Jacques Champion de Chambonnières Biography A quintessentially multifaceted personality, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières was clearly a man of multiple talents. In addition to being royal harpsichordist, he was also a dancer and organized paying concerts in Paris. Even though his birth year is unknown, Chambonnières was probably born toward the end of 1601 or the beginning of 1602. His father, Jacques Champion, sieur de la Chapelle, had indeed married Anne Chastriot on January 31, 1601. Two more children were born to their union: Louise, who in 1639 married a Piedmontese nobleman, Victor-Amédée de Mainfroy, and Jehan-Nicolas, who became a captain in the regiment of the Comte d’Harcourt. While there is little documentation on the first three decades of Chambonnières’s life, his father is known to have secured for his then only child, in September, 1611, the reversion of his position as spinet player in the king’s music, which Chambonnières occupied during the reign of Henri IV and Louis XIII until the latter’s death in 1642. From a young age, Chambonnières must therefore have displayed a promising aptitude since his father was so keen to ensure his own succession. The hypothesis is bolstered by the testimony of Marin Mersenne in his Harmonie universelle of 1636: Jacques Champion, sieur de la Chappelle, & Chevalier de l’Ordre du Roy, displayed his profound knowledge, & fine playing on the spinet, & those who were acquainted with the perfection of his playing admired it, but after having heard the harpsichord played by his son the sieur de Chambonniere, who carries the same name, I can express my feelings by saying that one should not hear anything else after him, if one desires either beautiful melodies and harmony perfectly blended, a beautiful rhythmic sense, a lovely touch, or both light and fast fingerwork, combined with a most delicate ear, so one can say that this instrument has met its ultimate master (Book One, Part One, p. 10). This passage is interesting in several ways. It quite clearly differentiates between the spinet and the harpsichord. As the collector and theoretician Pierre Trichet (ca. 1586–1640) pointed out in his 1640 Traité des instruments, the harpsichord was “a modern instrument,” which is borne out by the fact that French harpsichord makers appeared at a later stage compared to Italian and Flemish builders. Moreover, the praise of the quality of the young Chambonnières’s playing only confirmed what was written about it by other contemporaries, such as the poet and composer Constantin Huyghens or the mysterious Le Gallois in his Lettre... à Mademoiselle Regnault de Solier touchant la musique, published eight years after the harpsichordist’s death. He extols “the beautiful and pleasing manner that the late Chambonnières employed:” Everyone knows that this illustrious person excelled others, not only because of the pieces he composed but also because he was the originator of a beautiful manner of playing, that was both brilliant and flowing and so well executed and integrated that it would be impossible to do better. Beside technique & accuracy, he had a delicacy of hand that others did not have, such that when he played a chord, which another might have played right afterwards by imitating him, one would notice a great difference. The reason for this is that he had an approach and manner of applying his fingers to the keys that was unknown to others (p. 68–69). Described in June, 1632 in his father’s will as “gentilhomme de la Chambre du roi,” Chambonnières first married Marie Le Clerc, before 1631, and then Marguerite Ferret in December, 1652. Next to his activity as royal harpsichordist—in particular, he was asked by Anne of Austria to purchase a harpsichord for the young Louis XIV in September, 1645—he participated, as dancer, in several ballets de cour, such as the Ballet de la Marine (February 25, 1635), the Ballet de la Nuit (February 23, 1653) and the Noces de Thétis et Pélée (April 14, 1654). On October 17, 1641, he founded the “Assemblée des honnêtes curieux” with the purpose of organizing concerts in Paris. To do so, he signed a contract with six musicians, one singer and one composer, by which they committed themselves “to promptly arrive and assemble, at noon twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, during one year only, at the room and in the place to be decided by the said sieur de Chambonnières” in order to “give concerts of music.” The venture lasted for a while, since in October, 1655 the scientist Christian Huyghens wrote to his father Constantin that Chambonnières had taken him to the Assemblée before inviting him to dinner at his home and playing the harpsichord “admirably well.” It was no doubt on those premises that Parisian music lovers discovered the young Louis Couperin in the 1650’s. Indeed, Titon du Tillet reports that Chambonnières, who owned some land in the Brie region, was treated to a surprise serenade by Louis Couperin, performed with the complicity of his two brothers, Charles and François, at the door of the dining-room of his château, where he was entertaining friends. Won over by the young Couperin’s talent, he must have invited him to appear in Paris, no doubt at the “Assemblée des honnêtes curieux” and at court. The 1650’s, however, signaled a change in Chambonnières’s situation, as evidenced by the agreement of