Wilfrid Mellers' Couperin

I didn't have high hopes for this book as it was originally published in 1950 (this is a 2008 reprint by an English bookshop), but so far it is quite interesting. Perhaps wrongly, I think of monographs from the 50s as tending to be dry and analytical, but Mellers surprised me by starting with four chapters on the origins of the Couperin family, the social and ethical culture of the time, the aesthetic context and the place of music in the court and the theater.

One thing that reveals the age of the writing is the great chunks of untranslated French prose! Oh yes, go back seventy years and a writer of a scholarly book could just expect everyone to read the occasional passage in French. Another book of this vintage I have been reading lately is Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy. He expects you to read, if not lengthy passages, then certainly individual terms, in Greek. And not Greek transliterated into Roman letters. No. Greek: εὐδαιμονία for example. The only issue with the Mellers book so far is that my copy is missing pages 51-2. Weird.

Those four chapters on the historical/cultural background reveal a more contemporary attitude than I would have expected. Of course it is not really up to date: he doesn't obsess about intersectionality, race and gender.

One of the stumbling blocks, at least for English speakers, in the music of Couperin, is his titles, nearly every one of them an impenetrable French obscurity. Mellers has an appendix with notes on virtually every one of Couperin's titles.

I'm still in chapter four, a discussion of the development of French ballet and opera, neither of which Couperin contributed to, but both of which influenced him, so a full review will have to wait. But so far, a hearty recommendation for this somewhat elderly book on François Couperin.

This provides the opportunity to put up another envoi of Couperin's keyboard music. The best performer to my mind is Grigory Sokolov, on piano, though only a couple of ordres are available on YouTube. Here is the Treizième Ordre followed by the Dix-huitième Ordre, both recorded at a concert in Schwetzingen, May 22nd 2001 (the clip is mislabeled):

You have to admire a pianist who will walk on stage and play nothing but Couperin for the whole of the first half of the concert!