of portraits, 'sapho' and couperin: titles and characters in french instrumental music of...

Of Portraits, 'Sapho' and Couperin: Titles and Characters in French Instrumental Music of theHigh BaroqueAuthor(s): David FullerSource: Music & Letters, Vol. 78, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 149-174Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/737388 .

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OF PORTRAITS, 'SAPHO' AND COUPERIN: TITLES AND CHARACTERS IN FRENCH INSTRUMENTAL

MUSIC OF THE HIGH BAROQUE

BY DAVID FULLER

Cependant, comme, parmi ces Titres, il y en a qui semblent me flater, il est bon d'avertir que les pieces qui les portent sont des especes de portraits . . (FranSois Couperin) Of making musical portraits I do not know the beginning, and certainly for now there is no predictable end. (Virgil Thomson)'

IN DECEMBER 1704, in the bleak twilight of the reign of Louis XIV and when Francois Couperin was 36 years old, the Mercure galant ran an article that began as follows:

About 40 years ago [in fact, 47] a fashion sprang up in France which was taken up by all who could think and reflect about themselves. Everyone studied himself as closely as possible in order to depict himself in works called portraits, written in prose or verse or a mixture. People who had hardly emerged from childhood put pen to paper to work at their portraits: friends made portraits of friends, scholars made them of scholars, lovers of their mistresses, and many made portraits of sovereigns and notables. Even those with obvious defects worked at their own portraits so as not to leave them to others, and many composed masterpieces of wit, admitting and excusing their faults cleverly and amusingly. In less than two years, all Paris was filled with such works, of which several collections were printed . . .2

The article went on to explain that the fashion ran out only for lack of fresh supplies of people to describe. It is no wonder that shortly after the time the article was talking about, that is to say, in 1659, one of Moliere's Pricieuses ridicules, Magdelon, should declare herself 'furieusement pour les portraits'.3 Mascarille, the valet of her rejected lover, has just said that 'You will find that 200 chansons, as many sonnets, 400 epigrams and over a thousand madrigals, to say nothing of enigmas and portraits, all of my making, are circulating in the best salons of Paris'.4 And Magdelon answers: 'I confess that I am mad about portraits; I know of nothing so galant'. This article began as lectures for the Aston Magna Academy in 1979 and 1986, and an early version was published as 'Portraits and Characters in French Instrumental Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century', Early Keyboard J_ournal, viii (1990), 33-59. The present text is completely rewritten and further enlarged.

Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson's Musical Portraits, New York, 1986, p. ix. 2 Mercuregalant (December 1704), 298-305. See also Arthur Michel de Boislisle, 'Un recueil inedit de portraits et

caracteres, 1703', Annuaire-bulletin de la Societi de l'Histoire de France (1896), 206-52. A partial transcript of the Mercure galant article is found on pages 218-19, and a shorter excerpt is given in Dirk van der Cruysse, Le Portait dans les 'M6moires'du Duc de Saint-Simon, Paris, 1971, pp. 36-7.

3 On the apparently erroneous reports that Moliere's play had first been produced in the provinces (perhaps at Beziers in 1654), see the edition by Micheline Cuenin (Geneva & Paris, 1973), p. xii; see also Roger Lathuillere, La Priciosite: itude historique et linguistique, Geneva, 1966, pp. 105-8.

4 Musicians will wonder, perhaps, if chansons and madrigals were musical. They were not, as the terms are used here, though of course 'chanson' also meant song. Poetic chansons had one or more stanzas, madrigals just one. A madrigal was 'a kind of amorous epigram usually composed of irregular lines' (P. Richelet, Dictionnaire franfois, Geneva, 1680-88 (repr. Tokyo, 1969), ii. 5).

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The year of Moliere's Paris production also saw the publication of Diver.s portraits of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (or simply 'Mademoiselle', as she was usually styled), which through its four editions and changing titles (1659-63) accumulated no fewer than 155 pieces in verse and prose describing her friends and acquaintances, and in at least one case her enemies.5 Her memoirs record her introduction to portraits as a parlour amusement: it was autumn 1657, and two friends, the Princess of Tarante and Mlle de Tremoille, arriving at her estate in Champigny (60 miles south-east of Paris), brought with them their portraits, which had been composed for them on a visit to Holland. Mademoiselle, much intrigued, made her own on the spot; it took her fifteen minutes.6 In what circle these ladies might have encountered this diversion is unknown, although it might have been among Huguenots, who had preserved a brilliant French cultural tradition since their exile during the Wars of Religion. (Mademoiselle herself was just ending a period of semi-exile, the result of her having assisted nobles against the Crown during the uprisings of the Fronde.)

Nor is it certain that it was Mademoiselle who was chiefly responsible for introducing the vogue to Paris. Tallemant des Reaux attributed the fashion not to her but to Madeleine de Scudery, whose ten-volume roman-a-clefArtamene, ou Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53) has been called 'a history in portraits of the seventeenth century, written by the person who perhaps best knew the whole society of that epoch'.7 Here is Mlle de Scudery's self-portrait in the tenth volume (pp. 332-6), where she calls herself'Sapho, cette fameuse Lesbienne'. Everyone seems to have heard of Sapho, but no one knows her story. Democede (a friend of Sapho whom the keys do not identify) is delegated to tell it, though he has only two hours, since Cyrus (the great Conde (1621-86)) has to get back to his camp. They all (the two men, four or five princesses and a queen) settle down in a tent, and Cyrus demands that the story of Sapho's adventures be preceded by a description-of her person and personality so vivid that one will think one already knows her. Decomede expounds on the difficulty of 'making a faithful painting of the heart and mind ... when brushes and colours play no part', and Onasille (Mme de Maure) is sure that she will know Sapho better 'des que vous en aurez fait le portrait'. After some background, Decomede begins with her appearance:

Give me leave to tell you, Madame [Decomede is addressing the queen, perhaps for reasons of protocol], that though you hear speak of Sapho as the most charming person of all Greece [France], yet you must not imagine her to be one of those, in whom Envie

5 Also known as 'La grande Mademoiselle' (1627-93), the daughter of Gaston d'Orleans (brother of Louis XIII) and the richest woman in France, she was the first employer of Lully, who remained in her service from 1646 to 1652. Composed by herself and her friends, the collection appeared in early January 1659 as Divers portraits, then, somewhat changed, on the 25th of the same month as Recueil des portraits et eloges en vers et en prose. A third edition, of 912 pages, appeared a few months later, and finally in 1663 it was reissued as La Galerie despeintures, ou Recueil des portraits en vers et en prose. For a complete edition, see La Galenre des portraits de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, ed. Edouard de Barthelemy, Paris, 1860; and see also J. D. Lafond, 'Les Techniques du portrait dans le "Recueil des portraits et eloges" de 1659', Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des Etudes Franfaistes, No. 18 (1966), 139-48, at p. 144.

6 See Gedeon Tallemant des Reaux, Historiettes, ed. Antoine Adam ('Bibliotheque de la Pleiade', cxlii), Paris, 1960, ii. 691, 1460. Tallemant is the richest single source for French social history (particularly scandals) of the mid seventeenth century.

' Victor Cousin, La Sociitifranfaise au XVIF siecle d'apres 'Le Grand Cyrus' de Mlle de Scudiry, Paris, 1858, i, pp. iv f. The French literary portrait was first treated systematically in three German studies: Arthur Franz, Das literarische Portrat in Frankreich im Zeitalter Richelieus und Mazarins, Leipzig, 1905; Erich Werner, Das literarische Portrdt in Frank- reich im 18. Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1935; and Paul Ganter, Das literarische Portrdt in Frankreich im 17 Jahrhundert ('Romanische Studien', 1), Berlin, 1939. Franz reprted having found in the Dresden Royal Library a portrait of Richelieu by Georges de Scudery (Madeleine's brother) from about 1636 printed on a loose sheet, a copy of which Van der Cruysse was unable to locate in the Bibliotheque Nationale (Le Portrait dans les 'Mimoires' du Duc de Saint- Simon, p. 34).

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cannot find a fault: But yet you must know, that though she be none of those which I speak of, yet she is able to inspire greater passions than the greatest beauty of all the Earth. And though she says she is very low, when she would detract from herself, yet she is of a reasonable stature; but so noble, and so well made as possibly can be desired. As for her complexion, it is none of the highest Lustre, yet so well, as none can say but that she is very fair: But her eyes are so unexpressibly lovely, so fair, so sweet, so quick, so amorous, and so sprightly, as the lustre of them strikes to the very heart of those she looks upon ... [there follow another 67 words on her eyes]. But there was such an amorous kind of spirit which did sweeten them in such charming manner, as I do not believe there was ever any person, whose looks were more dreadful.8

Similarly lyrical (but mercifully briefer) accounts of her face, mouth and hands follow. Finally, 'But, Madame, these are not they which make Sapho most amiable: F6r the charms of her wit do infinitely transcend those of her beauty'. This is the first true statement (leaving aside the modern sense of 'dreadful'!), and it can be verified by comparing with her writings the remarkably plain face that stares out of her picture: according to Furetiere, 'her ugliness was of the highest degree, and I scruple to describe it completely for fear of offending readers of delicate imagination'.9 The portrait goes on to praise her brilliant mind, her infinite goodness and her sur- passing accomplishments (which included dancing, playing the lute and singing, although she did the last only 'passing well'); the whole runs to about 1,400 words, which is long, but not excessively so, for the genre. The most interesting (and accur- ate) observation concerns her powers of psychological penetration: 'And she knew so well how to read an Anatomy Lecture upon an amorous heart (if it be lawful to say so) that she could make an exact description of all its jealousies, all its inquietudes, all its impatiencies, all its joys, all its disgusts, its murmurs, its despairs, its hopes, its fears, its revolts, and all the tumultuous imaginations of it'.

It is almost as though Madeleine de Scudery wanted to provide a model of what the literary portrait ought to be: she tells us that it is, in fact, a portrait that she is about to make; she invents a plausible justification for putting it where it is; she prefaces it with a discussion of the problems of depicting the subject's mental and moral qualities; she refers to the differences from painted portraits; and she constructs it in what became a kind of ideal form, with first the physical characteristics, then the qualities of mind, then the disposition (humeur) and finally the moral qualities-the heart and the soul.10 Since she goes on at some length about the bril- liance of her mind, she must forestall the charge of cleverness unbecoming to a lady:

8 Artamenes, or The Grand Cyrus: that Excellent Romance ... by. .. Monsieur de Scudery . . . Englished by F. G. Esq., London, 1691, x. 189 f. The authorship of this and other novels bearing the Scudery name is a matter of some dis- agreement. They were all signed with the name of Madeleine's brother Georges, who was also a writer. Tallemant says he wrote no more than the preface and dedications of Cyrus (Histornettes, ed. Adam, ii. 689), although he corrected the proofs and made arbitrary alterations in some of the portraits. Tallemant also suggests that Madeleine may have signed his name out of modesty (by which I suspect he means a concern for appearances; see below) or because his works had sold well. Some modern commentators see the hands of both: his in the adventures, hers in the portraits, conversations and love-intrigues; or his in the earlier parts, hers in the later; or his in the poorly written episodes, hers in the better ones. Clilie seems more clearly to be all her own.

9 Antoine Furetiere, Le Roman bourgeois, ed. Franqois Tulou, Paris, n.d., pp. 148 f. And according to her friend Mme Cornuel (loc. cit.) 'Her skin was black and rough, her eyes were black, her nails were black, she sweated ink from every pore'.

'" In his preface to one of the editions of Mademoiselle's Divers portraits, Jean Regnaut de Segrais, her secretary, who assembled and published the work for her, uses the very word 'model' in reference to Mlle de Scudery and at the same time supports Tallemant's assertion that she was the real source for the parlour portrait, if not for the fashion itself: 'Nous sommes tres redevables au Cyrus et a la Clilie qui nous ont fourni les modeles'. (According to Magne, Segrais collaborated with Pierre-Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches; see Van der Cruysse, Le Portrait dans les 'Mimoires' du Duc de Saint-Simon, p. 37.)

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her 'great intelligence' is concealed from society, her conversation limited to 'such as was within the compass of a Ladies knowledge', and even to her closest friends she admits only that 'she has learnt something'.11 The breathlessly hyperbolic style (which the English translation rather flattens out) is typical of the portrait galant, swooping from superlative to superlative until one grows dizzy with the sitter's per- fections and wonders what the writers of portraits could possibly have meant when they insisted on faithful verisimilitude.

