These youthful works bear within them the seeds of Couperin’s future compositions, including the Leçons de Ténèbres, the virtuosic harpsichord works, the sonates de cour and the Concerts royaux.

The Italian Influence

Like many artists of his time, Couperin felt intense admiration for Italian music. Le Cerf de la Viéville’s refers to him as “a passionate servant of Italy” in his Comparaison de la musique italienne et française. Couperin was exposed to the Italian repertoire in Parisian salons where he himself was also called upon to play, as well as at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the exiled Stuart family, James II and his wife Maria of Modena, and James III took refuge. Arcangelo Corelli is probably the musician with whom he felt the strongest affinity, his trio sonatas filling him with wonder.

Chamber music was much in fashion at the end of the 17th century. It met the demands of a new genre which had originated in Italy and was the heir of the vocal quartet’s polyphony and melodic expressiveness. Sonatas composed for a wide variety of instruments and ensembles were divided into two categories at the time Couperin introduced the genre to France: the sonata da chiesa, written to be played in church, and the sonata da camera, a dance suite. Couperin opted to use the sonata da chiesa as his model; its through-composed movements gave him a great deal of freedom, though he was in fact writing secular music. Couperin was inspired by the formal construction of Corelli’s music, but his own compositions bore throughout their numerous movements the unique stamp of his own contrasting tempi and varying tonalities.

Couperin wrote five trio sonatas: La Pucelle, La Visionnaire, L’Astrée, La Steinquesque and La Superbe, as well as a quartet sonata, La Sultane. Three of these works were later republished as part of Les Nations in 1726. In this work, La Pucelle was transformed into La Française (a French woman), La Visionnaire became L’Espagnole (a Spanish woman), and L’Astrée was La Piémontaise (a woman from the Piedmont region, Italy). Four of the five trio sonatas carry specific identities based on their titles: La Pucelle (the Virgin) was probably the first sonata of its style to be published in France; La Visionnaire makes allusion to a fashionable play; L’Astrée refers to a novel by Honoré d’Urfé; La Steinquerque is reminiscent of the victory of 1692; La Sultane evokes an orientalist who was in vogue at the time. Only La Superbe does not evoke anything in particular.

These noble and vigorous sonatas have been compared to the music of Purcell and have certain traits in common with Handel’s writing. One of the original elements of this music is the way in which it elevates the use of the violin, which had until that time been used almost exclusively as an instrument to accompany dancers. The sonatas are a complete success in terms of their melodic and harmonic inventiveness characterized by graciousness and restraint.