The music of Couperin is as simple as possible. But we must not judge its sound by the somewhat heavy pianofortes of our time, which, even in the playfulness of a rapid passage, seem conscious of an _arrière pensée_. No; the spinet, which, even at its saddest, had a joyous exhilaration--this was the instrument of this playful music. The passages glide on, usually in two voices, of which the one is played by the right hand, the other by the left; and whether these voices are tied in chords or chord passages, or whether--as occurs more rarely--full chords, usually arpeggio, stand between, in either case there is a delicacy which recalls to us the origin of French clavier-music in the sweet-toned lute. But Couperin advanced yet further. In his last “Ordres” his compositions increase in depth; the more luxuriant conceptions and deeper feelings of a lesser Beethoven show themselves; the playful and ornamental element recedes into the background, and the compositions become those of a master who has summed up whole centuries of music in himself. From the insipid melodies of Lully’s time Couperin has fashioned more graceful and charming turns of expression; not only roguishly dancing-melodies, in which the vigorous popular songs seem to live again, but also melodies of the intellect, in which the soul of Mozart might seem to dwell. He prefers to advance in the diatonic scale; and the sense for the general outline of the composition, which is so often wanting in the older generation, is in him so unerring that he permits, with inimitable skill, the semiquavers of his “papillons” to sway up and down through entire bars. Yet occasionally his melodies seem ashamed of their nakedness, and, as in the “Sailor’s Song,” draw the flowery robe of adornments so closely round them that we can scarcely trace their limbs. There are the well-known short and long grace-notes, upper or lower, the _pincés_, _ports de voix_, _tremblements_, and the whole apparatus of ornamentation, which was then larger than it is now, and which, in spite of the stern admonitions of the composer’s marks, was frequently at the mercy of the performer. Like almost all composers of that day, Couperin gives in his first volume the table of his ornamentations, but he insists strongly on their exact carrying out. To players of to-day his _agréments_ are anything but pleasant. They seem to destroy our sense for the pure run of the voices, and are painful in their superabundance. But we must play them with _historical_ fingers, and seek to understand the psychology of their expression. They give to the quick clavier-tone a significance of its own; they are, so to speak, running drills, cutting the tones deeper into the relief of the piece, some more, some less, until they bring out the light and shade which serve to aid expression in the material of the clavier. Could we hear Couperin play, we should certainly