The tight little world in which the novels of Mlle de Scudery were read, and portraits to her recipe concocted and devoured, was in part the creation of one of the most remarkable women in French history, Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet (c. 1588-1665), who from 1607 until her death held the salon that made 'Hotel de Rambouillet' a synonym for intellectual elegance and cultivated manners in seventeenth-century France. Saint-Simon described it as 'a sort of academy of wit, gallantry, virtue and learning ... the meeting-place for everything most dis- tinguished and meritorious, a tribunal to which account must be rendered and whose judgment on the conduct and reputation of persons and on works that were presented to it carried great weight in the world'."2 It is from Furetiere again that we learn what high standards Mme de Rambouillet expected from those whom she received. New visitors required letters of recommendation from old friends, and even for these a course of instruction in a preparatory salon was advisable: the house of Valentin Conrart (founder of the Academie Fran,aise) was 'a seminary of well- bred people who, after having spent some time as novices, were worthy to enter the Palace of Rambouillet'.13 The greatest influence of the Hotel de Rambouillet extended from about 1630 until the death of Vincent Voiture, its chief wit, and the outbreak of the Fronde in 1648, but its legacy lived on in the salons of its hostess's many friends and imitators, especially that of the Marquise de Sable, more intellectual and less chaste than Mme de Rambouillet, and in the 'Saturdays' of Mlle de Scudery, chastest of all."4

To a degree quite alien to us in the expiring twentieth century, real life in this world merged with literature; the one overlapped and interacted with the other and sometimes fused, as in witty conversations carried on in rapid exchanges of letters carried back and forth by footmen, and as in the constant play with pieces

" '. . . mais c'est qu'elle songe tellement a demeurer dans la bien-seance de son sexe, qu'elle ne parle presque jamais que de ce que les Dames doivent parler; & il faut estre de ses Amis tres particuliers, pour qu'elle advoue seulement qu'elle ait apris quelque chose' (Artamene, ou Le Grand Cyrus, x. 335; the English translation here is faulty, and I have substituted my own). La Bruyere, whom we shall meet later, likened a woman with learning to 'a fine Gun: the workmanship of it is rare, 'tis engrav'd most curiously, and kept wonderfully bright, but then 'tis only fit to adorn a Closet, to be shown them who admire such things' (The Characters, or The Manners of the Age, by Monsieur de La Bruyere ... Made English by Several Hands, London, 1699, p. 68). The key published with this translation gives 'a woman with learning' as 'Madame Scudery', who was still active when La Bruyere was writing.

12 It must be said that, browsing through Magne (see n. 21, below), Emile Colombey (Ruelles, salons et cabarets, Paris, 1892) or, above all, Tallemant, one gets the impression less of stiffly-seated gentlefolk being elaborately polite to one another than of a circus: a great deal of energy seems to have been spent on playing outrageous tricks, and the conversation itself was wickedly funny as well as elegant. Still, Corneille tried out his tragedies on the friends of Mme de Rambouillet, the ageing Malherbe pursued his purification of the French language in her ruelle, and everyone raved with one voice about the character, brains and personality of the lady herself.

13 Nouvelle alligorique, ou Histoire des derniers troubles arrivez au royaume de l'Eloquence (Paris, 1658), ed. E. van Ginneken, Geneva, 1967, pp. 36 f.

4 Voiture, along with Jean-FranSois Sarasin (Sarazin or sometimes Sarrasin; 1615-54), was one of the leading poetes galants of the period. Sarasin also frequented the H6tel de Rambouillet, but especially the Samedis of Mlle de Scudery. Sapho's virtue was not universally conceded, as these verses copied out by Tallemant (Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii. 1453) demonstrate: 'Plenty of rubies glisten on my face, / I'm approaching forty, / I've put all the sins to good use in my youth, / but now I advise pretty girls: / I'm a madam!'.

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galantes. But 'it was through novels above all that the aristocracy did its apprentice- ship in everything concerning the manners of polite society'.15 The century began with Honore d'Urfes immensely influential pastoral novel L'Astr6e,16 which, besides teaching people how to behave, seems to have launched the fashion of giving them vaguely classical nicknames modelled on those of D'Urfe's shepherds and shepherdesses (and on his multitude of sources), such as 'Arthenice', invented by Malherbe for Mme de Rambouillet (after 'Catherine')."7 For Mlle de Scudery- Sapho-L'Astree was one of the 'true well-springs from which my mind drew the knowledge that was its delight'.18

In the second quarter of the century, novelists seem to have begun to return the compliment that society had paid them in naming themselves after persons in their stories by introducing members of that society as characters, disguising them with pastoral names and situating the action in classical landscapes, though in the absence of authoritative 'keys' to these early novels the extent to which the characters represented real persons remains a matter of controversy.19 But there is no doubt about Mlle de Scudery's Cyrus and Clilie, to which keys abound.20 Her approach guaranteed success within the social circles from which she drew her characters: everyone had to read about themselves and their friends as each volume appeared.21 What could be more exciting than the idealized portraits and fictional adventures of Cleobuline, Cleomire, Parthenie, Callicrate, Theodamas and Clarinte, or of the musicians-the beautiful Elise, the virtuosa Agelaste and the old master Chrysile- whom one knew as the flesh-and-blood Queen Christina of Sweden, Mme de Ram- bouillet (she was not the only person to have more than one nickname), Mme de Sable, Voiture, Conrart and Mme de Sevigne, and (the musicians) as Angelique Paulet,22 Mlle Bocquet23 and Pierre Guedron.24

15 Marguerite Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les theories de I'honneteti en France au XVII' sitcle, de 1600 a 1660, Paris, 1925, i. 165. Indeed, the great classics of French literature blossomed in a bed of novels: 'si nous voulons nous faire une id6ejuste de notre litterature classique, nous devons nous convaincre que toute cette epoque est nourrie de la lecture des romans' (Antoine Adam, L'Age classique, i: 1624-1660, Paris, 1968, p. 143).

16 Part 1, first version, is dated 1607. D'Urfe died in 1625, having published Part 3; two rival completions, each claiming authenticity, appeared in 1625 and 1627.

17 The story is in Tallemant, Historiettes, ed. Adam, i. 128 f. 18 From a letter to Huet (see n. 10, above), given in Adam, L'Age classique, i. 143. 19 The novels of La Calprenede and Puget de La Serre after 1635-40 have been cited; see Maurice Magendie, Le

Roman franfais au XVII' sieck-, Paris, 1932, p. 406. 20 There is, in fact, one doubter, but he bucks a strong current of consensus: see Rene Godenne, Les Romans de

Mademoiselle de Scudiry (Geneva, 1983), where it is argued that Mlle de Scudery's characters have no real-life counter- parts.

21 Her treatment of her friends was no less starry-eyed than that of herself. Emile Magne ( Voiture et l'H6tel de Ram- bouillet, Paris, 1929-30, ii. 165) rather nastily accused her of trading her panegyrics for gifts: a watch, a bolt of cloth for a dress, the furnishings for a small room. Tallemant, his source, says nothing about a quid pro quo, but he does remark more than once (Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii. 691, 1460) upon the avidity with which her friends would vie for a place in her novels.

22 Paulet (c. 1591-1660), daughter of the immensely rich inventor of the 'paulette' (an annual fee that conferred upon public functionaries the right to transmit their offices, which they had purchased, to their heirs), was a talented dancer and lutenist with a sublime singing-voice. The Favorites d'Angelique (courantes) in Ballard's lutebook of 1611 were named after her. She was said to have been a mistress of Henri IV (she would have been a teenager).

23 Bocquet (fl. c. 1640-60) was one of Sapho's closest friends and played the lute 'miraculously' and other instruments with 'great skill'. She may also have composed; see the biographical study by Monique Rollin in Oeuvres de Bocquet ('Corpus des luthistes franqais'), Paris, 1972, pp. xxiii-xxvi. There is a problem with her identity, however. First of all, there were two Mlle Bocquets, spinster sisters who lived together; both played the lute, according to Somaize (see n. 38, below). Alain Niderst (Madeleine de Scudiry, Paul Pellisson et leur monde, Paris, 1976, p. 235) calls them Angelique and Catherine and cites archival evidence giving their address as rue de Grenelle, while Rollin, who seems unaware of Niderst's source, calls them Anne and Marguerite and gives their address (from other archival evidence) as rue de Berry in the parish of St-Nicolas-des-Champs. The second address accords better with what is known of Sapho's friend.

24 Guedron was a major figure in the musical establishment under Henri IV, a singer and a prolific composer of

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De Boislisle (see n. 2, above) has been credited with being the first to suggest the 'diplomatic portrait' as another possible influence on the parlour portrait. The idea behind diplomatic portraits was that a knowledge of the personal strengths and foibles of those in power would help in dealing with foreign governments. Many such portraits are preserved, notably in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century relazioni of the Venetians-reports submitted to the authorities by envoys upon their return from missions. These were imitated throughout the European diplomatic services.25 Needless to say, they were as realistic as their authors could make them; otherwise they would have been of no value. But in other respects they bore a close resemblance to the portraits of novels and of the ruelles, being of comparable length and progressing from the physical to the moral. They differed in paying more attention to careers than to hearts and souls.

But new as the parlour portrait was to Mademoiselle, and in spite of its attribution by Tallemant to the novels of Sapho and in spite of any debt it might have owed to the diplomatic portrait, it had existed-in at least one example independent of any larger context-as early as 1628. The subject is the young and randy Vincent Voiture who has been exercising all his oratorical art to break through the resistance of Marie Bruneau, Mme des Loges. Finally she pricks his bubble by dashing off a 'portrait': nineteen teasing octosyllables all rhyming in '-ture' in which she is unkind enough to mention his bad teeth: 'La dent a quelque pourriture'.26 The quantity and variety of pieces galantes generated in the salons was so vast that it would be surprising if there were not more portraits of this kind. Still, it is a long leap from this to the extended prose examples in Divers portraits.

Mascarille's chansons, sonnets, epigrams, madrigals, enigmas and portraits by no means exhausted this repertory. There were also rondeaux, ballades, meta- morphoses, elegies, epitaphs or ci-gits ('here lies'), maxims, and more, which went in and out of fashion. Stances (stanzas) was a common heading, bouts-rimes (arrangements of rhyming words to be completed in verse) were a kind of puzzle, and impromptus were improvised on the spot. Letters sometimes belonged in this category, as, for example, Voiture's letters in a pastiche of medieval French. They can be found in all sorts of anthologies, single-author collections, memoirs and other sources, and they testify to the amazing literacy of a whole social class that found its chief amusement in wit and word-play.27 But Magdelon's singling out of the portrait and Mascarille's vaunting of his own contributions to this genre were not accidental: as noted earlier, the vogue for the 'parlour portrait' was at its height when Moliere created his two ridiculous precieuses. And when painters feared they would be put out of business by the rage for literary portraits, it was to the precieuses that they com- plained.28

airs, and teacher of Elise. He was, of course, long dead when Cyrus was begun. It should be noted that the very features of Cyrus and Clelie that guaranteed their success-the portraits-also guaranteed the brevity of their appeal, since as the subjects and their friends died off, there was no more thrill of recognition and no way to appreciate the conversion of real life into fiction.

25 De Boislisle, 'Un recueil inedit de portraits et caracteres', pp. 206 f.: Ezechiel Spanheim, Relation de la cour de france en 1690, ed. Ch. Schefer, Paris, 1882, introduction, p. xxxvii.

26 See Magne, Voiture et l'Hotel de Rambouilet, i. 133 f.; Tallemant, Historiettes, ed. Adam, i. 488, 1119-20. He was also small and hairy, and doubtless all too resistible.

27 A rich collection of examples is included in Georges Mongredien's anthology Les Pricieux et les pricieuses, n.p., 1963.

28 So it seems. The Rimonstrances des peintres de portraits aux Pritieuses de ce temps, dated in that magic year of 1659 and said to have been in the Bibliotheque Mazarine, could not be located by Van der Cruysse (Le Portrait dans les 'Mimoires' du Duc de Saint-Simon, p. 41).

