Louis-Claude Daquin

Nouveau livre de Noels

LOUIS-CLAUDE DAQUIN was born in Paris to a reasonably well-connected family. On his mother’s side he was related to Rabelais, on his father’s to the Rabbi of Avignon (who had converted to Christianity before he died in 1650). His great uncle was one of Louis XIV’s doctors and a King’s Counsellor. His father was a painter who travelled widely but with little commercial success. Louis-Claude was one of five children, but the only one to reach adulthood. Little in his back- ground would seem to have pointed to a musical career but Daquin showed a precocious talent at the keyboard as a very young boy; he was given some early lessons by a chaplain at the Sainte-Chapelle and informal instruction in composition by Nicolas Bernier. At the age of six he is said to have been heard by the King himself: the Dauphin predicted that he would become ‘the leading man of his age’. At the age of eight he reportedly directed (under Bernier’s guidance) a performance of his own Beatus vir for a large chorus and orchestra at the Sainte-Chapelle. His keyboard skill rapidly won him a variety of posts: in 1706 he became organist with the Hospitaliers de St Antoine and assistant to Marin de la Guerre at the Sainte-Chapelle. His first adult success came in 1727 when he defeated Rameau in a flamboyant competition to become organist at St Paul. Louis Marchand heard him play there and they became friends. As Marchand was dying in 1732 he is supposed to have said to his organ at les Cordeliers: ‘Farewell, dear widow: only Daquin is worthy of you.’ Daquin duly succeeded him. His crowning professional achievement came in 1739 when he was appointed as one of the King’s personal organists

The first record of an organ in France dates from the eighth century. By the tenth century Rheims was a centre of excellence for French organists. Illustrations on manuscripts suggest that the organ played a central part in French church music in the following centuries. Guillaume de Machaut is generally credited as having been the first (in the fourteenth century) to refer to the organ as ‘the king of instruments’. Organs came to be very large and elaborate: the organs at Amiens (1429), Rheims (1487) and Strasbourg (1489) all had more than two thousand pipes. By the seventeenth century the great tonal variety had come to be codified, giving way to a remarkable consistency of design and registration that lasted until the Revolution. This consistency was unmatched in Germany and Northern Europe

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