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.