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There can be few social phenomena in history that are so copiously documented and at the same time so elusive as the one known as preciosity. At the heart of the problem lies that characteristic seventeenth-century French fusion of literature with real life already mentioned in connection with the novel. Its complexity can be appreciated in the contradictory testimonies of the time, in the struggles of more than a century of the most diligent and intelligent scholarship, and in the futile multiplication of sub-types resorted to by both early and modern writers: v6ritables precieuses, fausses precieuses and precieuses prudes, coquettes, ridicules, nobles, bourgeoises, galantes, devotes ... Moliere himself contributed to this proliferation. It is no wonder that modern opinion runs the full gamut from the complete dismissal of preciosity as a fantasy of satirists to its complete acceptance as a historical reality corresponding to the accounts of these same writings, now regarded not as satire but as faithful (even if amusing and outrageous) chronicles.29 Even the most indefatigable and apparently unbiased observer of the time, the Abbe Michel de Pure, gave up: 'The precieuse as such has no definition; words are too coarse to express something so spirituel. One can only understand it by observing the people who make up that society.'30

One part of the problem is that the epithet precieuse itself encompassed a whole spectrum from the exemplary to the repellent. It was a term of encomium for Mme de Rambouillet at one end and, at the other, of the most virulent abuse of unnamed acquaintances by Mademoiselle.31 In between, it denoted admirable but controver- sial women like Mlle de Scudery. And no matter to whom it is applied, writers early and modern can be found who dispute the application: Mme de Rambouillet dis- played not one of the characteristics now commonly associated with preciosity; Mademoiselle's friends were not 'true' precieuses; Mlle de Scudery was not a ridiculous one. The two extremes were recognized in dictionaries. According to Richelet, 'unless accompanied by a favourable epithet it is always offensive'; according to Furetiere, the term 'used also to be applied to ladies of great merit and great virtue, who knew well the world and the language; but because others adopted affected and exaggerated manners, the name was discredited, and they were called fausses pricieuses or precieuses ridicules'.32 Unkinder opinion called them women over 40 without looks or money.33

Another aspect of the problem is that although writers of the period were prodigal with their descriptions of how precieux and precieuses thought and acted, and although they were not reluctant to identify real persons as precieux and precieuses, they almost never matched the behaviour with the individual. The reader searching for historical personalities possessing the qualities which precieuses are supposed to have had finds himself continually grasping at air. Ordinary

29 Another sort of dismissal was elaborated in Rene Bray's La Priciosite et les pricieux de Thibaut de Champagne a Giraudoux (Paris, 1948), which sees preciosity as a vein running through the whole sweep of French literature and argues against singling out the mid seventeenth century. Bray's theory is disposed of efficiently by Lathuillere (La Priciosit'i, p. 219).

30 La Pritieuse, ou Le Mystcre des ruelles, ed. Emile Magne, Paris, 1938, i. 67. 'Spirituel' normally means 'witty', but something approaching 'spiritual' seems to be meant here. The second sentence reads: 'On ne peut concevoir ce que c'est que par le corps qu'elles composent, et par les apparences de ce corps'.

31 Divers portraits, pp. 301-6 (ed. Mongredien, pp. 200-202). The portrait is unsigned, but it was probably written by Mademoiselle herself. The objects of her vilification seem to have been-possibly among others-the Countess of Fiesque, Mme de Frontenac and Mlle d'Aumale, and the cause of her fury a snub (Lathuillere, La Priciositi, p. 61). Their crimes included the possession of bosoms 'as big as those of the best wet-nurses of Montmorency, so that there is usually a big cleavage on top'.

32 Richelet, Dictionnaire francois, ii. 212 f.; Furetiere, Dictionaire universel, The Hague & Rotterdam, 1690 (repr. Geneva, 1970), s.v. 'Precieuse'.

33 Anon., Catechisme des pretieuses, given in Niderst, Madeleine de Scudery, p. 285.

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acquaintance with preciosity today hardly extends beyond Moliere's play,34 and even there, it is usually limited to samples of the jargon: conseiller de graces for 'looking-glass'; vite, voiturez-nous ici les commodites de conversation for 'quick, bring us some chairs'; voila qui est poussi dans le dernier galant for 'how very smart'. This last illustrates the characteristic use of pousser ('be', 'do', 'get' etc.) and dernier ('the most extreme'), and the treatment of an adjective as a substantive (le galant). Other turns of speech included exclamatory expressions introduced by le moyen, the incessant use of ah! and ma chere!, and the impersonal on instead of first-person pronouns. Simple ideas were expressed in incongruous hyperbole (une delicatessefurzeuse), and we still hear echoes of their favourite furieusement, temrblement and diablement, meaning 'very', in our everyday speech, both English and French.35

Roger Lathuillere, in his monumental, doubtless definitive and brilliantly organ- ized (though unfinished) study of preciosity (see n. 3, above), after analysing every conceivable source and scrutinizing every scrap of modern criticism (too early, thank heaven, for deconstruction!), has shown convincingly that although no one actually talked like Magdelon and her cousin Cathos (who were provincials recently arrived in Paris), the separate elements of their speech can all be found in the literature and conversations-so far as they were transcribed-of the period, not excluding the great tragedies of Pierre Corneille ('Cleocrite'). Moliere invented nothing, but his comic genius was able to exaggerate and distil what he (newly returned to Paris) found to be the latest rage of society so as to create a new linguistic stereotype. Whether anyone went so far as the 'retranchement de ces syllabes sales / qui dans les plus beaux mots produisent des scandales' ('suppression of those dirty syllables that in the nicest words cause scandal') advocated by one of his Femmes savantes (1672) is doubtful ('immaculee conception'?), but the silliness went quite far enough to stimulate a whole industry of mimicry.36

The language, however, was but one manifestation of a larger pattern of behaviour. Underlying everything was a disdain for the commonplace and a desire not only to separate oneself from it but to seem above it. Just as ordinary modes of expression were exchanged for unusual figures of speech, ordinary manners were exchanged for affected ones, the simple and direct for the elaborate and oblique (precieuses were said to prefer looking at people over their shoulder), polite attention for the bored yawn. Some cultivated the pedantic display of superior learning. But most characteristic-of women, needless to say-was the refus de l'amour, the rejec- tion of ordinary love and marriage in favour of spiritualized, virtuous and even stylized love.37 'But I bev you, ladies, to let me tell you that notwithstanding the

34 This became also rapidly true for the contemporaries of Moliere, whose idea of preciosity soon fixed itself permanently in the images of Magdelon and Cathos, in spite of the distinction he drew in his preface between them and the 'veritables [i.e., good, ticket-buying] precieuses', whom he was clearly anxious not to offend.

3 Tallemant (Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii. 691) blamed it-quite unfairly-on Sapho: 'On peut dire que Mlle de Scudery a autant introduit des mechantes facons de parler que personne ayt fait il y a longtemps'. A parallel to the language of preciosity exists today in a segment of society that in the France of Sapho would have been called 'Italian': 'Ma chere! C'est pour en mourir!' (Lathuillere, La Priciosit'i, p. 680)-'My dear, it is to die!'

36 The first to pounce was Antoine Baudeau de Somaize, whose Viritables pri'cieuses appeared in print in January 1660, less than two months after Moliere's premiere. In another two months, he had produced the first version of his Grand dictionnaire des Pritieuses (Paris, 1660-61; ed. Ch.-L. Livet, Paris, 1856), which contained not only a glossary (including some highly unlikely expressions like 'l'urinal virginal' for 'chamber pot' and 'votre chien s'ouvre furieusement' for 'your dog is . . .'), but also a biographical dictionary of persons deemed by him to be pri'cieux and pri'cieuses, listed under their nicknames with a key. Lathuillere's exhaustive analysis (La Priciosit'i, pp. 157-200) of this deceptive but also richly informative work found-as in Moliere-a free manipulation of basic truth for purposes which, in this case, remain obscure.

37 There was, in fact, a kind of club of rowdy young noblemen (Colbert's son among them) who rejected women and marriage-though not love-and misbehaved egregiously. See the chapter entitled 'La France devenue

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respect that I might have for my husband, I cannot prevent myself from having an inconceivable horror of marriage . .. is there on earth a tyranny crueller, severer or more intolerable than these shackles which last to the grave?'38 The holiest scripture of this kind of love was the Carte de Tendre, an allegorical map of the route from Nouvelle-amiti6 to Tendre, which Mlle de Scudery included with a long description in her Clelie, thus winning for herself the status of virgin-goddess-or perhaps more accurately, den-mother-of preciosity.39 The route, a kind of precis of her 'anatomy' of love, passed through Complaisance, Soumission, Petits-soins and-as one got closer to Tendre-Sensibiliti and Obeissance. There were all sorts of false turnings, and beyond Tendre, separated by the Mer dangereuse, were Terres inconnues-lands unknown to virgins. But however famous, much discussed and widely imitated (and parodied) the Carte became, private behaviour, alas, did not conform to its geo- graphy-except, certainly, in the case of Sapho, the 'virgin of the Marais'40-and the cruellest accusation hurled at the precieuses was that of hypocrisy. Far from despising the pleasures of love, as they so loudly proclaimed, they-some of them, at least- tumbled into bed with glee at the least opportunity.4" Others, the bluestockings and the intellectuals, doubtless remained chaste. Yet this antipodal state of affairs only reflected the chaotic contrasts of the larger society of the 1650s, free of the restraints of Richelieu and still reeling from the wars of the Fronde, in which La De'votion aisee (1652) of the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne horrified the jansenists of Port-Royal (and their great champion, Blaise Pascal), who were in turn condemned by the Pope the fol- lowing year; in which the famous Ninon divided her lovers into 'payers', 'martyrs' and 'favourites', the sinister Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement spied on the impious, and Claude Petit was burnt alive for some naughty verses about the Virgin.42

As a parlour amusement, the portrait lasted hardly two years. The note in which Tallemant attributed both it and the jargon of the pricieuses to Mlle de Scudery speaks of 'that foolish fashion of making portraits, which are beginning to bore people to death, 1658'.43 Thus only a year after Mademoiselle first heard of the

italienne' in La France galante by Roger de Bussy, Comte de Rabutin (Bussy-Rabutin, L 'Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, suivie par La France galante, ed. Sainte-Beuve, Paris, n.d., ii. 345).

38 From a conversation in L'Abbe de Pure's La Pritieuse (see n. 30, above), given in Mongredien, Les Precieux et les pricieuses, p. 106.

I' She regretted having published the carte, which she and a few friends had run up in half an hour (in 1654) to explain to Pellisson (later her closest friend and even uglier than she) why he was not yet eligible for the rating of tendre in the scale of her amities, and which was hardly intended for 'two thousand people' (evidently her estimate, or hope, of the readership of Clilie), much less the 'coarse, stupid and malicious' people who would use it to make fun of her (Tallemant, Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii. 1457; and Niderst, Madeleine de Scudiry, pp. 284, 290, and P1. IV). One example of such mockery is C6me Savary de Maulevrier's Carte du Royaume des Pricieuses in Recueil de pieces en prose les plus agriables de ce temps, composies par divers auteurs, 2nd edn., Paris, 1659, i. 322; see also Lathuillere, La Priciositi, p. 69. The passage in C/lie that explains the Carte de Tendre is printed in Mongredien, Les Pricieux et les pricieuses, pp. 133-6.

40 Apparently she hated the epithet: 'Sapho a este fort en colere, ou plutost Pellisson pour elle, de ce que Furetiere, dans la Guerre de Galimatias, l'a appellee, la Pucelle du Marais' (Tallemant, Histornettes, ed. Adam, ii. 693).

41 Lathuillere, La Priciositi, p. 59. 42 See Adam, L'Age classique, i. 9-74, for an excellent survey of general conditions in France between 1624 and

1660. A shorter survey in English with up-to-date documentation forms Part 1 of the commentary to Dance Musicfrom the Ballets de cour, 1575-1651, ed. David Buch, Stuyvesant, NY, 1993. On Ninon (Anne de Lenclos, daughter of the lutenist Henry de Lenclos and a lutenist herself), see Tallemant, Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii. 440-49. It was Ninon who dubbed the pri'cieuses 'Jansenists of love'.

43 Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii. 691: 'Elle est encore cause de cette sotte mode de faire des portraits, qui commencent a ennuyer furieusement les gens, 1658'. Later on, Tallemant (ii. 693) gives further testimony to her decisive role: 'Already the Carmelites and other pious types hold it against her that she established galanterie [here, 'preciosity'],

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parlour portrait people were complaining about it. And in the preface to his Grand dictionnaire, written in 1660 or 1661, Somaize spoke already of 'portraits which were in vogue a while ago' (see n. 36, above). But though society's rage for them may have faded rapidly, portraits lived on in the service of diplomacy, and they took on a new vigour in the hands of memoirists-Cardinal de Retz, Saint-Hilaire, Sourches, even Mme de Maintenon, and, above all, Saint-Simon.44

Even if moribund as a game, the literary portrait was yet to realize its full artistic potential. The writer responsible for this flowering was the moralist, social critic and one of France's great stylists, Jean de La Bruyere. Like the portraits in Mlle de Scudery's novels, La Bruyere's sketches bore classicizing pseudonyms, but unlike hers, they were often distinctly unflattering, and the subjects included-or were claimed to include-the editors of the Mercure galant, whose article on portraits was the occasion for a bitter attack on him. The motive of revenge was alleged: his portraits had been meant to injure those who would not go along with his preten- sions to social status and to acceptance at court. Acording to the Mercure galant, 'He called his work Caracteres instead of Portraits, and not daring to name the objects of his satire, he underhandedly distributed a key'.

