Louis Marchand Pièces dorgue, Livre II (Mss. 61/1 de Verailles) Although almost none of his organ music appeared in print during his lifetime, Louis Marchands fame as an exponent of that mightiest of instruments was quite secure during the early decades of the eighteenth century. It seems likely, however, judging from an unusual event of 1717, that Marchand himself might have believed the estimates of his skill to be somewhat exaggerated. Dresden, you see, was in 1717 to play host to a contest of organ virtuosity. The two contestants: Marchand and J.S. Bach. But, as legend has it, the Frenchman heard Bach practicing the day before, realized he didnt have a chance, and fled the city in the middle of the night with his tail between his legs! (German accounts of Marchands life also note that in addition to being a coward Marchand was also guilty of domestic abuse). True or not, the legend of this aborted Dresden contest gives us some kind of starting point for an appreciation, or, as some would have it, a lack thereof, of Marchands organ-music output. Most of Marchands extant organ music is preserved in a group of manuscripts housed in the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles. The body known as Pièces dorgue, Livre II (the translation reads nothing more esoteric than Organ Pieces, Book 2) contains 13 individual pieces probably, but not certainly, composed during the last few years of the seventeenth century. The idiom is similar to that of the Couperin Livre dorgue and several other contemporaneous works by the same name -- there are dialogues, duos, and trios, and some music explicitly built from plainchant Mass material, in this case a Te Deum in 16 versets that brings Marchands Livre II to a close. Also present in the Pièces dorgue, Livre II, which incidentally is notated entirely on two staves (leaving the organist a certain freedom in the deployment of music to the pedals), are two items with the title Basse de trompette.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 06:56:44 +0000
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