Eighteenth-century French character pieces intrigue with their evocative titles. But collections of these works remain largely impenetrable thanks to historical distance and sometimes deliberate obfuscation (see François Couperin's Premier livre de clavecin). Such mysteries are only compounded in the case of Pierre Nicolas La Font's Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (1759), which was lost until 2003, when the University of California Berkeley acquired the only known print. As a result the composer too has been ‘lost’; La Font does not feature in the pages of Grove or any other major music history, appearing only briefly in David Fuller and Bruce Gustafson's A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music 1699–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). If most scholars and players didn't even know to lament the collection's presumed loss, should we now celebrate its re-emergence? Editor Jonathan Rhodes Lee believes so. He demonstrates that this ‘new’ collection provides an engaging and succinct encapsulation of mid-century French harpsichord composition in its variety of genre, style and technique. Further, it offers a way to rediscover the composer's environment, allowing us to gaze (if hazily) upon a rich social-musical world in which composers, players and patrons intersected in printed collections as they may have done in real life.
Primary sources tell us that La Font (c1725–c1791) was organist at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was connected with the Clicquot family of organ builders and enjoyed sufficient reputation to have been enlisted, with François-Henri Clicquot, to test out an organ restoration in Gisors by Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Lefebvre in 1774 (ix). With the rediscovery of the Premier livre, however, Lee is able to centre La Font within social-musical circles of patronage and artistry that emerge first from the dedication and secondly from careful research into the titles and subjects of the character pieces. The dedicatee, Louis de Noailles (1713–1793), duc d'Ayen, held many aristocratic titles and was an important patron as well as composer and singer. In the dedication, La Font describes how the duke had fostered his youthful musical exploits and later motivated the composition of this volume (3). Thus it is fitting that the duke is the subject of the first character piece, ‘La Dayen’, a technically vigorous portrait marked ‘Hardiment’.
Though Lee does not include the possible subjects of the other character pieces in the introductory material on ‘the composer and his circle’ (ix–xi), probably because he is aware of the tentative status of identifications – for which he always provides alternative possibilities (xii–xiv) – many titles seem to widen the circles around both d'Ayen and La Font. D'Ayen appears to be the oblique subject of the last pieces in the collection, a programmatic suite on the royal hunt, for which d'Ayen served as captain. ‘La Hénin’ seems likely to be a portrait of the duke's military comrade, while other titles (‘La Dillon’, ‘La Neugent’ and ‘La Delange’) suggest members of the exiled Stuart court still in residence at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where d'Ayen served as ‘gouverneur’. As documented by Edward Corp, Italian and French music thrived during the Stuart court's residence, and this seems likely to have influenced Couperin, who composed ‘portraits’ of the court just as it appears La Font has done here (Edward Corp, ‘François Couperin and the Stuart Court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1691–1712: A New Interpretation’, Early Music 28/3 (2000), 445–453). This suggests that courtiers who continued on at the chateau long after the exile of James III maintained the palace as an important locus for musical life. Meanwhile a second pairing of character pieces within the ‘Sonata [avec l'accompagnement de violon]’ builds out La Font's connections to contemporary musicians, including René Drouard de Bousset (‘La Dubosset’) and one or more members from the Forqueray family (‘La Forqueray’). I find myself in agreement that at least some of these connections observed ‘can hardly be coincidence’ (xiii).
After the character pieces, programmatic pieces and accompanied sonata already described, a pair of minuets rounds out the collection. La Font organizes these pieces by key into informal ‘suites’, excepting the character pieces ‘La Neugent’, ‘La Dubosset’ (Rondeau) and ‘La Forqueray’ (Gigue), which comprise the accompanied ‘Sonata’. Here the added violin permits La Font to enrich the harpsichord part with accompaniment in thirds or in complementary arpeggiation, and even to take the lead in the couplets of the rondeau ‘La Dubosset’. Accompanied keyboard works were not new in France in 1759, but they appear to have been sufficiently novel and marketable that special mention was made at the end of the advertisement, which somewhat exaggerates the collection's ‘plusieurs Piéces [sic] avec accompagnement de violon’ (ix).