La Bruyere's Caracteres was first published in 1688 as an outsized appendix to his translation of the Ethical Characters of Theophrastus. The latter was a series of 30 brief, post-Aristotelian vignettes with such titles as 'On Dissimulation', 'On Flattery', 'On Sordid Gain', 'On Him who Blushes at Nothing', 'On Stupidity', most of them illustrated by a description of the behaviour of a presumably imaginary individual characterized by the foible of the title.45 La Bruyere's translation was hardly more than an excuse for his own much more brilliant-and very much more extensive- collection.46 Grouped under general headings like 'Town', 'Court', 'Women', 'Men' and 'The Heart', La Bruyere's caracteres were detached pieces ranging from mere aphorisms like 'Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love' to miniature essays on such knotty problems as the morality of allowing oneself to be valued for reasons that have to do not with personal worth but solely with high rank.

Although the first edition had contained few portraits of the kind to which the Mercuregalant was objecting, they accumulated as edition succeeded edition. It is not clear whether the author was responsible for the keys to his pseudonyms, as the Mercure galant claimed, but many such keys appeared well into the eighteenth

for Cartes de Tendre etc., and Portraits come from nowhere but her books; and how many women have had the ambition to be a character in them!'

4 See Van der Cruysse, Le Portrait dans les 'Mimoires 'du Duc de Saint-Simon, pp. 50 ff., and De Boislisle, 'Un recueil inedit de portraits et caracteres', p. 210. At his death, Mazarin left a set of portraits of the whole court for the instruction of the young king, and Pellisson made a set of the magistrature for Foucquet. For Spanheim's set for Fred- erick III of Brandenburg, see n. 25, above.

45 La Bruyere was not the first to dip into Theophrastus.Joseph Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608), which inaugurated a vigorous movement of character-writing in England, was translated into French in 1610 and again in 1648. A French translation of Theophrastus itself appeared in 1613, and native character-writing began in 1640 with the writings of Le Moyne (author of La Divotion aisie). An instance that seems to have been overlooked in the literature appears in Tallemant, Historiettes, ed. Adam, i. 406. The heterodox lawyer, writer and courtier to Richelieu and Mazarin, Francois Le Metel de Boisrobert (1589-1662), having composed a satyreplaisante against La Vrilliere (a former Secretary of State), defended his creation to Cardinal Mazarin: 'Monseigneur, it was not against M. de La Vrilliere that I made these verses; I read the Caracteres of Theophrastus and in imitation I invented the caractere of a ridiculous minister'. See also Georges Mongredien, Recueil des textes et des documents relatifs a La Bruyfre, Paris, 1979; and Jane R. Stevens, 'The Meanings and Uses of Caractere in Eighteenth-Century France', French Musical Thought, 1600- 1800, ed. Georgia Cowart, Ann Arbor, 1989, pp. 23-52.

46 La Bruyere, who apparently worked from the Latin translator of Casaubon (1592, 1599 and 1612), knew only 28 of the characters; the remaining two were not discovered until 1786. His translation, unlike his original writing, is 'fort mediocre' according to the modern French translator of Theophrastus, Octave Navarre (Paris, 1952, p. 34).

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century. In any case, La Bruyere himself repudiated them vigorously, insisting that his caracteres were composite portraits, not representations of particular personalities.47 Here is one, said by the keys to be the Marechal de Villeroy:48

Menippus is the Crow that is made fine with other Birds Feathers: He neither speaks, nor thinks himself, but repeats other peoples Thoughts and Discourse. 'Tis so natural for him to make use of their Wit, that he is the first himself that's deceiv'd by it; for thinking to give his own Judgment, or express his own conception, he does but Eccho the last man he parted with. He's pretty tolerable for a quarter of an hour, but then immediately he flags, and when his shallow memory begins to fail him, grows downright insipid. He is himself the only person that's Ignorant how far he is from being Sublime and Heroick, as he affects, and is very unfit to judge of the extent of Wit, since he very innocently believes, that he has himself, as much, as 'tis possible for any Man to have, and accordingly assumes the air and management of one that neither desires any more, nor envies others. He is often in Soliloquy, which he so little endeavours to conceal, that you may meet him gabbling, and arguing to himself, as if some great matter were under his Deliberation. If you salute him at such a time, you put him into a strange Perplexity, to know whither he shall return your Salutation or no, and before he's come to a Resolution, you are got quite out of sight. 'Tis his Vanity that has elevated him, and made him the Man of Honour, which he is not naturally. To observe him you would conclude it was his whole Employment, to consider his own Person, Dress and Motions, that he fancy'd all Peoples Eyes were fixt on him, and if they chanc'd to stop, that 'twas only to admire him.

This may be compared with two other portraits of the same gentleman, dated just after the turn of the century. Both (I will call them 'BL' and 'Pinceau')49 are in the genre of the diplomatic relation; that is, they give his real name, mention his military qualities and come from sets of portraits devoted to the French court. BL was probably written by a French protestant refugee in England; Pinceau purports to be a translation from an English original but is more likely a native political tract. BL is kinder than either La Bruyere or Pinceau-'still handsome for a man of 64 [really about 58] ... unfailingly polite and decent [except to his officers] ... pays his debts when he has got any money ... does as well as he can'-while Pinceau begins with 'homme de mediocre valeur' and goes downhill from there. But both agree that he treated his officers badly and that he avoided great actions because they frightened him. And they agree with La Bruyere on his pretentiousness: his ambition exceeded his capabilities, and magnificence was his mania, but in bad taste-according to Pinceau, there was 'always something of Mascarille about him', while for BL his pleasure was 'to be noticed for his dress, his carriages and his servants'.

La Bruyere's complete title was The Characters of Theophrastus Translatedfrom the Greek with the Characters or Mores of the Present Age. Since his book included much more than descriptions of people, his use of the term 'character' cannot be equated with 'portrait'; but that, nevertheless, is the way his contemporaries used it, as

4 La Bruyere's repudiation, delivered on the occasion of his reception into the Academie Francaise on 15 June 1693, is printed, along with further controversy, in Mongredien, Recueil des textes et des documents relatifs a La Bruyfre, pp. 60 ff.

48 From the seventh edition of 1692 as trans. in The Characters, or, The Manners of the Age, p. 49. A key to the French edition appeared the same year (1692) from the same publisher (Michallet). The subject was apparently Francois de Neufville, Duc de Villeroy (1644-1730), peer and (from 1693) marshal of France.

49 Respectively, London, British Library, Add. MS 29507 (the whole set printed in De Boislisle, 'Un recueil de portraits et caracteres, pp. 221-52); Caracteres de lafamille royale, des ministres d'Etat et desprincipalespersonnes de la cour de France, Villefranche, 1702 (with editions to 1706), pp. 400 f. The latter, published pseudonymously by 'Paul Pinceau', was unavailable for this study, but a near-copy is included in the appendix to Spanheim's Relation de la cour de France en 16X90, pp. 400 f. For a discussion of both these collections, see Spanheim, op. cit., pp. liv-vi, and De Boislisle, 'Un recueil inedit de portraits et caracteres', pp. 212-17.

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Pinceau's title already suggests. The Mercuregalant shifts freely from one to the other, at the same time evoking what seems to be a new, more popular kind of portrait:50 'For some time there have been appearing, not books, but broadside sheets, on which portraits of persons are printed-but with names. These Caracteres resemble the Portraits of which I spoke at the beginning of this article, and it would be desir- able if, for the satisfaction of well-bred people, this fashion should be resumed.'51 However much his portraits may have fallen short of the ideal expressed in the Mercure galant, La Bruyere lamented the world of Voiture and Sarasin that engendered it: 'the blithe conversations, the social gatherings, the witty banter, the lively, colloquial letters, the little games to which only the clever were admitted'-it had all gone.52

The decade of the 1650s, the decade of precieuses and portraits galants, coincided almost precisely with the whole of Louis Couperin's brief career; it saw the peak of Chambonnieres's renown and the continuation of his concert series-possibly the first paying series anywhere-called the 'Assemblee des honnestes curieux';53 it encompassed the early ballet collaborations of Lully, the final efforts by Mazarin to naturalize Italian opera and the first, tentative experiments in native opera by Dassoucy, La Guerre, Cambert and Perrin (see below); and it marked the begin- nings of a new coloristic style in Louis Couperin's organ music, the belated acceptance of the basso continuo, and the publication of Henry Dumont's Cantica sacra and Melanges. It was during these years that the downward curve of the ageing lute school crossed with the rise of the harpsichord.

None of this, it is true, seems to reflect either the frivolous affectation or the blue- stocking prudishness of preciosity, and it was to be half a century before anyone would talk about painting portraits with music. Music was rarely mentioned in literature (and that little, as we have seep, was mostly a matter of singing or lute playing).54 The connection was there, nevertheless. Some poesies galantes were written expressly to be sung, like strophic chansons by Voiture sur l'air du Branle de Mets and sur l'air des Landriry. Then there were the literary personalities who supplied poetry for professional composers, such as Benserade, 'ce Voiture prolonge' (Sainte-Beuve) and the librettist for Lully's mature ballets; Perrin, whom Somaize called 'the great painter of the precieuses, who has made quantities of their portraits' and who collaborated with the composer Robert Cambert on the pioneering Pastorale d'Issy (1659); and Quinault, Lully's librettist, 'whom the pricieuses brought into the world', according to Somaize, and who according to Lathuillere was their 'favourite author'.55 And there were the musicians themselves: the Bocquet sisters; the celebrated singer and composer of airs de cour and future father-in-law of Lully, Michel Lambert, then in love with the young pricieuse Mlle de Lestre (again,

50 For a futile attempt to distinguish between portraits and characters, see Lafond, 'Les Techniques du portrait dans le "Recueil des portraits et eloges" de 1659', p. 144.

5" According to Van der Cruysse (Le Portrait dans les 'Mimoires' du Duc de Saint-Simon, p. 34) several broadside portraits are preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. I have not tried to locate them.

52 Chap. 13, 'De la mode', fragment 10. 5 Other concerts are mentioned, e.g. those of Pierre Chabanceau de La Barre, but none which required a finan-

cial outlay and therefore probably an admissiori charge or subscription is documented. 54 A rather startling exception that mentions the harpsichord is recounted by Tallemant (Historiettes, ed. Adam, ii.

194}: 'Une autre fois, comme le Cardinal [Richelieu] voulait faire jouer le clavecin, Boisrobert [see n. 45, above] dit: <<M. de Bullion a pisse dedans>>.'

5 La Priciositi, p. 429.

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according to Somaize); Louis Couperin himself, in the service of the superintendent of finances, Abel Servien, whose niece, Mme de Saint-Ange, was an intimate of Mlle de Scudery; or the great lutenist Charles Mouton, a prized guest in the world of the ruelles and the pricieuses on the evidence of a fascinatingly allusive poem by Sarasin and of other circumstances of his life.56

Second, the taste for the instrumental piece-first for lute, then for harpsichord, guitar or viol-must have proceeded from the same aesthetic animus that lay behind the pullulation of literary pieces galantes. Of comparable dimensions, both served to amuse the same circles, and although there were professional musicians and professional poets, there was no clear dividing line in talent or skill between the masters in either field and gifted amateurs-nor, indeed, does there seem to have been any sharp social distinction. There was, to be sure, the difference that while everyone could make verses, the activity of musical amateurs was generally confined to the performance of pieces composed by professionals. Even the terms of poetry and music overlapped, as we have seen. Titles like Poisies chooisies de Messieurs Corneille, Benserade, de Scud'ry ... (Paris: Charles de Sersy, 1653-60) or Recueil de pieces galantes (see n. 60, below) were echoed in Ballard's Pieces chooisies pour le clavecin de differents auteurs of 1707 (discussed on pages 168 f., below). For a century, French music for harpsichord, plucked instruments and viols would consist of more or less independent pieces meant to be consumed for pleasure like poetic madrigaux or ipigrammes.57 What better musical equivalent to the elegant rondeaux of a Voiture or the chansons of a Sarasin than the inexhaustibly varied courantes of Chambonnieres, in which wit, tendresses and rhythmic surprises conceal an effortless control of melody and counterpoint?

