THE NEW COUPERIN
A NEGLECTED COMPOSER
By ERNEST NEWMAN
The Sunday Times,
Last Tuesday being the 200th anniversary of the death of François
Couperin—“Le Grand Couperin”—I was innocent enough to imagine that the various wireless
stations would do something worthy of the occasion. From London I could have
listened, had I been so disposed, to any amount of music by such great
composers as Brockett, von Blon, Czibulka, Ketelbey, Herbert L. Brown (“Let’s
call it a day”), Löhr, Ansell, Lincke, Reeves, Marks, Drigo, Eric Coates, Adam,
Siede, Ramsay, and Heykens. Of Couperin, however, not a note : though the
B.B.C., one would think, might at least have turned on, for the occasion, one
of the performers who used to work so conscientiously, between 6.30 and 7 on
certain evenings, at undermining the Foundations of Music. I had not much
better luck abroad. One or two Continental stations seemed to be dimly
conscious of the importance of the occasion; but after listening to some maddeningly
clumsy orchestral perversions of Couperin's delicate little works for the
clavecin, I decided that billiards—even my billiards—was better.
COMPLETE EDITION
Perhaps the people who compile wireless programmes were under the impression that Couperin was merely a writer of clavecin trifles which it was hardly worth broadcasting. Had they only known it, they could have had the choice of at least a dozen notable works, instrumental and vocal, on the large scale, that would have widened considerably the musical public’s notion of Couperin. To all but a few students, however, this other Couperin seems to be quite unknown. I was curious enough, the other day, to turn up the pages devoted to him in about a dozen of the leading histories of music; the result was the discovery that not a single historian, German, French, Italian, or English, really knew the Couperin about whom he was talking so glibly. There may be a little excuse for them, for some of the material was hard to get at until quite lately. The clavecin works are known to the majority of pianists only through the half-dozen or so favourite pieces that appear in those quaint publications known as Albums, or Trésors, or what not, though Brahms and Chrysander brought out, many years ago, what is virtually, if not actually, a complete edition of these works. The French publishers have issued some of the less-known works of Couperin in recent years, but few students seem to know of these editions.
At last, however, thanks to the munificence of an Australian lady, Mrs. Louise Dyer, we have a uniform edition, in sumptuous form, of the complete Couperin (Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, Paris, twelve volumes; the edition is limited to 325 sets, and the price is 2,250 francs). The issue is under the general editorship of M. Maurice Cauchie, who has had the assistance of such specialists as M. Paul Brunold (whose “Traité des signes et agréments employés par les clavecinistes français des xviie et xviiie siècles” is the standard work on this subject), M. André Schaeffner, M. André Tessier, and M. Amédée Gastoué. The first volume contains Couperin’s didactic works (“L'Art de toucher le Clavecin,” etc.); the second, third, fourth and fifth the clavecin pieces, the sixth the organ “Pièces en trio” and “Pieces de Viole”, the eleventh and twelfth the vocal music.
Of all this music, with the exception of the clavecin pièces, the historians
seem to have known practically nothing at first hand. It has always been said
that Couperin, though the organist of the
MASTER OF MINIATURE
The various editorial introductions, the editing of the texts, the explanation of the ornaments, the realisation of the figured basses, and all the other points of scholar-ship connected with a publication of this kind, reach the high standard to be expected from such experts as M. Cauchie and his collaborators. I am glad to find that certain notes that always struck me as dubious in the Brahms-Chrysander edition of the clavecin works have been corrected in the present edition. So far as one can judge, very few errors have been made in this latter, though I have come across one accidental in the clavecin works that seems to me to be a misprint, while in one of the sacred vocal works the tenor clef sign appears on one page instead of the bass sign.
