Tombeau de M. de Blancrocher

Memorial piece for the lutenist François Blancrocher, who died in 1652 after falling down stairs. Written in Louis Couperin's unmeasured prelude notation — entirely in whole notes without bar lines — the Tombeau achieves a profound concentration of grief through slow, heavily ornamented harmonic progressions and bold dissonances. It is one of the earliest French keyboard tombeaux and the most fully realised. Many lutenists and other composers of the period also wrote memorials to Blancrocher, making this one of the most documented elegies of the early French Baroque.