If there is a third parallel between music and the literary productions of the pricieux and the pricieuses, it is to be found, perhaps, in a common element of play. The playfulness that animated the writing-and indeed the whole society-is not so obvious, to be sure, in the noble seriousness of the allemandes, sarabandes and many other types of pieces by the lutenists and the harpsichordists. But what, after all, is the style brise if not a way of playing with the expectations of the listener by the constant delay, anticipation or even omission of notes?58 Moreover, the extreme sophistication and delicacy of expression, especially of lute music, amounted to a kind of preciosity-the good kind, not the silly or the pretentious one-and the role this music played in the culture of the ruelles bears witness to its compatibility, at least, with the literary diversions. The wonder is that it took as long as it did for French music to come to the portrait. Like their contemporaries in other countries, the French did not doubt that the highest duty of music was to 'imitate' nature and

56 The poem was published in 1656, two years after Sarasin's premature death. See Oeuvres de Charles Mouton, ed. Monique Rollin ('Corpus des luthistes francais'), Paris, 1992, pp. xvi-xix; Catherine Massip, 'A propos de l'image du musicien dans la litterature du XVIIe siecle', Musique, signes, images: liber amicorum Franfois Lesure, ed. Joel-Marie Fauquet, Geneva, 1988, pp. 199-206. Massip's reservations as to the identity of Sarasin's Mouton with Charles, based on a supposed birth date of 1626 (p. 201), can be laid to rest by the discovery of the record of his christening in 1617 (Oeuvres de Charles Mouton, ed. Rollin, p. xv).

57 Although lute and harpsichord pieces are sometimes grouped in suites in major sources and were doubtless played in such groups by professionals, it is clear from countless other sources that they were ordinarily 'consumed' as pieces ditachies, just as literary pieces normally were. (Organ pieces were, of course, played according to liturgical requirements.)

58 This style, which is really a kind of complicated arpeggiation, appeared first as a technique of variation (see Ballard's lutebook of 1611), and then, with Mesangeau and the old Gautier, it suffused French lute music, from which it spread in its most extreme form to Froberger and other German keyboard composers. Chambonnieres made only very moderate use of it, but Louis Couperin more, inspired, perhaps, as much by Froberger as by the lutenists.

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the passions. Ultimately resting on Aristotle, the notion of imitation could in principle extend to 'character' and, presumably, portrait.59 But this appears not to have happened until the turn of the century and the maturity of Fran9ois Couperin, when Mlle de Scudery was at the end of her long life and preciosity was no more than a distant resonance in a world made grim by wars and a king in love with pious glory.60

Titles suggesting some kind of imitation are scattered throughout secular instrumental music of the seventeenth century. The vast majority of them are attached to pieces belonging to some established genre whose designation is usually supplied along with the title. The titles are of three kinds: names of (usually popular) tunes on which the pieces are based; proper names (i.e., names of real people); and names of things, qualities, actions or types of persons. For reasons that are too complicated and too obvious to go into here, it is -by no means always possible to tell to which category a title belongs, but it is probably true that the first two greatly outnumber the third in the music of the first 60 years or so of the century. The rich sampling of titles in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book gives an easily accessible idea of these propor- tions, even though the total number of titled pieces in this collection relative to those carrying only generic labels is much greater than in the generality of European and English music. Mid-century Naples yields two collections with unusual, even anomalous titles. A printed set of ensemble pieces by Andrea Falcolnieri (1650) has not just dedicatory titles such as La Murroya: corrente echa para el Senior D. Ferdinando Murroya-or indeed La Preciosa, echa para Don Enrico Butler-but also others like La hermosa Iacinta or L'infante arcibizzarra that could be intended to be descriptive of people.61 A keyboard manuscript of c. 1675 has titles of a kind not found elsewhere in Italian keyboard music; they may also indicate an attempt at description-as, for example, Verita, Innocenza and Constanza-or even whole proverbs: Se credi in questo mondo haver solazzo, t'inganni, poco speri, e gia sei pazzo.62

In France during the first 50 years of the seventeenth century, the lute was king of the solo piece. Almost nothing has survived of harpsichord music, the viol played mostly in ensembles, and ensembles played old-fashioned polyphony or accompanied ballets and ballroom dancing. The overwhelming majority of lute pieces after about 1620 were allemandes, courantes and sarabandes in a new style, with some preludes (many more improvised, no doubt) and miscellaneous dances like pavans, gigues, chaconnes (the last two only towards the middle of the century) and so forth. Only one or two of the pieces by Rene Mesangeau (d. 1638), who must have

59 See Aristotle, Politics, viii. 51: 'Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know them from our own experience ... Even in melodies there is an imitation of character.'

60 Although preciosity soon ceased to be an issue and Mlle de Scudery ceased to hold her Samedis, that formidable lady lived on and continued to write, finally dying in 1701 at the age of 94 in peace and honour and in full possession of her faculties. Moliere's play continued in the repertory of the Comedie-Francaise, and in an unpleasant portrait in the eighth edition of his Caracteres (1694) La Bruyere called Fontenelle ('Cydias')-who in his youth had collaborated in the librettos of Lully's Psychi and Bellirophon-'a combination of pedant and pricieux'. The taste for the productions of the pricieux and the pricieuses did not altogether disappear: what Mongredien calls 'the most specifically pricieux collection' of them all, the Recueil de pieces galantes en prose et en vers des plus beaux esprits du temps, edited by Sapho's friends the unchaste Countess of La Suze and the ugly Pellisson, went through some fifteen editions from 1663 to 1748, ultimately growing to five volumes; see Mongredien, Les Pricieux et les pricieuses, pp. 228, 257 f.

61 Andrea Falconieri, Ilprimo libro de canzone, sinfonie, fantasie. . . ('Archivum musicum', xxii), Florence, 1980. The Spanish reflects the Spanish rule in Naples at the time.

61 Unless this last is a song text: see Alexander Silbiger, Italian Manuscript Keyboard Sources of 17th-Century Keyboard Music, Ann Arbor, 1980, pp. 109-10; Lawrence Oncley, The Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella Library Manuscript No. 34.5.28: Transcnption and Commentary (unpublished Master's dissertation), Indiana University, 1966.

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been the principal creator of this new classical lute style, have been transmitted with titles. A few more are found in the works of Ennemond ('vieux') Gautier (d. 1651), like L'Immortelle, La Poste or, most famous of all, La Belle Homicide. Here, and in French music from now on, third-category titles dominate and popular tunes are rare. Very little of this music was ever published, and the various manuscript sources, some of them dating from long after the death of the composers, often differ as to headings of the same piece.63 Sometimes one version has a title, another a genre label, and yet another no heading at all. One allemande by the old Gautier is so labelled in one source, unlabelled in another, and in a third is called Allemande Le Languetock ou La Pompefunebre ou bien Le Bucentaure. It is rarely possible to know what the composer himself intended.

The situation was so similar in harpsichord music as it appears in sources that began to emerge in the third quarter of the century that examples are unnecessary. The publication of 60 of his pieces by Chambonnieres in 1670, two years before his death, only confirms the general impression that titled pieces were in a small minority and that nearly all of these were standard dances with few or no obvious descriptive qualities. Titles continued to be rare in harpsichord music, as well as in the emerging repertory for bass viol, up to the end of the century and beyond.64 Gaspard Le Roux summed up the vacillating attitude around 1700 with a piece entitled La Piece sans titre. His allemande L'Incomparable has the subtitle rubbed out in one copy. An important late seventeenth-century manuscript source for the music of Chambonnieres and Louis Couperin also has a number of titles crossed out for no apparent reason.65 Like the lute repertory, nearly all this music consisted of the traditional suite movements in styles remarkable for their homogeneity.66

In the lute publications of the last quarter of the century, however, the proportion of titled to untitled pieces (still nearly all suite dances) was abruptly reversed. All but a few of the roughly 200 pieces by Mouton andJacques Gallot had titles-always in addition to genre labels-those of the latter often running off the scale of originality: La Comete, La Piece de huit heures, La Meurtriere, L'Oesope ridicule etc. In her interpretations of the titles of these two composers, Monique Rollin identifies a large number with connections to the literary world and to the pr6cieuses.67 It is likely, of course, that much of this music, with or without its titles, dated from long before

63 These generalizations about the seventeenth-century French lute repertory would have been impossible without the dozen or more volumes devoted to it in the series 'Corpus des luthistes francais' published by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

64 For a survey of the viol repertory, see Michel Sicard, L 'Ecolefranfaise de viole de gambe de Maugars a Sainte-Colombe (unpublished dissertation), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, n.d., and two articles based on it: 'The French Viol School before 1650' and 'The French Viol School: the Repertory from 1650 to Sainte-Colombe (ca. 1680)', Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, xviii (1981), 76-93, and xxii (1985), 42-55. A major exception to the rarity of titles in harpsichord music, though one insignificant for the argument of this article, was the very large number of arrangements of vocal and orchestral music from Lully's ballets and operas.

65 The 'Bauyn' manuscript, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Res Vm7 674 (facs. edn., Geneva, 1977), for example pp. 59, 129, 233.

66 It should be noted that although the descriptive qualities of the titled dances may not be obvious to us (or to me), the complexity of the style and the enormous latitude of performing possibilities on both harpsichord and lute, but especially on the latter, leave open the possibility that the music could have been the vehicle for the most vivid description under the fingers of a master.

67 Oeuvres des Gallot, ed. Monique Rollin ('Corpus des luthistes francais'), Paris, 1987, pp. xxxvi-xxxix; Oeuvres de Charles Mouton, ed. Rollin, pp. xl-xli. Like all such interpretations, these cover a wide range from certainty to guesses. For Rollin, Mouton's Tombeau de Gogo laments the death (in 1653) of Mme du Plessis Belliere's parrot; for Claude Chauvel, it was Elisabeth de Montgobert, friend of Mme de Sevigne and her daughter (see the liner-notes for Hopkinson Smith's recording of Mouton, Astree, AS52, 1980).

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publication; this is the case at least in the music by Mouton, who was active as a musician and well known in literary society by 1650 (little is known of Gallot's life).

It is rarely that we are told by composers themselves-or by witnesses in a position to know-how we should interpret such titles. But the Baroque period yields a few illuminating statements on the subject, and their message, unfortunately, is that without some such declaration, and in the absence of some obvious cliche of musical depiction like battle fanfares, rustic drones, or bird-like warbling, we cannot possibly be sure what the significance of a given title is, or even whether it has any meaning at all, given the diversity and unpredictability of their approaches. In northern Italy during the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, it was common to attach proper names to instrumental pieces, especially canzonas; the practice is attributed to the Lombards by Claudio Sartori.68 But occasional remarks make it clear that there was no intention to describe the owners of the names or to paint their portraits. Thus Bartolomeo Grassi, who in 1628 published Frescobaldi's first book of canzornas, added names to them 'to testify to the devotion' that he-not the composer-bore their owners, while in 1669 Cazzati gave the names of powerful persons to his capriccios 'as a shield against the blows of Envy'. In some cases-for example, Poglietti in Vienna, Biber in Salzburg and Kuhnau in Leipzig, with their elaborately labelled keyboard pieces, mystery sonatas and biblical sonatas-the intent to describe in music is clear. This is also true, of course, in the French theatre with its rich repertory of storms, infernal scenes, pompes funebres and sommeils.69 But the classicizing titles in Denis Gautier's La Rhitorique des dieux (1648-52) were introduced by the compiler-so far as one can gather from his preface-simply as lures to spark the interest of the musically uninstructed. In the first place, there is no evidence that Gautier himself had anything to do with this manuscript. Second, the titles appear to have been added after the music was entered, and they are incomplete. Finally, none of the pieces that appear in other sources has the title that it bears in La Rhetorique, not even when published later by Gautier himself or by his widow.70

It is worth advancing momentarily into the eighteenth century to cite a few other statements concerning the significance of titles. In 1702, two composers took opposite approaches. Charles Desmazures said of some ensemble pieces that 'the ones with particular titles, like Le Triomphe du Roy, Le Carillon, Les Re^veries and La Deroute, make it sufficiently clear by their character what I have tried to express';71 while Michel de La Barre put proper names to his flute pieces, Op. 4, 'only because there are many of the same species, and I have taken the names either from persons who did them the honour of liking them or from the places where I composed them, without claiming in any way to indicate their character by these names' (my emphasis). Not every title is, in fact, a proper name, and one, L'Afflige, contradicts the composer's claim by having a series of sighs as its theme. The near-contemporaries Rameau and

68 'Une pratique des musiciens lombards (1582-1639): l'hommage des chansons instrumentales aux familles d'une ville', La Musique instrumentale de la renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot, Paris, 1955, pp. 305-12; William Klenz, Giovanni Maria Bononcini of Modena, Durham, North Carolina, t962, pp. 67 ff.