The varied generic designations in advertisement and print – ‘Piéces’ and ‘Sonata’ – indicate the diversity of approaches within accompanied keyboard writing in eighteenth-century France, which included collections of generic three-movement sonatas (Mondonville, Charles-François Clément, Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Louis-Gabriel Guillemain, Chevalier d'Herbain), titled sonatas with generic movements in the vein of Couperin's Les Nations (Michel Corrette) and groupings of character pieces into suites or sonatas (Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jacques Duphly, Simon Simon). La Font's accompanied sonata falls into the latter category and is like Duphly's Troisième Livre (1758) in that the accompanied works appear in a collection of solo harpsichord music, evidence of the genre's connection with solo repertoire and performance. But unlike Duphly and Rameau, La Font calls his work ‘Sonata’, perhaps acceding to the growing popularity of Italianate accompanied sonatas; indeed, this collection is among the last to feature accompanied character pieces. The La Font ‘Sonata’ thus seems to stand at an important crossroads, and is a valuable addition to the repertoire.
Lee writes that the ‘duke was evidently fond of such sonatas’, citing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1764 dedication of his k8 and k9 accompanied sonatas to the duke's daughter and noted salonnière, the comtesse de Tessé (xi). I wonder at the nature of this ‘fondness’, and wish that Lee had provided more information. After all, the accompanied sonata was often associated with female keyboardists and male accompanists, an association made clear by La Font's still-lost second publication, titled Amusement des dames pour le forte-piano, avec accompagnement de violon ad libitum (1773). Could it be that the duc d'Ayen played the accompanying violin parts in the La Font and other chamber sonatas? Of the other composers who dedicated works to the duke (xi), three of four offered chamber works for violin.
In the solo harpsichord works in the collection, La Font has much to offer both player and scholar. The coincidence of a summer thunderstorm with my first reading of ‘L'Orageuse’ was fortuitous, but even without the driving rain outside, the tempestuous technical demands (repeated notes, hand-crossings, broken octaves, arpeggio flourishes and other batteries), unexpected and unconventional harmonies (see ‘Tonnere’ [sic], bars 77–81) and imaginatively titled descriptive passages (‘Le Vent’, ‘Éclair’, ‘Le Grelle’, ‘Sonnerie’) delighted. Further, the organization of this detailed programmatic piece into an early sonata-allegro form shows an interest in thematic unity and organization also exhibited in even the simplest binary pieces in the collection (xii). And La Font's virtuosity is definitely on display, as in ‘La Dayen’, with passagework that resembles Rameau's and Duphly's most challenging harpsichord writing. It appears that La Font was known in his own right for virtuoso batteries, for Lee identifies an intertextual reference between an arpeggio passage in ‘La Dayen’ with a 1761 concerto by the composer Simon Simon (1735–1788) called ‘La La Font’ that appears to pay tribute to the composer and the ‘La Font style’ (xi). Elsewhere La Font writes with more grace than bombast (‘La Dillon’) and a handful of style brisé pieces are highlights (‘La Hénin’, ‘La Dubousset’, ‘La Derouflac’ and ‘Le Machine de Marly’). Thus the collection appeals to all manner of players, as it no doubt did in La Font's day.
Lee's edition creates a usable document by tacitly updating the notation to conform to ‘modern notational practices’ (55) and correcting errors in accidentals. Given what Lee describes as an idiosyncratic system in which La Font ‘avoided both ledger lines and clef changes as much as possible, freely distributing his music between staves and occasionally marking g and d to indicate the left or right hand’ (55), readers can feel fortunate that the edition was in the hands of an accomplished harpsichordist as well as scholar. The editorial process also called on Lee's compositional skills in completing the second couplet of the final piece, a rondeau entitled ‘Le Machine de Marly’, which cuts off abruptly at bar 24 in the source. Lee's completion reproduces the tendency for La Font's second couplets to feature climactic harmonic sequences (see ‘La Dillon’, ‘La Hénin’ and ‘La Derouflac’) and perfectly suits the programmatic depiction of the paddle wheels and pumps that brought the waters of the Seine uphill to Versailles (xiv). It seems fitting that the editor who restored La Font and his music to us should so successfully stand in for the composer in the final pages of the edition.
