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"There have been organists, whose abilities in unstudied effusions on their instruments have almost amounted to inspiration, such as Sebastian Bach, Handel, Marchand, Couperin, Kelway, Stanley, Worgan, and Keeble; several of whom played better music extempore, than they could write with meditation." Rees' Cyclopædia.
In "Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone.
They both issue from what is deeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span of centuries, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silver temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and the other clavecinists.
The publisher Durand set to work on his great editions of Rameau and Couperin. Towards 1893 the study of Music was introduced at the Sorbonne by some young professors, who made the subject the theses for their doctor's degree.
Frescobaldi, Couperin, Schubert, and Chopin, in their boldness of expression and style, anticipated the revolutionaries in orchestral music by fifty years.
So long as the tone quality, action and nature of the instrument sufficed for compositions of the type of those of Domenico Scarlatti, or François Couperin, or Rameau, there was little need for change, but as the more modern composers longed for new and more comprehensive effects, the piano-makers kept up with their desires and aims.
All of a sudden the musician stopped. "I can't describe your wife, now that I see her," he said. "I don't know any dignified old Japanese music, something like the gavottes of Couperin only in a setting of Kyoto and gold screens; and then there must be a dash of something very English which she has acquired from you 'Home, Sweet Home' or 'Sally in our Alley."
'Oh, monsieur, I will not consent to anything if he does not consent to have lessons given me by M. Couperin; I want to study music. "We had just reached this item of our negotiations when, unhappily, Mosaide surprised us, and without having overheard our conversation got the scent of its meaning. "He called me at once a suborner, and heaped outrageous insults on me.
It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that the exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on it.
And in the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and all the other barbarians.
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