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Dieupart: Les six suites

Francis Colpron
Susie Napper
Skip Sempé

“The Suites of Dieupart are equal in value to the best productions by the great masters from the beginning of the 18th century, next to which they must once again stanmd.” - Paul Brunold, 1934

After all the manners of turmoil that shook it during the 17th century, England witnessed a period of enviable prosperity under the reign of Queen Anne. Its control of the seas made it a world power from the outset of the 1700s, and London an all-important commercial metropolis. The British capital, perhaps the most populated city of Europe at the time, attracted very many foreign artists come to seek their fortune. English music was thus more than ever, especially since the passing of Henry Purcell, at the mercy of continental influences, which it had up until then been able to assimilate without sacrificing its national character.

Among the musicians that established themselves in London between Purcell’s death and the arrival in 1710 of Handel (who, as is well known, was responsible for the triumph of Italian opera in that city) was Charles François Dieupart. He seems to have been known under both these given names, although they were never used concurrently. In England, he appears on several documents as Charles, but a deed dated 1714 mentions a François Dieupart as residing in the parish of Saint James, Westminster, and the only autograph letter of his to have come down to us is signed F. Dieupart. All this leads to believe it is indeed one and the same man. He was born in Paris after 1667, the year his parents married, and his father, also named François, was a candle maker. Nothing is known of his training—other than the fact he learnt the harpsichord and the violin—nor of the first decades of his life; the first trace of him in a professional capacity is on a tax statement of 1695, where he is listed among the “organists and harpsichord teachers.”

His decision to move to England possibly stemmed from his meeting Elizabeth, Countess of Sandwich, who had come to the continent for health reasons. She was the daughter of John Wilmot, Count of Rochester, as well as the daughter-in-law of Admiral Sir Edward Montagu, a relative of Samuel Pepys. Dieupart dedicated to her the six suites recorded here, which were published by Étienne Roger around 1701, and it is most probable he taught her the harpsichord.

Dieupart’s presence in London is attested to in 1704; that year, he composed the incidental music to Peter Motteux’s play Britain’s Happiness staged at the Drury Lane theatre. The following year, he associated with the violinist Thomas Clayton and the Italian cellist Nicola Haym in order to produce, again at Drury Lane, an Italian opera (that is, at the time, comprising a single dramatic action and sung through and through) titled Arsinoe, the first on British soil, in an English version. The soprano Catherine Tofts sang the title role, while in the orchestra, alongside Dieupart at the harpsichord, played his friend John Christopher Pepusch, a musician and composer born in Berlin, and the flutist and oboist John Loeillet, originally from Ghent.

In 1706, Dieupart, still with Haym and Clayton, acted as organizer and harpsichordist for the performances at Drury Lane of Trionfo di Camilla by Marc’Antonio Bononcini, partly sung in English, and in 1708, for those of Pyrrhus and Demetrius, the English version of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio, this time at the Queen’s Theatre, which the impresario John Vanbrugh had just had built at the Haymarket for the purpose of housing an Italian opera troupe, without success. A little earlier, a collaboration of Dieupart with Motteux, for the latter’s play Love’s Triumph, earned him the following praise from the author: “The success of the play will owe not a little to Mr Dieupart, for his share in the contrivance of the entertainments and his supplying what recitative and other music was necessary.”

The enterprise of Drury Lane, however, went bankrupt in 1711, unable to compete with Handel’s newly formed company expressly devoted to the Saxon’s operas: Rinaldo, although entirely sung in Italian, met with enormous success. Dieupart, Haym and Clayton tried as they could with advertisements in The Spectator to attract audiences to the new musical entertainments they planned to give at the York Rooms, but their efforts failed, and a French observer remarked that after his fruitless endeavours, Dieupart “was on the point of leaving for the Indies in the wake of a surgeon who proposed to use music as an anaesthetic for lithotomies.”

The historian John Hawkins, to whom we owe most of the available information concerning Dieupart, tells us that from this moment on, our musician was obliged for his subsistence to organize concerts (which in the years 1711 and 1712 met with some success), to play in Handel’s orchestra, and especially to give harpsichord lessons. However, despite that “in the capacity of a master of that instrument [he] had admission into some of the best families in the Kingdom,” Dieupart spent his remaining years in poverty. He was still a good musician, though: Hawkins reports that not long before his death, “he grew negligent, and frequented concerts performed in ale-houses, in obscure parts of the town, and distinguished himself not more [?less] there, than he would have done in an assembly of the best judges, by his neat and elegant manner of playing the solos of Corelli.” All trace is then lost of him, and it is believed he died around 1740.

