Tombeau

A French Baroque keyboard genre — a memorial piece written in honour of a recently deceased person, typically a musician or aristocratic patron. The tombeau emerged from the lute tradition in the early 17th century and was adopted by harpsichordists. Louis Couperin's Tombeau de M. de Blancrocher, written for the lutenist François Blancrocher (died 1652), is the most celebrated keyboard tombeau of the period: notated in unmeasured whole notes, it achieves a profound concentration of grief through slow, chromatically rich harmonies and bold dissonances. Denis Gaultier, Froberger, and others also wrote tombeaux for Blancrocher, making it one of the most memorialised deaths in early Baroque music history.

The tombeau must move very slowly — the whole-note notation invites a tempo that approaches stillness. Let each chord sound fully before moving on; the dissonances should hurt slightly — that is their purpose. There is no need to 'perform' grief: play the harmony clearly and simply and the music will do its work. On piano, a very gentle touch with the sustain pedal will carry the harmony while allowing each new dissonance to register clearly against what has come before.