Jean-François Tapray (1738-1822)
- Simphonie Pour le Clavecin avec Orchestre, Oeuvre XII (1780)
Performers: Hubert Schoonbroodt (1941-1992, clavecin); Orchestre de Chambre Cartigny;
Gerard Cartigny (conductor)
Further info: Jean-François Tapray - Symphonie Concertante
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French composer, organist and teacher. He was the son of Jean Taperet
(1700-?), an organist who held posts in Nomeny, Jussey (1740), Gray
(1746), Dole (1753) and finally Besançon (1763). Taperet had a
reputation as a fine teacher, and in 1755 he published a figured bass
method, Abrégé de l’accompagnement du clavecin. Jean-François had at
least six siblings, of whom three can be identified as organists and
harpsichordists: Jean-Baptiste (1741-?) entered Cîteaux Abbey (south of
Dijon); Claude-Antoinette (1744-1815) became organist at the Hôpital de
la Sainte-Famille in Fontainebleau; and Henri-Philibert (1748-?) dazzled
the court in Versailles with his harpsichord playing at the age of
seven. A newspaper account of Henri-Philibert provides the only clue to
the birth date of Jean-François, referring to him as the composer of an
organ concerto at the age of 18 in 1757; it also hailed him as one of
the most skilful organists in the realm. He must have studied with his
father, and one early biographer stated that he was also a pupil of one
Monsieur Dancier, a student of Domenico Scarlatti. He was co-titulaire
with his father at Notre-Dame in Dole when he was 16 or 17. In 1756 he
composed a set of concertos for harpsichord or organ with strings,
published in 1758, but later ignored in his opus numbering. In 1765 he
moved with his father to Besançon. He was already married to
Elizabeth-Simone Lejeune, with whom he was to have three children.
Tapray spent the summers of 1767 and 1768 in Paris and then moved there,
becoming the first titulaire of the new organ at the Ecole Militaire in
1772. That chapel was attached to the Ordres Royaux Militaires et
Hospitaliers de Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel et de Saint-Lazare de
Jérusalem in 1779, and Tapray retained this name in his primary title
for the rest of his life, adding ‘former’ when he resigned from the post
in 1786 because of poor health. His reputation in Paris rested
primarily on his ability as a harpsichord teacher.
Grétry selected him to instruct one of his daughters at about the time
of his retirement from the Ecole Militaire, and he was still listed as a
teacher in Paris in 1789 when his keyboard method (op.25) was
published. During the Revolutionary years there are references to him
conducting two orchestral concerts in Fontainebleau (1793, 1794), where
his sister lived, and he published his last works without address just
before 1800. In the first biography (Choron, 1811), it is not clear if
he was still living, and he is not mentioned in his sister's death
certificate of 1815. Fétis claimed that he died in Fontainebleau about
1819. Virtually all of Tapray's output was for harpsichord and piano,
spanning the era of transition from one to the other. He, like most of
his contemporaries in Paris, made no significant stylistic distinction
between the two instruments, and thus it is uninstructive to compare his
harpsichord sonatas to those which include ‘piano’ on the title-page.
He was the most published French member of the Paris school of
keyboardists in the two decades before the Revolution, a world dominated
by Germans and Alsatians. His style is essentially in the same idiom as
that of the resident foreigners, however, and only occasionally
individual. The keyboard part is normally accompanied, and almost always
carries the thematic material, allowing no meaningful division of the
music into ‘solo’, ‘chamber’ and ‘orchestral’ categories. The almost
improvisatory spinning out of charming melodic ideas over figural
accompaniments with minimal development and simple modulation was much
appreciated in France, but found little favour in Germany, especially
after the late works of Mozart were known. Tapray was singled out in
1800 by the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in a lengthy and scathing
analysis of his last opus, the only one known in Germany. This review
has coloured subsequent evaluations of Tapray's music, lamenting the
lack of tonal variety, formal coherence and correctness in modulatory
passages, and holding up Mozart as the ideal.
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