Tombeau de M. Blancrocher

Louis Couperin (1626-61) is often regarded as the founding member of France’s greatest musical dynasty. He is the uncle of François Couperin, who would surpass him in popularity by the early 1700s. As a young man Louis settled in Paris with a position as organist and viol player in the royal chapel. Most of his compositions are for keyboard, and he almost certainly met and studied briefly with the great German composer Johann Jakob Froberger while the latter was passing through Paris. Despite such cosmopolitan influences, Couperin remained a French composer through and through. Perhaps his most significant contributions to music history relate to the prelude non mesuré (or “unmeasured prelude”), a work without conventional indications of meter or rhythm. This is largely true. But as in the F-major prelude, which we will hear, the main unmeasured section is often followed by a more rhythmic passage. Couperin used slurs to help indicate note grouping, though even today performers differ in their interpretations of his markings.
At the tail end of tonight’s harpsichord selections, we hear Couperin’s Tombeau de M. Blancrocher. It is one of those works that cause us to resist the ingrained belief that all laments or memorials must be in a somber minor key. This tombeau is rather gentle and sweet from the start. There are two moments when the music gets “stuck” as it fixates on a certain C-minor progression. Like the preludes, Couperin could exert a great deal of freedom in the tombeau, which represented no set structure and offered a chance to work outside the confines of the baroque dance suite. Incidentally, Froberger also wrote a tombeau for this same Blancrocher. It included a written preface explaining in detail how he died; Froberger graphically depicts the poor monsieur’s fatal fall down a flight of steps with a long descending scale.

(c) Jason Stell