A Solis./ En taille ||
Couperin a paris le 24 Novembre 1656./*
A Solis, en Basse./ ||
Couperin 1656./
A Solis, En triple./ a la haulte Contre./ ||
A Toulouze le 5e decembre 1659./ Couperin
Oldham MS
(1650s–60s?)
These three settings (of a total of five by Couperin) of the Christmas Office hymn ‘A solis ortus cardine’ (the beginning of a long abecedarian poem on the life of Christ by fifth-
century poet Caelius Sedulius) present the chant, entirely or essentially unadorned, in long notes; all three harmonize the beginning and ending pitches of the beautiful Mode III melody with root-
position triads upon those pitches and thus begin with a D-minor sonority and end with an E-major one. They presumably, though not necessarily, were meant to be played in alternation with sung verses of the hymn.
No. 41 is Couperin’s only piece in which a chant is set in the tenor voice (played here on the Pedal Trumpet with the other three voices played on the full chorus of the organ). This verse, though it does not use imitative techniques, is nevertheless in some ways close to the style of Couperin’s fantaisies and fugues, with varied and intricate writing for the manuals and in particular an active bass voice. (It is the only tenor-
chant piece in the French Baroque repertory with such a soloistic bass voice – it is perhaps notable that Couperin also wrote the first known bass-
solo works in the French organ literature – in part because it is nearly the only French tenor-
chant piece in fewer than five voices, i.e. in which the left hand has only one voice to play; the others known to me are two are by François Couperin and two in Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève MS. 2348, one of which is a gigue-
like trio. It seems unlikely, but it is worth wondering whether the left hand might play on a separate manual from the right;
cf. the ‘Sonaten’ registration for the third verses of Weckman’s ‘Es ist das Heÿl’ and ‘O lux beata Trinitas’.) This is the earliest precisely dated chant-
based piece in Couperin’s œuvre (a few others have just the year given, none earlier than 1656, and several others are undated), and it is easy to imagine him, just before Advent, looking forward to the Christmas season.
No. 44 is a duple-
meter setting in four voices with the melody in the bass (here played in the manual and doubled at the lower octave on the Pedal Trumpet, as instructed or explicitly notated in a number of subsequent French organ collections). With the lower octave doubling in the pedal, the outer voices span nearly the whole compass of the instrument at the outset: a bold gesture underscored by the delayed entry of the treble voice, which begins with a syncopated canonic inversion of the chant melody. Not only this canonic entry but also the use throughout of an eighth-
note motive derived from the first four notes of the chant, in both its upright and inverted forms, tie this setting to the triple-
meter one discussed below. At least as important as contrapuntal content and rhythmic gestures, however, is the delight the composer has taken in rich, often chromatic, harmony, with many suspensions and unusual progressions, which links it, like the tenor-
melody setting, to a type of fantaisie by the same composer – in this case, not a bass-
solo fantaisie, but rather the ‘Duretez Fantaisie’ with which the manuscript opens. Dated simply 1656, this bass setting may well have been written near in time to the tenor setting.
No. 45 is set in three voices, in the ‘modern’, dance-like
3 meter, with the chant melody, lightly decorated, in the alto, and the other voices correspondingly beginning exactly an octave higher than in the tenor setting. (Couperin was nearly the only French Baroque organ composer to set chant melodies in the alto, a practice that might have been a holdover from the era of Titelouze; the only other such setting known to me is an ‘Ave maris stella’ in the Livre d’Orgue de Limoges. Some of Couperin’s alto-
chant works are titled ‘trios’, suggesting performance – probably by two players – on three manuals; two indicate that the melody should be soloed out by the thumb[s] on a separate manual; but the present work and the other most like, the triple-
time ‘Conditor’, have no such indications, and like the Limoges piece sound and feel perfectly viable on one manual.) This setting is given a certain amount of unity by an arch-
like motive (which could be derived from any one of several phrases of the chant) heard in both quarter- and eighth-
note values and both upright and inverted forms; the first three notes of the melody are also echoed canonically in the bass at a distance of two bars. This is the latest dated piece in the manuscript source of Couperin’s organ works, again when he would have been looking ahead to Christmas.
* This date is given, I presume correctly, in the endnotes to the Couperin edition; the place and date ‘a paris le ije apvril 1657’ given in the score itself appears to be a dittography from the previous entry, ‘Tristes erant apostoli [en basse]’.