separate maintenance signed by him and his wife in June 1657. This transaction, which indicated a desire to protect the property of his wife, reveals that Chambonnières must have gone through financial difficulties. One year previously he had tried to leave France to enter the service of Queen Christina of Sweden. Was this change of affairs triggered by a possible deficit in his activity as concert organizer, or by the loss of his talent? Several allusions in the Huyghens family correspondence suggest that his harpsichord playing had become mediocre. As for Jean Rousseau, the viol player, he claimed, much later, that Chambonnières’s loss of favor was due to his being a poor accompanist. A tangible proof of those financial difficulties is that he sold his estate in the Brie in 1657 and sold the reversion of his position to the harpsichordist Jean Henry d’Anglebert in October, 1662. The last named, who may have been his student, paid homage to him, not only by writing several doubles to pieces by Chambonnières, but also by dedicating a magnificent “tombeau” in his 1689 collection of harpsichord pieces. The one other testimony to the financial turmoil in which he found himself was the sale of his two-keyboard harpsichord by Jean Couchet, which Constantin Huyghens, who owned a similar instrument, judged “most excellent” in one of his letters. In the post mortem inventory made in May, 1672, the instrument is not listed. All that appears is a “spinet with its wooden case, painted according to the Chinese fashion, and painted inside with a landscape and a view of Mount Parnassus, mounted on its five-column leg, also painted in the Chinese manner, estimated at sixty pounds;” “one harpsichord fit to be played, mounted on an five-column walnut leg, estimated at sixty pounds;” and another one, resting on boards, estimated “twenty pounds.” Having released to the public in 1670 two volumes of harpsichord pieces, which I will be discussing below, Chambonnières died at the end of April or in early May 1672. As shown by the detailed post mortem inventory, the royal harpsichordist left little that was valuable in terms of furniture or objects, a further proof of the reversal of fortune he had experienced. Harpsichord works Chambonnières left 153 pieces to posterity, five of which are of doubtful attribution.1 Sixty were published in two volumes in 1670. In spite of the decline he evidently suffered, his compositions were in demand. Thus, around 1649, Constantin Huyghens sent pieces by Chambonnières to Froberger, before the latter’s Parisian visit. On June 2, 1655, the same Huyghens wrote to Chambonnières to thank him for taking the trouble to send him “beautiful pieces.” And Huyghens added: They are all in your familiar style and there is none that does not bear one or another of those marks by which I can boast to be able to tell them from any other compositions. You don’t need to tell me what I miss by not hearing you play them, since I am well aware of all the delights that your miraculous hand brings to them. As for the moralist Saint-Évremond, not satisfied with the courantes by Chambonnières that had been sent to him at The Hague, he asked for more by the royal harpsichordist, especially one entitled Le Printemps (G. 62) as well as Jeunes Zéphyrs (G. 59): The Courantes by M. de Chambonnières you sent me are nice enough but they are not his strongest; the sarabande is very pleasant and written in its true tempo; I once heard a suite of courantes he played at a concert hosted by M. le duc de Joyeuse and found them ravishing; I had asked you for his Printemps, for which M. Servien wrote the words; it begins with a courante, continues with a sarabande, and ends with a chaconne; if you could send me all these, you would oblige me, together with Jeunes Zéphirs and the Courantes suite. With its eleven manuscript versions, the sarabande Jeunes Zéphyrs (G. 59) is indeed one of the composer’s two most famous pieces, along with the Courante Iris (G. 8), of which 17 manuscript versions are extant. Le Gallois also praised the style of those harpsichord pieces, adding: One also knows that he always employed natural songs, tender and well-written, in his pieces, that were not to be found in pieces by others; and every time he played a piece, he brought to it new beauties, with ports de voix, passages, varied embellishments, and double cadences. In short, he brought so much variety to them with all those diverse embellishments that one constantly found new charms in them. And that is why everyone has chosen him as a perfect model to imitate (p. 69–70). The two volumes of 1670 The publication of the two 1670 volumes was a watershed in the history of French harpsichord music. They were indeed the first works engraved for this instrument. Only Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, five years before, had issued a Livre d’orgue contenant cent pieces de tous les tons de l’Eglise. These two publications are linked to the development of copper engraving, the first example of which, in France, dated back to 1660, was the Airs by Michel Lambert. This technique was actually much more appropriate to render the subtlety of instrumental writing than movable print type, on which the Ballards enjoyed an implacable monopoly in their capacity as sole royal printers for music. Accordingly, Chambonnières turned to Jollain, who operated a print