The clavecin works will require no introduction to serious students of Couperin, though they are still not generally ranked at their true value, partly because few pianists know them in their entirety, partly because there have been so-called historians of music whose perceptions have been rather too blunt for them to appreciate either the quality or the scope of these works. There is nothing in the whole range of music to surpass, in its own way, either the exquisite workmanship or the variety of expression in these miniatures. Couperin is one of the supreme masters of keyboard style : even Chopin, though he may challenge him in this respect, does not surpass him, consideration being taken of the fact that Chopin had under his hands an instrument of a wider range of timbres and tints and washes of tone than the Clavecin. On his square inch or two of ivory, with his tiny stylus, Couperin can achieve the most astonishing variety of expression. His soul is the reflex of the very soul of the instrument; by means of the cunning placing of a single note here rather than there, by a thousand niceties of accent, of cross-accent, of rhythm, he performs the apparently impossible feat of creating a hundred different textures upon what the modern world mistakenly regards as an instrument of woefully limited capacity. His range of psychological expression in these miniatures is equally astounding. To ears that have been coarsened or deafened by the volume and the vehemence of modern music these two hundred and forty-or-so works may all sound very much alike; but anyone who has disciplined himself to acquire a sense of the scale of values upon which the French clavecinists worked is conscious of the differences between one Couperin miniature and another.
LARGE-SCALE WORKS
But we have only to read through the whole of the twelve volumes of this new edition to realise that the Couperin of the clavecin pieces Is only one-third of the total Couperin : and the other two-thirds are a revelation. The total Couperin is no more to be found in the clavecin works than the total Bralims is to be found in the smaller piano pieces; and to be ignorant of the Couperin of the large-scale instrumental works and the sacred music is, ceteris paribus, like being ignorant of the Brahms of the Symphonies, the Piano Concertos, the German Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody, and the “Song of Destiny.” After a study of these other works of Couperin we are once more astonished at his variety. He is no longer the exquisite miniaturist, turning an eye that is alternately amused and tenderly sympathetic upon the little foibles of the people around him, and fixing their physiognomy for all time in a thumb-nail sketch. He is a thinker, working large-handedly with big ideas and big material.
BACH AND COUPERIN
The composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not so inane as those of the present day, who, terrorised as they have been by a criticism that is as stupid as it is ignorant, fear nothing so much as not being “original,” nothing so much as having it said of them that they owe anything whatever to any of their great predecessors. The great men of the past had no hesitation in learning from each other. Bach, as we know, greatly admired Couperin. M. Bouvet tells us that the tradition persisted in the Taskin family that there had been some correspondence, now unfortunately lost, between Bach and Couperin, and that it is probable that the new keyboard fingering of the German master had been influenced by the treatise of his French colleague; and playing through the whole of the Couperin clavecin pieces again lately I was struck by several passages that may quite possibly have lingered in Bach's memory when he was writing the Forty-eight.
Couperin himself would have laughed politely in your face, had you
censured him for being an eclectic. That was precisely what he prided himself
on being. He had an equal admiration for Corelli and for Lully; and his own
desire was to reconcile the Italian and the French schools and build upon their
joint foundation. He has given us an illustration, that has its quaint
features, of this in two instrumental works: “Le Parnasse, ou l'Apothéose de
Corelli” and a “Concert instrumental sous le titre d'Apothéose composé à la
mémoire Immortelle de l'incomparable Monsieur de Lulli.” Each composer, on his
arrival at
MANY STRINGS TO HIS BOW
While the larger works of Couperin show him to be susceptible to what is best in both Italian and French music, what strikes the student of to-day in them is in the flrst place the difference between these larger works en masse on the one hand and the clavecin works on the other, and in the second place the difference, equally remarkable, between the instrumental works and the vocal ones. Evidently Couperin had more strings to his bow than the “historians” have imagined. What are called the chamber works in the new edition—i.e., suites for strings (for which other instruments can often be substituted) and clavecin—take us into a completely different world from, and a larger world than, the clavecin miniatures. His sentiment, his gravity, his gaiety, his irony, have now a wider sweep and a more solid texture. These works await the coming of some arranger of genius who shall score them discretly for a small orchestra : in that form they would make welcome additions, in our concert repertory, to the suites of Bach and Handel and to those that have been made by Mottl, and others from Glück, Grétry and so on.
We come upon quite a fresh manifestation of Couperin's genius in the religious works to Latin words. Here he not only sows an earnestness and a depth of feeling that will astonish those who think that the only Couperin is the Couperin of the clavecin miniatures, but reveals himself as a dramatic painter of words and a harmonist of unusual boldness : some of his chords and modulations, indeed, are so audacious, relative to his epoch, that we should be inclined to believe there has been an error in the engraving were it not that his figured bass puts the construction of the chords beyond dispute. There are several of these vocal works that might be given in the cathedral or the concert-room to-day; and when these and the larger instrumental works become known, the public will realise that the total Couperin was a far greater figure than has hitherto been supposed.