Charles Couperin

According to Titon du Tillet, the three brothers, who played the violin, went one feast day to serenade Chambonnières, whose estate lay near Chaumes; the King’s harpsichordist then took Louis to Paris. Charles was then ten or twelve years old, according to the article on musicologie.org. He joined his brothers in the capital, where they soon shared the organist’s lodgings at Saint-Gervais. He took part in 1659 in the Ballet de la Raillerie, performed at court: Bouvet states this as fact, more recent accounts are cautious.

When Louis died in 1661, it was Charles who took over the organ. At Christmas he received a twelve-year contract, renewed in 1673; a lease of December 1673, published by Bouvet, mentions the four hundred livres the churchwardens paid him each year. Titon du Tillet says he made his name “by the learned manner in which he played the organ”. He was also in the service of the Duchess of Orléans: the German Wikipedia article identifies her as the Princess Palatine, the French article on his son as Henrietta of England, whom he is said to have taught the harpsichord.

On 20 February 1662 he married Marie Guérin, daughter of a barber of the King’s Grande Écurie, at Saint-Gervais. Their son François was born in 1668. On 15 January 1679 Charles was still godfather to a child of the instrument maker Jacques Meunier; he died shortly afterwards. The German article gives 26 February 1679, the day on which the church council reserved his post for his son and entrusted the interim to Lalande; musicologie.org places his death only between those two dates. Titon du Tillet had first dated his death to 1669, and corrected the mistake himself.

He left a large pedal harpsichord and a spinet, and passed on to his son the name sieur de Crouilly, which referred to land, not to a title of nobility. Bouvet inferred from a sentence of Titon du Tillet that he had written harpsichord pieces; yet, as Bouvet himself noted, no document describes him as a composer.