A Philosophy Lesson with Francois Couperin? Notes on a Newly Discovered Canon

Secular vocal music makes up only a small proportion of François Couperin's surviving output. If we exclude the intermèdes from Myrtil et Mélicerte, whose attribution to Couperin is not universally accepted,¹ it mainly comprises small-scale pieces intended for domestic use. Until recently the list included only a dozen items—nine pieces published in Ballard's monthly Recueils d'airs sérieux et à boire between 1697 and 1712, and three vocal trios in manuscript, two of them canons à 3.²

Several of Couperin's biographers have sensed in this small body of domestic music an importance over and above the intrinsic worth of individual pieces. 'While these petits riens occupy a humble place in Couperin's canon', writes Edward Higginbottom, 'they reveal much about the sources of his musical style.'³ For Wilfrid Mellers 'the conventions which he employed [there] have ... an implicit bearing on almost everything he wrote.'⁴ Moreover, the secular vocal music reveals aspects of his personality not apparent elsewhere. It is thus good to report that within the past few years two further pieces have been added to the list. Both are, in fact, canons: Les agioteurs au désespoir for five voices, discovered by François-Pierre Goy,⁵ and thethree-part Héraclite, Démocrite, Diogène, the subject of the present article (illus.1).

The source of this last is an untitled manuscript collection now in the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels (MS III 1509 Mus., p.260). This miscellany includes 74 pieces, mostly airs sérieux or airs à boire; indeed, many also appear in the Ballard series mentioned above or in similar publications. The Brussels volume has recently been studied by Shirley Thompson.⁶ By establishing concordances for a large proportion of the pieces, she concludes that the manuscript could not have been completed before the mid-1720s. She further reveals that, of thesource's 27 attributions, only one can be shown to be incorrect, and this is a work whose authorship had long been a source of confusion in France.⁷ Given that the canon attributed to Couperin is on the final page and is not listed in the index, it was presumably a late addition. (This may suggest a terminus a quo for the copying but sheds no light on the date of composition.) The handwriting, which is not that of the principal scribe of the volume, has yetto be identified. The attribution simply to 'Couperin' at this period is most likely to refer to François 'le grand', who was, in any case, the only member of the dynasty known to have written vocal canons of this kind.⁸

On purely stylistic grounds there is no reason to doubt the attribution of Héraclite, Démocrite, Diogène to Couperin (ex.1). True, the canon contains nothing that could have been written only by him—how could it, within such a short span? But then again, it contains nothing incongruous with his idiom. Certainly his output includes many examples of the descending chromatic tetrachord, seen here in the lowest part. Indeed, if we set out the opening asif for harpsichord, using the composer's characteristic keyboard ornaments and making minimal adjustments to reflect the change of medium, it would hardly seem out of place in one of his pièces de clavecin (ex.2).