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Rating: What binds us to silence is only this festive air.
Paris, August 15, 1728: Marin Marais, the greatest viol player of his time, permanent conductor at the Académie Royale de Musique and court violist, dies in sumptuous rooms and among great honors, as befitted the times. François Couperin, as great as the famous Marais but far more modest, composes two suites for viola da gamba in his memory that encompass an ineffable light, of which words cannot possibly account. Two violas and a harpsichord converse in a manner of a daydream, allowing time, instead of flowing in the usual way, to proceed in indicating a tense atmosphere and a strange stirring of the heart.
An inlaid curl of spruce wood atop the shape of a viola da gamba: what is it, I wonder, that is so special? Yet it produces a sound that you will find nowhere else, no matter how many continents you dare cross with a keen ear. A sound heavy, nebulous, and clear at the same time. The harpsichord then plucks the strings instead of striking them. Instead of hiding the dissonances under the carpet, it lets them resonate indefinitely.
In these shadowy and labyrinthine folds, where harmony is not just clarity but a play of disharmonies, Baroque music lives.
The river Yerres, following the same daily path as the sun, has likely meandered sinuously in a thousand folds for hundreds of kilometers among woods, fields of tones now brown, now golden, dappled pastures, small towns, and barren lands before mixing fatally and inexorably with the Seine in the Marne valley near Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, where barges, now similar, now dissimilar, rim in blue and gray the tributary of the great Parisian river.
In its winding path to Paris, the Yerres bathes that corner of the world where the too-forgotten Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, in perfect solitude, had the opportunity to see with his own eyes, perfecting the instrument, what could emerge from the viola da gamba and it alone: a flaming warmth of memory and a bitter mingling of life and death. His daring student Marin Marais, who compensated for the master's lack of depth with lightness, met with a very different fate. A fate of fortune and greatness.
Indeed, the fate of the musician is, like that of the river Yerres, a destiny that inevitably leads to the capital.
Chaumes-en-Brie was and is a village caressed by the folds of that Seine tributary, like many others, with slate sloping roofs and walls of bluish-gray limestone. At that time, in the early seventeenth century, the Benedictine abbey of Saint Pierre, which for seven centuries had diverted travelers' paths across the fields, must surely still have been in its place among the sparse, pointed, and humble cottages when Charles Couperin found lodging and employment there as an organist. Half a century then passed sinuously, almost witnessing the death of the merchant and organist of St. Pierre until it happened that Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, the harpsichordist to the king of France, happened to visit Chaumes-en-Brie for the feast of St. James and there to hear a composition by the then slightly over twenty-year-old Louis Couperin, son of the modest village musician. Louis followed the king's musician to Paris and from the latter both he and his brothers and the subsequent generations of Couperin learned the art of sublimating the popular movement of dance in accord with the heartbeat, favoring what it, in its cadenced pace, inlays between the epiglottis and the diaphragm.
Louis lived only a decade in the capital, well before his nephew François Couperin Le Grand saw the light in 1668. Yet a decade was enough to compose more than a hundred auditory contrasts in forms of preludes, chaconnes, gigues, and sarabandes for harpsichord. In his hands, Baroque is like the inner development of a sound fold, pursuing, in the infinitesimal, the dance of life. Well, in this same deep and light dance sublimated and etched beyond time, the listener of the Pièces de Viole avec la basse chiffrée composed by his nephew François resides.
(now it's better to remain silent)
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