Charles Racquet

His name is also spelt Raquet or Raquette. He was a pupil of his father, Balthazar Racquet, who died around 1630, and his whole career was spent in Paris. The Laborde card index, as summarised in the French Wikipedia article, shows him married to Anne Dufay, godfather in 1623 and 1626, father of two sons and seven daughters baptised between 1633 and 1648, and connected with musicians and with instrument and organ builders. He lived in the parishes of Saint-Landry and Sainte-Madeleine-en-la-Cité, then in the Hôtel des Ursins, where he was living in 1648.

He became titular organist of the cathedral on 3 February 1618, at a very early age. That same year, according to the English article, he had the builder Valéran de Héman undertake a major restoration of the organ: two years of work, some three hundred rusted pipes replaced and new stops added. According to the French article, he handed over the post in 1643 to his nephew Jean; the English article has him in office until shortly before his death and succeeded by another member of the family.

Like his father before him, he served Marie de’ Medici and then, according to the English article, Anne of Austria, both of them queens mother. In July 1651 he was called in with Henry Du Mont to examine the new organ that Nicolas Lemerre had just completed at Sainte-Marguerite, in the parish of Saint-Paul; it was he who wrote the report, which valued the work at 900 livres. A renowned teacher, he may have taught the lutenist Denis Gaultier, who wrote a tombeau in his memory. In the 18th century Jean-Benjamin de La Borde still called him “the best organist of his time”. He died in Paris on 1 January 1664.

Racquet was the friend and correspondent of Father Marin Mersenne. At his request he composed a Fantaisie in the eighth tone on the antiphon Regina caeli, “as an example of what can be done on the organ”. The sources differ on how it has come down to us: according to the English article, it survives in the Harmonie universelle of 1636; according to the French article, it is a manuscript inserted in Mersenne’s own copy, which came from the library of the Minims of the Place Royale and is kept at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, and to which André Tessier devoted an article in 1929. IMSLP lists it as a manuscript. The English article adds that Mersenne describes the registrations Racquet used, among them the plein jeu.

The piece develops a single theme through several sections, most of them imitative, in the manner of the Netherlanders and of Sweelinck in particular: imitative counterpoint, then an ornamented subject over faster counterpoints, the subject in augmentation in each voice, a two-voice section, and finally a toccata over a pedal point. The English article regards it as a work without parallel in the French keyboard repertory.

Again for Mersenne, Racquet set the twelve verses of Psalm 146, “Puisque le monarque des anges”, in the translation by Germain Habert de Cérisy, as duos in the twelve modes. These duos, written for a treble and a bass, were printed in the Harmonie universelle by Cramoisy in 1636–1637. A Dutch manuscript in the BnF, which gathers carillon transcriptions of works from the early 17th century, also attributes five pieces to “Racquet”, among them a prose Mittit ad virginem, ballets and a courante; Charles is the likely candidate, though this is not certain.

In 1973 another organist of Notre-Dame, Pierre Cochereau, improvised at the cathedral organ, with two percussionists, a boléro on one theme by Racquet according to the French article, on two according to the BnF; the improvisation was recorded and published in transcription in 1996.