François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords.
The Third Book was published in 1722, when the composer was fifty-four years old. In the preface he attacks some of the performers rather harshly: "I am always surprised (after the care I have taken to mark the embellishments that suit my Pieces) to hear some people who do not obey them. It is an unforgivable negligence to fail to include these musical flourishes, especially since they have not been added arbitrarily. I therefore declare that my pieces must be executed exactly as I have marked them. They will never make a lasting impression on people with good taste unless everything that I have marked on the scores is observed to the letter, no more no less.". The Third Book and its seven orders is divided between the second half of Carole Cerasi's sixth volume, the seventh, and the first half of the eighth. We find two harpsichords here again; a copy of a Parisian Pascal Taskin from 1769 and a copy of a Jean-Claude Goujon from 1749. © SM/Qobuz