69 Even stage music, however, was not always as imaginative as it might be. Although his complaint refers to choreography, Claude-Francois Menestrier (1631-1705) could equally well have been complaining of the music for it when he wrote that entries de ballet for zephyrs, Scythians, cyclops, shepherds etc. were beginning to look all alike, without representing anything; see Des ballets anciens et modernes selon les regles du thidtre, Paris, 1682 (repr. Geneva, 1972), p. 301.

70 No. 8, Andromede, appears in three other sources as Tombeau de Blancrocher; see Denis Gaultier, La Rhitornque des dieux, ed. David Buch ('Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era', lxii), Madison, 1990.

71 In Pieces de simphonie a quatre parties pour les violons, flzittes et hautbois ranges en suites sur tous les tons, Marseilles, 1702).

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Dandrieu, both of whom published harpsichord collections with almost no titles as young men (1704-6) and then returned to the medium many years later with titled pieces (after Couperin had set the fashion), also approached their titles from opposite directions. For Rameau, the music proceeded from the idea: 'you have only to hear how I characterized the song and dance of the savages [i.e., American Indians] who appeared at the Theatre Italien two years ago, and how I have rendered the titles, The Sighs, The Tender Complaints, The Cyclopes, The Whirlwinds, The Conversation of the Muses'.72 Dandrieu, on the other hand, first composed his pieces, then searched for a title that would stimulate the player to discover its musical qualities: 'As for the names that I have chosen, I have tried to draw them from the very character of the pieces they designate, so that they may determine the style and tempo by awakening simple ideas from common experience or the ordinary and natural feelings of the human heart'.73 In other words, Dandrieu used titles as a poetic (and, in the end, more precise) equivalent of ordinary tempo indications such as 'Allegro' or 'Tendrement'.74 At the time these two composers made their statements, however, neither had used personal names as titles. When Rameau's Pieces de clavecin en concerts appeared in 1741 with several well-known names such as Laborde, La Poupliniere, Forqueray, Cupis etc. heading movements, it was with a note that effectively disposed of any notion that the music might be descriptive of the owners of the names: 'such, at least, is the opinion of a number of amateurs and professionals ... of which the majority have been kind enough to do me the honour of naming some [of the pieces]'. As late as 1775, Guillaume Lasceux explained that in naming some keyboard quartets he 'has only followed the desires of his pupils, who have appeared to be flattered to see each of these pieces appear in their names'.

Inspired by Corelli, Couperin wrote the first ensemble sonatas in France beginning around 1692, but unlike Corelli, he gave them titles: La Pucelle, La Steinquerque, La Visionnaire, L 'Astree, La Superbe. Two of them are obvious literary allusions: Les Visionnaires was an immensely popular comedy by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin about three silly girls, which though dating from 1637 held the stage throughout the century and beyond;75 and I have already mentioned L'Astree. La Pucelle is more likely to be the 'virgin' ( pucelle) French sonata than the Pucelle du Marais (see n. 40, above), and Steinquerque was a military victory. But Couperin's attitude towards any descriptive qualities of this music is suggested by the fact that La Pucelle became La Franfoise, La Visionnaire became L'Espagnole, and L'Astre'e became La Piemontoise when they were published in 1726. An explosion of ensemble collections followed Couperin's initiatives, but only a minority used titles, among them some by Rebel, Hotteterre, Dornel and Gautier of Marseilles, as well as Michel de La Barre and Desmazures. Hotteterre's first book of flute pieces (1708) has suite pieces with personal names in addition to labels, such as Rondeau Le Duc d'Orleans and Sarabande La D'Armagnac, and the sonatas in Dornel's Sonates a violon seul et suites pour la flute

72 Letter to Houdar de La Motte, 25 October 1727, printed in the Mercure de France, March 1765; given in Cuth- bert Girdlestone, Jean-Philippe Rameau: his Life and Work, 2nd edn., New York, 1969, p. 6.

73 Pieces de clavecin (Paris, 1724), preface; ed. Pauline Aubert & Brigitte FranSois-Sappey, Paris, 1973, p. [ix]. 74 In fact, Dandrieu wrote out-and-out programme pieces: a transcription of his danced 'symphony' Les Caracteres

de la guerre and two other divertissments (as he calls them), Les Caracteres de la chasse and La Fete de vilage, as well as Le Concert des oiseaux, Le Carillon, etc., all in the collection from whose preface the above quotation is taken. The nearest he came to portraits was with La Lully and La Corelli, in the styles, inevitably, of an overture and of a sonata.

75 Louis XIV played in it in his youth, according to a letter of his sister-in-law, Madame, the Princess Palatine (20 February 1721). Couperin used the title again in his fourth book of harpsichord pieces.

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traversiere avec la basse (1711) were headed with names, including La Couprin.76 Some of Gautier's symphonies (published posthumously in 1707) appear to be elaborately descriptive, like L 'Embarras de Paris, which consists of 73 bars (the whole marked to be repeated) of almost unbroken crotchets, or Les Prisons, composed in the prisons of Avignon. But the only source to explain titles piece-by-piece and to specify precisely what musical feature each title was meant to reflect is the table of contents of a collection of viol duets by Sainte-Colombe.77 This extraordinary document was drawn up by the copyist of the music, apparently in the composer's absence, and it should serve as a warning never to guess at the meanings of titles. Many of those here seem to be the copyist's invention, according to whom 'Generally, the concerts have been named simply according to the melody of the opening, though there are some exceptions'. Thus Le Craintif (timorous) is so titled 'because it moves by slow steps before a theme comes in', and Le Prompt 'because it begins brusquely'. But several titles refer to technical features of the piece as a whole: Le Constant because it never changes metre; Le Figure because it constantly changes metre.78 To be sure, a few allude to conventional effects that the composer must have intended, like Le Cor, 'because the melody imitates the hunting horn in several places'; and there are some that suggest the expressive content, for example Le Brun, 'because it is like gloomy weather' (our first thought would be that it was a portrait of the royal painter of that name!). But L'Incomparable is nothing but the copyist's judgement of the piece, which is 'a very beautiful allemande'. One or two show how far from our expectations the true interpretation of a title can be. The copyist called one piece Le Change' because 'the Sr de Ste Colombe ruined it with changes and I have restored it', and the composer himself named another L'Aureille (i.e., 'L'Oreille', the ear), 'because it is played without measure and it must be played by ear'. Five of the concerts are headed by proper names, but none represents an attempt at description. Three of the personages played the piece in question particularly well, another was a lady whom the composer wished to honour, and the last was a friend of the copyist who happened to walk into the room while he was looking the piece over.

Some of the finest and most serious of seventeenth-century titled French pieces were tombeaux, and it was here that instrumental music and literature had one of their points of closest convergence.79 The term tombeau appeared in the second half of the preceding century to designate a collection of poems by different authors put together in honour of someone recently deceased, and more celebratory than mournful in tone. The first lute tombeau appears to have been composed by Ennemond Gautier on the death of Mesangeau, and the genre continued to be cultivated mainly by lutenists, although later on a number were composed also for the harpsichord and the viol. As if to reciprocate the favour of poets in lending their term to musicians, Mouton used the frankly literary term Oraison funebre ('funeral

76 The repertory for strings is discussed in great detail in the first volume of Lionel de La Laurencie, L'Ecole franfaise de violon de Lully a Viotti, Paris, 1922.

7 Concerts a deux violes esgales du Sieur de Sainte-Colombe ('Publications de la Societe Francaise de Musicologie', i/20), Paris, 1973, p. xix. Sainte-Colombe has only recently been identified as Jean de Sainte-Colombe, living in the parish of St-Germain-L'Auxerrois in Paris in 1669 (communications from Sylvie Minkoff and Jonathan Dunford). This corrects a previous identification as Augustin D'Autrecourt. Two more recently discovered manuscripts, one autograph and the other by the copyist of the Concerts, apparently have few titles, some probably vaudevilles and one, pienel, unexplained. Facsimiles of all three are being issued (Geneva: Minkoff).

78 Note the masculine gender ofthese titles, which agrees with 'concert', in contrast to the usual 'La' agreeing with 'piece'.

79 Another is Lanciclopidie: allemande de Dubut in the lutebook of Marguerite Monin, begun in 1664.

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oration') for a piece in honour of Denis Gautier.80 The question arises, of course, as to whether the composers of tombeaux ever tried to paint the portraits of those whom they were honouring. Although most tombeaux were basically allemandes, less often pavans, they do indeed exhibit a good deal more individuality than those dances normally do, but the intense seriousness of expression in most of them is more suggestive of a memorial function than of any attempt to describe a personality. However, a number of extraordinary passages in Marin Marais's tombeaux for Lully and Sainte-Colombe (in his second book of 1701)-neither of them a dance type- cry out for some extra-musical explanations, probably more anecdotal than psychological; but in the absence of documents, any interpretation would be purely speculative.

On the basis of the evidence presented so far, we would be justified in concluding that, with the exception of tombeaux, pieces bearing proper names, so far from being portraits, cannot be shown to have any musical connection with their titles at all, while non-personal titles often, perhaps usually, have some bearing (guessable or not) on the music, even if only as a guide to performance. But FranSois Couperin had a different view:

I have always had an object in composing all of these pieces; different occasions have furnished them to me. Thus the titles correspond to the ideas that I have had; I may be excused for not rendering an account of them. However, since among these titles there are some that seem to flatter me, it is well to point out that the pieces that bear them are a kind of portraits, which have sometimes been found good likenesses under my fingers, and that most of these flattering titles are given to [should be regarded as being the property of?] the amiable originals that I have tried to represent, rather than to [of ?] the copies I have drawn from them.8"

Here, finally, is a composer for whom the person named in the title is the generating idea of the piece: Couperin declares that he has painted portraits in music, and we have no reason not to believe him. It is reasonably certain that the first ten ordres, or 109 of Couperin's harpsichord pieces (somewhat less than half the total number) were composed over a period of perhaps 25 years preceding 1713.82 Of these 109, 25

80 The term also appears in the Rhitonrque des dieux, but, as has been explained above, Gautier probably had nothing to do with it.

81 From the preface to his first harpsichord book (1713). The flattering titles are of course the names of persons of high station, and the somewhat obscure final clause seems designed simply to disarm those who might accuse him of name-dropping: 'et que la pluipart de ces Titres avantageux, sont plitot donnes aux aimables originaux que j'ay voulu representer, qu'aux copies quej'en ay tirees'. It is not the business of this article to explain Couperin's titles. They have inspired a whole industry of interpretation, some recent exegetes being Georges Beck, in the notes to Kenneth Gilbert's complete recording (Harmonia Mundi, HM4 351/67, 1970-71); Philippe Beaussant, in Franfois Coupenrn (Paris, 1980), trans. Alexandra Land (Portland, Oregon, 1990); Jane Clark, in 'Les Folies franqoises', Early Music, viii (1980), 163-9, and in Franfois Coupenrn, Pieces de clavecin: the Background (Oxford, 1992); Wilfrid Mellers, in an appendix to the 'new version' of his Franfois Couperin and the French Classical Tradition (London, 1987); Bruce Gustafson, in the notes to Christophe Rousset's complete recording (Harmonia Mundi, HMC 90 1445/52, 1992-3); and Pierre Citron, in the earlier but still valuable Couperin (Paris, 1956). See also the valiant efforts of Franqoise Escal to bring everything up to date with 'semiotics': 'Les "Portraits" dans les quatre Livres de clavecin de Couperin', Inter- national Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, xi (1980), 3-23; and 'Le Titre de l'oeuvre musicale', Poitique, lxix (1987), 101-11.

82 The preface to Book 1 speaks of a period of twenty years over which his many occupations and illnesses allowed him barely the time to compose his pieces, much less see them through publication; the preface to Book 2 implies that most of those pieces also had been ready for publication in 1713. From this, as well as from the high proportion of traditional suite dances relative to that of the late books, we can infer that the contents of those collections were the accumulation of twenty years' work. But that takes us back only to 1693, five years after Couperin began his duties as organist of St-Gervais, three years after he had demonstrated his mastery of composition in the two organ Masses of 1690, and after his initiatives with the sonata. He had probably begun composing for the harpsichord by the late

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are 'classical' suite dances-six allemandes (one with title only, one with label only and four with both), ten courantes (all with labels only), six sarabandes (all with both titles and labels) and three gigues (two with labels only and one with both title and label)-fourteen are miscellaneous dances, only two with titles, and one is an untitled rondeau. Thus, for reasons that remain obscure, allemandes and sarabandes nearly all have titles, while almost none of the other suite dances do.

