Johann Sebastian Bach is described as the prototypical “German” composer. Though he didn’t travel geographically far in his life, his music is full of styles and instruments borrowed from places far from home.  In his hallmark work for solo flute, his Partita BWV 1013, we see him fusing French, Italian, and German styles into a work that scaled the full range of the instrument at the time. And the flute that he was writing for was one made in the halls of the court of Louis XIV.  Having conquered in battle, Louis XIV settled back at home, setting his sights on conquering the art world. Naturally, he needed a flute.

 

Up until this point, the woodwind instruments of France were oboes and bassoons, instruments that were used proudly in the military bands, and designed for playing out of doors. But Louis needed a wind instrument suited for the gold-decked rooms of Versailles. So the creative players of the French court tinkered, created the baroque flute in the 1680’s. The aristocracy became OBSESSED with it. 

 

And though it was at the top of the charts in the French court, it would take almost 40 years for the instrument to find its way to Johann Sebastian Bach.

 

And before he was able to get his hands on it, his older brother, a military oboist by the name of Johann Jacob Bach, heard the great flute virtuoso Piere-Gabriel Buffardin in 1707. Like many oboists before him, he fell in love with the flute, and even took lessons with Buffardin. I like to imagine him writing to his brother to tell him of this amazing instrument and Buffardin’s incredible skills! And in 1719 J.S. Bach met Buffardin in the Dresden court, writing both his solo partita and Brandenburg 5 for Buffardin’s virtuoso skills.

 

French influence (and the flute) never left Bach’s music and it was French musicians who later helped bring Bach’s flute works back into the spotlight. After the flute’s second major reinvention in the mid-19th century (this time into a metal instrument), French players and composers embraced it wholeheartedly. At the Paris Conservatory, the legendary flutist and pedagogue Paul Taffanel gave his students a strict diet of Bach, technique exercises, and new music. The Partita may not have been heard publicly between its composition in 1719 and a performance in 1913, the same year Debussy’s Syrinx premiered, after which it became a cornerstone of the repertoire.

And it wasn’t just the flute repertoire of Bach, or just Bach that French musicians were reviving. Tonight we’ll hear one of Camille Saint-Saëns’ transcriptions of Bach for the piano alongside one of his transcriptions of the music of Jean Philippe Rameau. Rameau, France’s most celebrated Baroque composer, and court composer to both Louis XIV and XV, saw a flourishing thanks to Camille Saint-Saëns’ interest in his music. Saint-Saëns’ arrangements and engraving of Rameau’s Pieces de clavecin en concert reintroduced these incredible works that feel equally at home in the 20th century as they do in the 18th.

 

This revival coincided with broader French fascination with the past, perhaps best embodied by Erik Satie, described by his best friend Claude Debussy as a “gentle medieval musician lost in the 20th century.” Satie’s music often contained throwbacks to times and styles of music of the past, both imagined and real.  When he returned to school in his forties to get a better grip on counterpoint, Bach’s chorales were the foundation for his study. As part of these studies, he reharmonized Lutheran chorales, something he had mixed opinions on, remarking in the frontispiece of one of his scores “My chorales are equal to those of Bach, with this difference: they are rarer and less pretentious.”

 

Satie never stopped learning, and like Bach, he also played a crucial mentoring role, supporting a younger generation of French composers, most notably the group Les Six, among them Francis Poulenc. Poulenc would remember his mentorship long into the future. We even have some amazing recordings from the 50’s of Poulenc performing works of Satie. A few years after that, Poulenc’s Sonata for flute and piano was commissioned by the Library of Congress. Writing about the work, Poulenc described it as having “the feeling of going back a long way, but with a more settled technique. It's a sonata of Debussyan dimensions. It's the French sense of balance [la mesure française].”  A few parallels to say the least. 

 

Satie encouraged a young Poulenc early in his career. 1917 correspondence between the two includes some of this wonderful advice from Satie to the young composer: “You seem to me to be lost, but easy to find….Never get mixed up with ‘schools’: there’s been an explosion - quite natural, by the way…Laugh my good friend.” Just two years earlier in 1915, a sixteen year old Poulenc wrote to a number of French composers to solicit their opinions on César Franck. Satie replied “Everything leads me to supposed that Franck was a huge musician. His work is astonishingly Franckist, in the best sense of the word.” Lol.

 

César Franck was a child prodigy whose parents moved the family from Belgium to Paris so that he could get the best musical training at the Paris conservatory where he won prizes not only in performance, but in the art of the fugue. Bachian to say the least! Retreating from public life at the ripe old age of 26, Franck dedicated his life to composition, the organ, and to teaching. His students included Vincent D’Indy who, decades later, would guide Satie through his counterpoint lessons at the Schola Cantorum. Though his Prélude, Choral et Fugue was conceived as a modern response to Bachian forms, he would make it decidedly his own. And as always, there were critics. Saint-Saëns wryly remarked that “the chorale is not a chorale and the fugue is not a fugue”. But in it, you hear influences of the musical world taht Franck inhabited. It’s hard for me not to hear the melodies of the cabaret songs Satie would play at Le Chat Noir fly through its most lyrical moments.

 

Years prior, I had the chance to perform Franck’s monumental Sonata for violin and piano. And in the great baroque tradition of adapting music to ones own instrument (whether or not it was originally written for it) I adapted the violin part to the flute. It works marvelously, and in searching for a companion piece for Franck’s Sonata, I decided to make a Franckian arrangement of 17th century song Laissez durer la nuit by French composer Sébastian Le Camus. Little is known about Le Camus, but I fell in love with this song many years ago, and decided to “borrow” and “update” it as a 21st century pop song in my debut album Amour Cruel. This flute, cello, and piano version is quite different to the stacked harmonies in my pop arrangement, borrowing instead from Franck’s glittering textures and shimmering melodies.