Mark Kroll’s Couperin Project: Volume Eight

At the beginning of this month, Centaur Records released Volume 8 in Mark Kroll’s project to record the complete keyboard works of François Couperin. My understanding is that two more single-CD volumes remain, meaning that the entire collection will have the same size as Erato’s Complete works for Harpsichord box set recorded by Olivier Baumont. I can also assume that Kroll’s recordings will account for everything that Johannes Brahms and Friedrich Chrysander collected for publication. Chrysander’s preface for that collection is dated November 1, 1888, and the collection was republished by Dover Publications in 1988. It also includes the allemande and eight preludes included as examples in Couperin’s treatise L’Art de toucher le clavecin (the art of playing the keyboard). For the record (so to speak), Baumont’s collection not only includes those nine pedagogical pieces but also a siciliano that predates Couperin’s first published volume of Pièces de clavecin and is not included in the Brahms-Chrysander publication.

Having accounted for the two longest ordres (suites) in Volume 6 and Volume 7, respectively, Kroll can now return to his earlier practice of collecting three ordres on a single CD. These are presented in numerical order: the twelfth (eight pieces in E major-minor), the twentieth (eight pieces in G major-minor), and the 25th (the first in E-flat major followed by four in C minor). This appears to be the first album in the series recorded in France. The recordings were made at the Domain of Villarceaux chateau in the Val d’Oise. The chateau hosts a harpsichord made by Christian Kroll in 1776.

One advantage of the Dover volumes is that the two tables of contents provide English translations of most of Couperin’s titles. Whether or not understanding those titles will assist the keyboardist in finding an appropriate rhetorical stance is left as an exercise for the reader. Some of them are clearly prankish and sometimes involve deliberate misspellings. For example, what may have been a “politically incorrect” reference to the Jacobin’s refers to them as “Jxcxbxnxs.”

courtesy of Naxos of America

However, there was one title from the twentieth ordre that lacked a translation: “La Croûilli ou la Couperinéte.” This appears to be a cryptic reference to Crouilly, which was the ancestral home of the Couperin family. Indeed, Couperin had an ancestral namesake, who was known as “Couperin de Crouilly!” This piece may also evoke some rural nostalgia, since it concludes with a drone pattern that might have evoked a bagpipe player or some other “folk” musician, such as the one illustrated above on the cover of this album.

My guess is that there are any number of similar opportunities for detective work behind Couperin’s keyboard compositions. For my part, however, I prefer to be one of those “eager amateurs” that were probably the sorts of individuals for whom Couperin composed and then published this massive wealth of material. Nevertheless, even if Couperin’s goals had more to do with entertainment, rather than pedagogy, it is worth recalling that at least one of his contemporaries saw the pedagogical value of his music. Johann Sebastian Bach’s so-called Notebook (Notenbüchlein) for Anna Magdalena Bach includes a rondeau from Couperin’s sixth ordre (cataloged as BWV Anh. 183). Bach apparently appreciated that what might divert the French could also serve to educate the Germans!