But what of the names that Couperin found flattering? There are only eight names of persons of high rank or great wealth in the first ten ordres (including the derivative La Bourbonnoise for Mlle de Bourbon (1693-1713) ).83 If we take Couperin strictly at his word, these are the portrait pieces. There are another ten people in music or in the theatre whose pieces may be (and some of which probably are) portraits. It is remarkable that none of these pieces is a traditional suite dance.84 On the other hand, nearly all the titles of the traditional dances (as listed above) are epithets or nicknames like La Tinibreuse, La Milordine, La Prude, La Dangereuse etc.,85 which are too 'generic', one would think, to add much to the composer's glory. It can be argued, therefore, that Couperin developed his art of musical portraiture in a style other than that of the old suite dances.

He taught music to the Duc de Bourgogne (the king's grandson and the dauphin) beginning in 1694, and during the -next eighteen years to six more princes and princesses, including Mlle de Bourbon, her sister Mlle de Charolais (for both of whom there is a payment record) and probably another sister, Mlle de Sens (formerly de Gex), whose names appear on pieces in the first, second and ninth ordres. Their lessons, and thus Couperin's acquaintance with them, would have begun about 1699, 1701 and 1711, assuming that they conformed to his recommendation in L'Art de toucher le clavecin that children should begin the study of the harpsichord at five or six years.86 There is no portrait of the Duc de Bourgogne, at least under his name. It seems likely that the preface to Couperin's Book 1 (1713), first mentioning portraits, was engraved before the dauphin's death on 18 February 1712, since he mentions him as if he were still alive.

The first of Couperin's harpsichord pieces to be published, and thus the first that can be dated, did not appear until 1707, in a collection of ten pieces printed without

1680s in the style of the time; some of the old-fashioned courantes, sarabandes and other dances may have originated then.

83 One must never leap to hasty identifications of French family titles. Mlle de Bourbon, daughter of Louis III de Conde-'M. le Duc'-was born Mlle de Charolais and upon her marriage became one of two simultaneous Princesses de Conti; her sister, Mlle de Sens, then became Mlle de Charolais, and another sister, Mlle de Gex, became Mlle de Sens. Their brother was the Comte de Charolais and their aunt had been Mlle de Charolais after having been Mlle d'Enghien and before becoming the Duchesse du Maine. Bourbon, Charolais, Sens and Conti are all names in Couperin's harpsichord music, and the Duchesse du Maine seems to have been a presence behind many more. There is a payment record of 1711 showing that Mlle de Bourbon (b. 1693) and Mlle de Charolais (probably Sens-Charolais, b. 1695) were his pupils. I have excluded-to some extent arbitrarily-the eleventh and twelfth ordres of Book 2 from these calculations because Couperin seems to say in his preface that two additional ordres were composed especially for this publication and were not part of the accumulation of twenty years.

84 La Mizangere is an allemande (not so labelled) of a new type-beginning in the middle of the bar without the stock dotted quaver-apparently invented by Couperin. Mesangere was the king's martre d'ho^tel, and his wife was Couperin's pupil.

85 A sarabande is entitled Les Sentimens, and Jane Clark (Franfois Coupenn . . . the Background, pp. 1, 9) believes on slim evidence that La Logiviere, a traditional allemande, is the Czech lutenist Count Losy, and that L'Auguste is Louis-Auguste, Duc du Maine. Adjectival titles remain in a very small minority in the later ordres, and several of them are attached to allemandes.

86 A poor copy of La Princesse de Sens, without the title, exists in a manuscript (No. 1152) containing pieces dated 1709 and 1710 by an otherwise unknown 'Babou' in the library of the Conservatoire Royal de Musique, Liege, perhaps attesting to an early date for this piece and, by association, for the others; see Norbert Dufourcq, 'Francois Couperin sous le signe de Babou', Milanges Franfois Coupenrn, Paris, 1968, pp. 64-71.

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attribution by Christophe Ballard.87 It is likely that they had been in circulation long enough to achieve a degree of popularity sufficient to convince Ballard that it would pay him to publish them, since the initiative- and financing-apparently had not come from the composers or their patrons, as was usually the case. None of the six pieces by Couperin bears a proper name, although four or five titles probably refer to people, and none is a traditional suite dance. These are the first examples of a new style marked by an altogether original, studied, arch and highly sophisticated naivety, the vastly increased freedom and variety of which permitted a range and sharpness of characterization that could never have been achieved within the stylistic parameters of the old dances.88 No comparable stylistic break occurred in the music of any other harpsichord composer before 1724. This was the style that Couperin would develop throughout his four books and that would overwhelmingly dominate in the later ones, the style in which he could perfect his art of portraiture and in which the pieces for the three Conde sisters were composed. It seems, by the way, that it is to Marin Marais that the (belated) first use of a term to distinguish descriptive pieces in free style not bound to the rhythms or forms of the dance can be traced. In the preface to his fourth book of viol pieces (1717)-and invoking the fashionable word 'character'-he refers to a number of pieces caract6rizees, and in his last book (1725) he says that 'since pieces de caracteres are received favourably today, I thought it appropriate to insert a number of them. The different titles will indicate them readily, without any need to point them out.'89

From all this we can cautiously deduce a chronology. Couperin almost certainly began harpsichord composition in the years before 1690 with traditional suite dances. If we are to take him literally, any of these first pieces that found their way into Book 1 were descriptive: he had 'always had an object in composing all these pieces' (my emphasis). But even if we discount the relatively few dances without titles in this collection, we must imagine his art of characterization evolving during much of the 1690s, doubtless first applied to 'objects' and generalized types of persons, then to particular persons of high rank like the Conde sisters. It is likely that pieces bearing less exalted names are also portraits, but we do not have Couperin's explicit assurance to that effect. Although his art continued to deepen and to grow more personal throughout his life, the essential features of his new style cannot have taken shape much later than 1705.

We do not know what relations Couperin might have had with the Conde house- hold in the 1690s, but from 1684 until his death in 1696 La Bruyere was employed there, at first as tutor of the father-to-be of the three sisters; and it was there that he

87 Pieces choisies pour le clavecin de differents auteurs. For information about the sources of Couperin's harpsichord music, see Bruce Gustafson & David Fuller, A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699-1780, Oxford, 1990.

88 Evrard Titon du Tillet said of his harpsichord pieces: 'On peut dire qu'elles sont d'un gouit nouveau, & d'un caractere oii l'Auteur doit passer pour Original' (Le Parnassefranfois, Paris, 1732, 2nd suppl., 1755, p. 665). I have argued Couperin's role as creator of this style in my 'La Grandeur du grand Couperin', to be published in a collection by the Academie Musicale de Villecroze. The early maturation and wide circulation of the new style is proved by a copy dated 1708 of Les Vendangeuses-later to become one of Couperin's most popular pieces-among the notes of Baron Fiirstenberg in Schloss Herdringen, near Neheim-Hiisten, Westphalia, as reported in J. Gaudefroy- Demombynes, Les jugements allemands sur la musiquefranfaise au XVIII sicle, Paris, 1941, p. 318.

89 Marais's conception of the character piece was quite different from Couperin's, however. Whereas the latter's was all subtlety and humour-the music proceeding from the idea-the former often began with some unusual, even bizarre technical idea, which he then simply named directly or allegorically. For example, Le Contraste alternates 12/8 and 4/4 bar by bar. The similarity to the approach of Sainte-Colombe's copyist is striking (Sainte- Colombe was Marais's teacher). The term 'character piece' may have gained currency in speech (in a letter Rameau wrote of airs caractirisis) but it was not taken up on title-pages. One exception is Jean-Baptiste Dupuits's Pieces de caracteres pour la vielle, Op. 5 (c. 1745).

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wrote his Caracteres, taking it through its eighth edition in 1694. Couperin almost certainly possessed a copy.90 In any case, 'character' was in the air, was fashionable and was a subject of controversy, even scandal, and it must have been a very familiar idea to Couperin. Moreover, as we have seen, there was little distinction between character and portrait in the discourse of the time. It is difficult to believe that literary models did not have some influence on Couperin's art of musical portraiture.91

As musical influences on Couperin, we cannot rule out Mouton and Gallot, some of whose many pieces bearing the names of real people may have been intended to describe them. Mouton, at least, was active and presumably composing when the literary portrait was all the rage, and indeed he moved in the circles that cultivated them. But no statement or document proves that his aim was to describe the persons named, and the music itself, which does not break free from the traditional dance formulas, cannot tell us much.92 Of course, the musical portrait, even freed from the shackles of the dance, does not lend itself to the same kind of direct observation as the literary portrait, since music can rarely convey concrete images or ideas. We do not have to know the names of the subjects of literary portraits to know what kind of persons they are-hence the possibility of anonymous or pseudonymous portraits for guessing-but with music, unless we are told, we cannot even know whether we are listening to a portrait at all.93 As we have seen, not even pieces with proper names attached are necessarily portraits. But it is possible, nevertheless, for music to suggest personal characteristics-for example, the way someone sounds, moves or behaves, or the emotional aura he projects-and it can call up associations that evoke him. As with any programme music, once we know what the object of description is supposed to be, we can take delight in such audible resemblances and allusions as the composer has managed to put in the piece.94

Apart from La Bruyere and from any of the new broadside portraits mentioned by the Mercure galant that Couperin might have come across, there was another possible point of contact between the composer and the literary portrait, and indeed other

The book is listed as simply 'Caracteres de Theophraste' in the 'Inventaire apres deces de Fran,ois Couperin' (transcr. in Revue de musicologie, xxxiv (1952), 114-27). In 1956, Pierre Citron suggested a connection with La Bruyere and also with La Fontaine (Couperin, p. 34).

91 There was, however, another meaning of 'character' that found its way into musical titles. Jean-Fery Rebel's danced 'symphony' Les Caracteres de la danse (1715) consisted of a chain of different dances (sarabande, gigue, passe- pied, gavotte etc.), often incomplete in their forms and connected to each other without breaks. Although a 'programme' inspired by the choreography was later published, the term 'character' seems to refer here to the different dance steps themselves, as in Rameau's stage direction for Pygmalion (1748): 'les Graces instruisent la Statue et lui montrent les differents caracteres de la danse'.

92 Jacques Morel's Ipr livre de pieces de violle (1709) has one or two pieces that might be portraits, among them La Fanchonette, which must concern the same Fanchon Moreau, a singer, as La Tendre Fanchon in Couperin's first book (see Jane Clark, 'Les Folies fran,oises', p. 164). In 1711, Louis-Antoine Dornel gave names of musicians, including Couperin, to eight chamber sonatas.

93 This is looking at the matter from the viewpoint of the eighteenth century. In our own century, the portraits of Gertrude Stein reached a degree of indirectness and abstraction that is comparable to (not very tuneful) musical representation. Here are the first few sentences of her portrait of Virgil Thomson: 'Yes ally: As ally. Yes ally yes as ally. A very easy failure takes place. Yes ally. As ally yes a very easy failure takes place. Very good. Very easy failure takes place. Yes very easy failure takes place. When with a sentence of intended they were he was neighboured by a bean.'

94 Virgil Thomson was one of the very few composers since Couperin to make a speciality of musical portraits and the only one to discuss his technique. His portraits were composed in the presence of the sitter, in silence and above all without conscious calculation of the method. Although there was 'no test' for the resemblance, Thomson echoed Couperin in declaring that 'persons acquainted with the sitters not infrequently recognize characteristics' (see Tom- masini, Virgil Thomson 's Musical Portraits, p. ix). Thomas Mace has left us an account of his lute piece My Mistress, which originated by a process similar to Thomson's method, see Musick's Monument, London, 1676 (repr. 1966), 122-4.

