Pieter-Jan Belder - Trois Livres de Pieces de Clavecin - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Jean-François Dandrieu was born in August or September 1682 on rue Saint-Louis, Île de la Cité, Paris. He was the eldest of at least four children and showed such musical precocity that it is reported he played the harpsichord for Louis XIV and his court at the age of five. It can be assumed that his reputation led to great demand for his services as a performer, since he travelled outside Paris as a musician on several occasions. He was not the first musical Dandrieu his uncle, Pierre, trained as a priest and organist in Angers. It is possible that it was he who organised Jean-François's studies with the harpsichordist and composer Jean-Baptiste Moreau, a fellow Angevin and near contemporary. The musical environment in which Dandrieu was raised was a period of considerable change. Paris saw the rise of a modish cultural élite with an increasing desire for new music, whether instrumental or vocal, and this was fed by several publications such as Mercure Galant (1678-1714), which reported not only on concerts and new music but also provided a modicum of artistic gossip to inform it's readers which artists were currently in vogue. It has been mentioned that Dandrieu was renowned from an early age as a prodigy. While we know little else about his activities as a performer, the decision to publish his early compositions must have been based on the level of notoriety he had achieved. According to the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the first book of harpsichord pieces was published in 1705, but there are no records of his legally required lettres de privilège being submitted to the Paris Guild of Booksellers for that year. Indeed, though records for November 1700-January 1704 are now lost, it is assumed the books were issued at some point between these dates, which would make him the youngest-known composer to have released a book of music. While Dandri