shop named “À la ville de Cologne”; he was the only one known to work in this field. He was more renowned for his engravings of maps and fashion drawings than for music. His having issued in 1669 a Carte généralle d’Allemagne… dédiée au duc d’Anguien may explain Chambonnières’s choice. Indeed, the first volume is dedicated to the wife of the duc d’Anguien [Enghien], Anne of Bavaria (1648–1723), who must have supported the publication financially. To show themselves worthy of the homage paid to this patron, Jollain and Chambonnières embellished the volume with a fine frontispiece showing, on the left, a harpsichord, and, on the right, a spinet, resting both on a table above which two putti hold a tapestry on which the title of the work appears. Though bearing the inscription “Jollain sculpsit,” this decoration came from an engraving realized a few months before by Jean Le Pautre (1618–1682) for the Tombeau de Madame, following the death in June, 1670 of Henriette d’Angleterre, the wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s brother. After the handsome frontispiece serving as title-page and the homage to the duchesse d’Enghien, the first volume opens with a series of four poems praising the royal harpsichordist. Two, in Latin, are by the poet Jean de Santeul, the third is by His Majesty’s “maître d’hôtel,” Claude Sanguin, and the final one is by Joseph Quesnel, librarian to Monsieur de Thou. They are followed by the privilège (permission to print), granted on August 25, 1670, and a preface by Chambonnières, in which he states the reasons why he decided on this publication: The usual disadvantage there is in publishing one’s works had prompted me to be satisfied with the approval that the most august persons of Europe have been kind enough to give to these pieces, when I had the honor to play them for them. Having, however, been apprised from various places that there is some kind of trade for them in nearly every city in the world where the harpsichord is known, through copies that circulate, though they are highly defective and thus harmful to my reputation, I came to believe that I ought to give away willingly what was being violently taken away from me and I should bring out myself what others had brought halfway out on my behalf; and since I publish them with all their embellishments, as in the present collection, they will no doubt be more useful to the public, while doing me more honor, than all those unfaithful copies that are being published under my name. Despite the expense presumably entailed by the publication of the two volumes of harpsichord pieces in 1670, the act is no doubt indicative of the desire, not just to make a little money with the sale of the books, but also to leave to posterity a correct edition of part of his oeuvre. In each volume, the pieces are grouped according to key: A minor, C major, D minor, F major, G minor in the first volume; C major, D minor, D major, F major, G minor, G major in the second volume. Save for the pieces in G minor in the two volumes, which open with a pavane, the others always begin with an allemande, generally followed by two or three courantes, occasionally with a double. Whereas the first volume includes one sarabande in all keys (and even two for the G minor pieces), the second volume includes none for pieces in C major and G minor. In the ones in C major that open the volume, the dance is replaced by a gaillarde. And while in the first volume D minor and G minor pieces all end with one or two gigues, the second volume includes three, two of them directly following a pavane (G minor) and an allemande (G major). This structure recalls the one favored by Froberger, on the evidence of the Hintze Manuscript. Could this be a sign of his influence on Chambonnières? In these two volumes, Chambonnières gave titles to twelve of his pieces. While the “Sarabande de la Reyne” (G. 10) and the “Courante de Madame” (the aforementioned Henriette d’Angleterre) are explicit, others are more mysterious, such as “La Loureuse” and “Les Baricades” (which may be a distant allusion to an episode of the Fronde that took place in August, 1648). “La Dunquerque” might evoke the repurchase of the city by Louis XIV from the king of England in October, 1662, unless it refers to a trip by Chambonnières to Flanders, where he might have composed the piece. On the other hand, it is hard to tell whether the gigue “La Verdinguette” refers to a person or a place, Elverdinge, a small Flemish city the harpsichordist may have been familiar with. As for the pavane “L’Entretien des dieux,” it brings to mind the world of the lutenist Denis Gaultier, with whom Chambonnières was acquainted. Chambonnières supervised the quality of the publication of the two volumes, as evidenced by the reprinting of the first volume, in which he had errors and engraver’s mistakes corrected. The edition of Chambonnières’s two volumes remained for sale long after his death. In the 1730’s it was still possible to acquire copies, even though the style the pieces stood for no longer had anything in common with the music of the period. Despite an entry devoted to him by Titon du Tillet in his Parnasse français in 1732, his name fell into long oblivion until 1861, when Farrenc published the second volume of harpsichord pieces in his Trésor des pianistes. Denis Herlin Paris, April 2015 Translation: Vincent Giroud