Dieupart left very few compositions: six sonatas for recorder and thorough bass published in London in 1717, some thirty airs published mostly between 1729 and 1731 in The Musical Miscellany, an overture and a chaconne for the opera Thomyris, both published in 1708, as well as a few unpublished concertos and sonatas for wind and string orchestra. The six suites were published by Étienne Roger in Amsterdam, probably in 1701—as was often the case at the time, the title page bears no date. A rare occurrence: the publisher issued two versions, a first for harpsichord and a second, in separate parts, for one treble instrument and thorough bass—Couperin was only to mention this possibility for the performance of his harpsichord pieces. Probably composed just prior to Dieupart’s arrival in London, they achieved rapid recognition in England; not only does the title page indicate a point of sale in the British capital, but a gentleman named Charles Babell left us a manuscript version dated 1702, not to mention that thirteen of the harpsichord pieces were republished three years later by John Walsh under the title Select Lessons for Harpsichord or Spinett.

The exact title of the set is Six suites de clavessin divisées en ouvertures, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, gavottes, menuets, rondeaux et gigues. The second version announces that they are “suited to the flute or the violin,” but the first version in its title already allowed that they be played by “a violin and a flute with a bass viol and an archlute.” ‘Flute’ here of course refers to the recorder, because if it had been meant for the transverse flute, the publisher would certainly have called for a ‘German flute.’ The instrument is however designated more precisely at the beginning of each suite: the first four call for a ‘voice flute’ and the last two for a ‘fourth flute.’ The choice of instruments in chamber music was at the time largely left to the performers; the mention here of the type of recorder ideally suited to each suite—the recorder was extremely popular then in England among amateurs—was possibly no more than an indication as to the range required by each of them. Whatever the case, they can as easily be given to the transverse flute and have a harpsichord rather than an archlute realize the thorough bass.

The six suites are fashioned on an identical structure—although the second suite replaces the menuet with a passepied— sometimes with thematic links between the movements, and they are all preceded by an overture based on the Lullyan model. All follow the succession of four basic dances that had become typical since Chambonnières—the allemande, the courante, the sarabande and the gigue—and the whole is akin to the contemporary productions of Louis Marchand, Nicolas Clérambault and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. Yet, the use of a single cast for the six suites, with always a gavotte and menuet between the sarabande and the gigue, is a first in the French harpsichord literature, while the overtures are more of an adaptation of orchestral music than they are in keeping with the practices of Dieupart’s compatriots.

Despite their very French character, the suites by their genuine melodic ease sometimes show the influence of Corelli, at a time when French music, much appreciated in England until around 1700, was gradually losing ground to Italian music. As André Pirro wrote in 1924 in Les clavecinistes, “Dieupart appeared amidst the English musicians at about the time they were searching for a guide after Purcell’s death; and although he may well flaunt French traits, by placing an overture at the beginning of all his suits, such passepied or such courante flows as if Corelli had directed its current. Moreover, Dieupart is credited with having disseminated the works of Corelli in England.”

This important collection was to have a definite influence on François Couperin, on Gaspard Le Roux, on Handel also, but especially on Bach, if only for the overall structure the latter was to impart upon his suites for solo instrument. What is more, it has been suggested, to explain the title English Suites Bach gave one of his sets of harpsichord music, that there had been a direct influence, if not an imitation, of Dieupart’s set. Some maintain that this title comes from the fact that Bach’s six suites, using various borrowings, seem to pay homage to the Frenchman’s compositions, which were most in vogue in England. If one can wonder up to what point this explanation is valid, it certainly appears that Bach held the works of his predecessor in high esteem. He hand-copied the first and sixth suites of Dieupart, and many thematic resemblances have been observed between the latter’s pieces and those of Bach mentioned above, particularly between the Gigue of the first Suite and the Prelude of the first English Suite, both in A major; between a section of the Ouverture of the fourth Suite and the Prelude to the third English Suite; and between a section of the Ouverture of third Suite and the Prelude of the fourth English Suite. It would also seem that this same Ouverture of Dieupart, in B minor, heralds that of the Overture in the French Style BWV 831, written in the same key.

Musical London benefited greatly from the contribution of foreign musicians during the 18th century. One readily thinks of Handel, of course, but Charles François Dieupart was not a simple onlooker amid the “throng of foreign fiddlers” about whom an Oxford critic complained around 1730 with a touch of patriotic annoyance. His contribution is far from negligible, both for the quality of his output and for the influence he exerted on his contemporaries.

— © François Filiatrault, 2001.
Translation: Jacques-André Houle