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genres and habits of the era of the pricieuses. The seat of this contact was the mag- nificent Chateau de Sceaux, which the Duc du Maine had bought for his duchess in 1699 as a refuge from the deadly tedium of Versailles.95 Here she established a court which she entertained with madly extravagant nocturnal divertissements of which complete operas formed only one part and for which members of the king's music were regularly hired (Sceaux was only six miles south of Paris and ten from Ver- sailles). A number of titles in Couperin's first two books have suggested to Jane Clark a link with the duchess and her circle.96 For example, L'Abeille, a tiny ternary piece in 6/8 times first published in Ballard's collection of 1707 and then as Les Abeilles in Book 1, is not remotely suggestive of the buzzing of a bee, but its title may well allude to the duchess's private order of chivalry created with great ceremony in 1703, La Mouche a miel ('The Honey Bee'), and to her emblem, bees flying around their hive with a motto from Tasso that makes reference to her small stature: 'Piccola sl, ma fa pur gravi le ferite' ('Small, yes, but deep she wounds'). The piece could even be her portrait, although it is hard to see anything in its gentle lilt, marked 'Tendrement', that might describe that aggressive, clever, party-mad woman. Les Silvains, first published in Book 1 (1713) though probably in circulation earlier (it was arranged for lute and theorbo by Visee), may refer to an entertainment in honour of the duke and duchess sponsored by the brilliant poet and polymath Nicolas de Malezieu at his residence of Chatenay, hardly a mile from Sceaux.97 Malezieu, perhaps the most ardent and loyal of the duchess's courtiers, called himself the 'sylvain de Chatenay', and on this occasion, the night of 9-10 August 1705, the singer Marguerite-Louise Couperin, cousin of Fran,ois, appeared as a nymph. Couperin is known to have accompanied her on another occasion and may have done so here; moreover, he may have been among the 35 'elite' royal musicians comprising the orchestra, who were probably dressed as sylvans, as they had been for Malezieu's fete in 1702.98 After a comidie-ballet of a prologue and three acts in which the duchess had a role, Malezieu delivered a song, 'L'abeille, petit animal', that paraphrased her motto. (All this had been preceded by a dinner for 45 and cards, and it was followed by a mag- nificent supper, games of wit, fireworks and dancing lasting until morning.)

The only documented appearance of Couperin at Sceaux was as organist for two Masses in autumn 1701, when the king stopped there on his way from Fontaine- bleau back to Versailles.99 It is more than possible, however, that he appeared there on other occasions as a harpsichordist. If he did, he can hardly have been unaware of the jeux d'esprit and pieces galantes that were cultivated there with an enthusiasm comparable to that in the ruelles of half a century before. Similarly, he would have known of the habit of giving everyone nicknames: the duke was le garfon, the duchess Laurette, Malezieu le cure, and a friend, the Duchess of Nevers, Diane, perhaps the subject of Couperin's La Diane.100 Sceaux, moreover, and perhaDs Chatenav (which

9 The Duc du Maine was the legitimized son of the king and Mme de Montespan; the duchess was an aunt of the Conde sisters (see n. 83, above). For a detailed account of the activities at Sceaux, see AdolpheJullien, La Comidie a la cour, Paris, 1885 (repr. Geneva, 1971), 15-97; this is partly based on Abbe Charles-Claude Genest's Les divertissements de Sceaux (1712).

96 Franfois Couperin. ... the Background, pp. 1, 2, 6. It must be pointed out that not all of Clark's suggestions stand up to examination; for example, she associates La Tinibreuse, La Lugubre and La Lutine, all in Book 1 (1713), with the Grandes nuits, which did not begin until spring 1714.

97 The Princesse de Conti, sister of the duchess, was also present. 98 These divertissements, for which Malezieu's entire fortune would not have sufficed, were subsidized by the Duc

du Maine himself; they took place each August for several years beginning in 1702 (Jullien, La Comidie a la cour, pp. 43 ff.).

99 As reported in the Mercuregalant, given in Andre Tessier, Coupenrn, Paris, 1926, pp. 30 f. l Jullien (La Comidie a la cour, p. 94) gives a dozen more, none, however, used as titles by Couperin.

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functioned as little more than an extension of Sceaux) seem to have been the only places in the early eighteenth century where the detached literary portrait continued to flourish. Our witness is the parliamentary president Charles-Jean-Fran,ois Henault, another of the duchess's adoring courtiers, whose memoirs include four examples by the Marquise du Deffand (two), the Baroness de Staal-Delaunay and Henault himself.10l

Several of Moliere's comedies were given at Sceaux and Chatenay, as well as at Clagny, near Versailles (another of the duchess's houses), but not Les Pricieuses ridicules, so far as has been recorded.102 However, the actress who succeeded Madeleine Brejart, the first Magdelon, in Moliere's company and who specialized in soubrette roles doubtless including Magdelon, Jeanne-Olivier de Beauval, played several times at Sceaux, even though she was officially retired from the stage.103 And there was one last amusement at Sceaux described by Henault and Saint-Simon that finally brought music into juxtaposition, if not into a meaningful relationship, with something resembling portraits. This, however, was not exclusive to the duchess but existed at least from 1696 as a fashionable diversion on Christmas Eve. Henault describes it as he knew it: each year, on Christmas Eve, 'we gathered at eight in the evening in the salon at Sceaux. The instruments [symphonie] began by playing a suite of noels, and then we sang all the noels that had been written either on current events or on the carryings-on [plaisanteries] of society.'104 Although Henault's report did not antedate 1720, Saint-Simon brings us back to 1712, and probably before. In the course of a contemptuous portrait ofJean-Antoine de Mesmes (1661-1723), first president of the Paris parliament, he cites a noel which 'painted him with the greatest accuracy, one year when it was fashionable to write them in the form of portraits of quantities of people. This noel showed him in a crowd introducing himself at the crib' (the noels were always sung around the crib, however scurrilous their texts).105 Saint-Simon remembered only the fifth and last lines, but the whole text is included in a late eighteenth-century,collection, where it is directed to be sung to the tune of 'Les Bourgeois de Chartres':

Sans prince ni princesse, Without prince or princess de Mesme est survenue; De Mesme appeared; de peur que dans la presse for fear that in the crowd il ne fuit confondu, he would be mistaken,

101 Memoires du Prisident Henault, ed. Fran,ois Rousseau, Paris, 1911 (repr. Geneva, 1971), 130 ff. Henault did not meet the duchess until 1720 after her return from imprisonment for intrigue against the regent, and Van der Cruysse (Le Portrait dans les 'Mimoires' du Duc de Saint-Simon, p. 47) appears to be wrong in placing them before that event; nevertheless, Henault is more likely to have acquired his taste for portraits at Sceaux than to have introduced them there. It is, of course, a pure guess that Couperin could have heard of the literary portrait at Sceaux during the first decade of the century, early enough to have been stimulated by it.

102 It was performed twice in 1702, at Versailles and at the Comedie-Fran,aise, but hardly at all otherwise during the first decade of the century, while other Moliere plays were often seen.

103 Jane Clark identifies her with Couperin's La Douce janneton, where she is teamed up provocatively with La Fine Madelon. However, that pair of pieces was published only in Book 4 (1730), ten years after Beauval's death, and the actress seems to have been best known simply as 'La Beauval'. Two more pieces called jeanneton, totally unlike Couperin's, were composed by Dornel (1731) and Dagincour (1733). The principal source on Beauval is Fran,ois Parfaict & Claude Parfaict, Histoire du thiatre franfois depuis son onrginejusqu'a prisent, xiv (Amsterdam, 1748 (repr. Geneva, 1967; New York, 1968), 527-34).

104 Mimoires du Prisident Hinault, ed. Rousseau, p. 132. 105 Saint-Simon, Mimoires, ed. Yves Coirault, Paris, 1988, iv. 949. Another version is given in ibid., iv. 382. Saint-

Simon's portraits were an integral part of his approach to memoirs, while those of Henault were simply collected and inserted.

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il dit au bon Joseph: 'Je suis M. de he said to the good Joseph: 'I am M. de Mesmes'. Mesmes'.

Puis, baisant le poupon, don don, Then, kissing the Christ-Child, don-don, on dit qu'il le pria, la la, they say he invited him, la-la, a souper le Careme. to supper in Lent.106

Since the music was not composed for the words, there could be no question of musical portraiture here, but the combination of music and portraiture-or anec- dote-might have been suggestive to a composer of instrumental music. This is one of 42 'Noels de la Cour en 1696' satirizing notables from the king down, many in a manner that one might think would have landed the authors in prison. All, apparently, were to be sung to the same tune.

Couperin's first harpsichord book seems to have struck his colleagues dumb. Only three other composers ventured out in public with harpsichord music during the eighteen years over which his four books appeared: the ageing Siret, doubtless reassured by his long friendship with the master; Rameau, with no doubts as to his own mastery; and Dandrieu, who in spite of his lack of interest in portraits was the first (1724) to leap with both feet on to Couperin's title-bandwagon. By contrast, during the next eighteen years (beginning in 1731) no fewer than 34 composers put out a total of 45 collections, and few now dared present a piece de clavecin without a title.107 Indeed, when Dandrieu revised and republished older, untitled dances in 1734, he felt obliged to update them: a gavotte became La Galante, a sarabande La Constante and so forth. Marpurg should be added to this total, since he published a book of Pieces de clavecin in Paris in 1741 containing a mixture of untitled dances and pieces bearing such titles as Le Songe des muses, Le Coucou and La Nymphe marine. But it was not until 1751 that a composer again said that he was painting portraits, and it was another Couperin, Armand-Louis, son of the great Couperin's cousin Nicolas: 'I have tried to vary the styles and to be original; everything is a portrait of one kind or another'.108 The rather vague use of 'portrait' suggests that Couperin may have meant it in the sense of any representation, whether of persons or of things: although most of his titles are indeed proper names, there are a few-for example Les Tendres Sentimens-that are not. The collection is dedicated to Madame Victoire, daughter of Louis XV and apparently a good harpsichordist; the opening piece is, naturally, La Victoire. Only three years before, Jacques Duphly had dedicated a book of harpsichord pieces to that same princess, and he also began with a La Victoire. Duphly's piece is an obvious pun on 'victory', with fanfares and triumphant outbursts. Couperin's less flamboyant and rather empty-headed piece is marked 'Noblement' and seems to concentrate on rockets (fireworks at a victory celebration?), although there are passages in thirds that may be intended to imitate a pair of trumpets.

The brief life of the 'parlour portrait' in the salons of the mid seventeenth century seems hardly to have been exceeded by that of the musical portrait in early eighteenth-century France. The first ran out for lack of people to describe, according to the Mercure galant (see p. 149, above), and the latter, apparently, for lack of

106 [Sautereau de Marsy], Nouveau siecle de Louis XIV, ou Poisies-anecdotes du regne et de la cour de ce prince, avec des notes histonrques et des iclaircissements, iv (Paris & London, 1793), 295.

107 See the chronology in Gustafson & Fuller, A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, pp. 343-4. Only one composer of the 30 whose music has been located, Demars, left his pieces with largely generic dance headings.

08 Pieces de clavecin, Paris, [1751] (repr. Basle, n.d.; New York, n.d.), p. [v].

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composers who combined the genius and the inclination to succeed in this most *demanding and elusive of descriptive musical genres. The rage for titled pieces in general also finally spent itself, at least for a time. In 1779, Mlle Edelmann (sister of Jean-Frederic) was scolded in the press for adding titles to the movements of a sonata: 'Readers will not approve of the titles, L 'Ingenue, L 'Indiffirente, placed at the head of movements ... this fashion is out of date. It is true that early barbouilleurs [dabblers] used to put over their grotesque compositions, "this is a horse", "this is a tree"; but the works of Mlle Edelmann have no need of this miserable resource.'109 But if the character piece languished, it did not die. In Berlin, between 1754 and 1757, C. P. E. Bach imitated not only French generic titles-Les Languers tendres, L'Irresolue etc.-but Couperin's portraits as well, or at least the practice of attaching the names of friends to detached, non-dance pieces, as with La Gleim, La Pott etc.110 Moreover, the innovations devised by Couperin to meet his descriptive needs took root, developed and became an essential element of what we call the Classical style; and the character piece itself, given a life of its own by Couperin and a name by Marais, flourished again richly in the music of Schumann-who said that his titles never occurred to him until after he had finished composing. It is a long and slender thread that connects the countless charakteristische Stticke of later times to the friends of Sapho and the satires of La Bruyere, and there are more gaps than connections in the route from Couperin to Virgil Thomson. No one has ever succeeded in recaptur- ing the enigmatic, playful, elegant innocence of Couperin's music. But in anything that calls itself a character piece there will always be something of the French Baroque.

109 Annonces, affiches, et avis divers, 23 January 1779, p. 181. 110 For a more detailed consideration of Bach's character pieces than has been possible here, see Darrell M. Berg,

'C. P. E. Bach's Character Pieces and his Friendship Circle', C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Stephen L. Clark, Oxford, 1988, pp. 1-32.

111 Even the occasional portrait can be documented in the years between Couperin and Virgil Thomson. On 30 December 1856 Brahms, who was working on his First Piano Concerto, wrote to Clara Schumann: 'Auch male ich an einem sanften Portrat von Dir, das dann Adagio werden soll'. See Clara Schumann, ohannes Brahms: Bnefe aus den Jahren 1853-1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann, Leipzig, 1927 (repr. 1970), i. 198; discussed by Christopher Reynolds in 'A Choral Symphony by Brahms?', 19th Century Music, ix (1985-6), 3-25.

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of portraits, 'sapho' and couperin: titles and characters in french instrumental music of...

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