the Duke of Burgundy and of the Dauphin, of Anne and Louis of Bourbon, giving his lessons and receiving pensions of a thousand francs. A true lady’s man, he thinks the hands of women better adapted to the clavier than those of men. He is the first to sanction ladies in his own family as clavier-players. His daughter Marguerite Antoinette, and his cousin Louise, played at court. Marguerite even became the teacher of the Princesses, and was official royal clavier-player—in France certainly, and probably in the world, the first woman to hold such a post.
The music of Couperin has something of this feminine quality. It is more truly “virginal” music than that which Queen Elizabeth once played in her quiet chamber. But its grace is not hidden; it is coquettish and conscious of itself. It is the high style of grace which belongs to the French culture of the eighteenth century. A spinet stands on a smooth parquet, and the ladies sit around with their roguish eyes and tip-tilted noses, smiling at all the well-recognised allusions, as the then flourishing pastel-art has fixed them for us in light colours. It is light, entertaining music, in which the thoughts of their own accord run on bright and resplendent paths. Short pieces; courantes with their lively, scarcely broken triple-rhythms; allemandes in their decorous and interwoven quadruple time; minuets with their pretty, melodious triple rhythm; chaconnes and passacaglie rearing their piquant erections on slow-moving basses; sarabands in their triple movements and interesting national colouring; gavottes with their graceful movement in soft two-time, the hurrying fugal gigues, and all the many other unnamed dances—all these give the ear, without exertion, a subtle delight. The rondo-form takes a supreme rank; it is constantly growing from a simple round-dance with refrain into a genuine clavier-composition, seeming to forebode the sonata which still remains unborn within it. Its theme, like a Ritornel, recurs among the “couplets” or episodical passages; but it is only seldom that the couplets set themselves in conscious opposition to the theme. Usually they adopt its rhythm or the character of its melody, and play with it until, neatly and gracefully, they glide back into the theme itself. There is no iron rigidity of thematic handling. A delicate colour-sense holds the parts together. Couperin does not regulate his pieces according to any definite scheme of dance-successions; he binds the dance and the non-dance, the piece in one or more sections, together into one bouquet which he offers to his lady-friends, often with a polite dedication appended, under the general title of “Ordre.” Twenty-seven such “Ordres,” in four volumes, were published by him between 1713 and 1730.
