ABSTRACT
Francois Couperin was happy with his music being performed on a variety of instruments. The piano, however, does not readily lend itself to his harpsichord music. Couperin does not make it easy for the performer. The technical demands posed by the ornamentation alone are daunting, to say the least. Couperin's luxuriantly embellished lyricism had its precedents in the suave melodies of Chambonnieres, his seriousness and gravity in the suites of D'Anglebert, while his fondness for the picturesque stems from the gallic tradition as a whole. Couperin stands above his predecessors and contemporaries is in the extraordinary variety of styles and techniques brought together in the four books, and in the sheer range of his musical imagination, fertilised by the French encounter with Italian music. Some of the techniques of the French Clavecin School had their roots in the of the seventeenth-century French lutenists whose style brise considerably influenced the texture of keyboard writing.
