Claude Balbastre

He was baptised on 9 December 1724 in the church of Saint-Michel in Dijon. His father, Bénigne Balbastre, organist at the cathedral, had eighteen children by two marriages, of whom he was the sixteenth; three of his brothers were also named Claude. He has long been confused with one of them, Claude-Bénigne, born on 22 January 1727 who died young, which explains the date of 1727 given by several dictionaries and the compound first name under which he is often cited; the BnF authority record gives 1724, and the English article states that the discovery of the baptismal entry has settled the date.

His father was his first teacher. On his death, when the boy was thirteen, his teaching passed to Claude Rameau, the younger brother of Jean-Philippe Rameau, who succeeded the father in the organ loft; Balbastre himself took over the cathedral organ in 1743, following his teacher. The German article, on the contrary, has him succeed his father directly at the age of thirteen. In 1749 he gathered seventy-six pieces in a Livre contenant des pièces de différent genre d’orgue et de clavecin, signed “organiste de la cathédralle de Dijon”; this manuscript, known as the Versailles or Dijon manuscript, contains among other things a concerto in D major, the only one of his fourteen organ concertos to have been found.

He settled in Paris in 1750; Jean-Philippe Rameau, according to the English and German articles, helped him to become known in high society there. On 21 March 1755 he made his debut at the Concert Spirituel with a much admired organ concerto, and according to the English article he went on appearing there until 1782. At Saint-Roch, where according to the English article he succeeded Pierre Février, with whom he had studied, he was appointed in 1756 according to the French article, as early as 1751 according to the German one. In 1760 he became organist of Notre-Dame. He was harpsichordist at court, where he taught Marie-Antoinette, teacher of the Duc de Chartres, organist to the Comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII, and received a quarter at the Chapelle Royale; the French article places these posts from 1776 onwards, the German one partly as early as 1766.

His playing drew crowds, so much so that in 1762 the Archbishop of Paris forbade him to play at midnight Mass, “because of the multitude who came to hear the organist and did not keep the respect due to the holiness of the place”; in 1766 he also banned his Te Deum settings on the eve of St Roch. In 1763 he married Marie-Geneviève Hotteterre, of the family of musicians, who died soon afterwards, and in 1767 Marie-Antoinette Boileau.

On 17 June 1770 the English composer and writer Charles Burney left a dinner early to hear him at Saint-Roch. During the Magnificat, he reports, Balbastre played between the verses minuets, fugues, imitations, even hunting pieces and jigs, without the congregation appearing to take offence. At his home in the rue d’Argenteuil Burney admired a Ruckers harpsichord painted like a snuff-box, its lid depicting Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, and a large practice organ with pedals, “too large and coarse for a chamber”. He noted with pleasure the friendship between Balbastre and Armand-Louis Couperin.

After a book of harpsichord pieces in 1759, Balbastre published in 1770 his Recueil de noëls formant quatre suites, avec des variations, pour le clavecin et le forte-piano. The twenty-three noëls, from “À la venue de Noël” and “Joseph est bien marié”, which open the first suite, to “Or nous dites Marie”, which opens the fourth, are nevertheless “clearly in the tradition of the French organ”, as the French article notes; Balbastre himself played them with great success on the fortepiano in aristocratic salons. Organists have since taken them up widely.

During the Revolution he rallied, at least outwardly, to the new ideas. In 1793 he published the Marche des Marseillois et l’air Ça ira “by Citizen Balbastre”, and at Notre-Dame, now the Temple of Reason, he played his arrangements of revolutionary hymns. The sources disagree on his situation: according to the French article he kept his post at Notre-Dame; according to the English one he lost his official posts and, for a time, his pension; according to the German one he grew poor but remained organist of Notre-Dame. He died on 9 May 1799 (20 Floréal Year VII), in the rue d’Argenteuil, in the parish of Saint-Roch, “forgotten by all” according to the French article.