Louis Marchand

Louis Marchand (2 February 1669 – 17 February 1732) was a French Baroque organist, harpsichordist, and composer. Born into an organist's family, Marchand was a child prodigy and quickly established himself as one of the best known French virtuosi of his time. He worked as organist of numerous churches and, for a few years, at the French court. Marchand had a violent temperament and an arrogant personality, and his life was filled with scandals, publicized and widely discussed both during his lifetime and after his death. Despite his fame, few of his works survive to this day, and those that do almost all date from his early years. Nevertheless, a few pieces of his, such as the organ pieces Grand dialogue en ut majeur (C) and Fond d'orgue en mi mineur (E minor), have been lauded as classic works of the French organ school.

Marchand's father Jean was an organist in Lyon. As a child, the future composer showed exceptional talent: one contemporary account, by Évrard Titon du Tillet, states that already at the age of 14 he was offered the prestigious position of organist at the Nevers Cathedral. By age 20 he settled in Paris and married, eventually becoming organist of several Parisian churches, including Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné (), the church of the Cordeliers Convent, the Jesuit church in rue St Jacques, and Saint-Honoré. At around 1707–8 he became one of court organists. Between 1713 and 1717 Marchand went on a long concert tour of Germany, at one point performed before the emperor. After his return to France Marchand once again settled in Paris and worked as organist for the Cordeliers Convent, augmenting his income with teaching.

Virtually all contemporary accounts contain lavish praise of Marchand's keyboard talents, yet most writers also mention that the composer had an extremely colorful and unpredictable personality. This combination of prodigious skill and bizarre temperament resulted in numerous anecdotes, scandals, and rumors recounted in various sources, only some of which are fully reliable. Marchand's married life, for example, was unhappy: he beat his wife, separated from her after 12 years of marriage, and then refused to provide financial settlement. One scholar suggests that the extended German tour was an attempt to escape his ex-wife's demands. A contemporary account by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (in Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, 1754–55) gives a different reason: it wasn't his ex-wife Marchand was escaping from, but the French king, whom Marchand insulted. After an unfavorable remark made by Louis XIV about Marchand's hands, the composer responded with an improper retort about the king's ears. Still another account claims that after Marchand's wife had left him, Louis XIV ordered half the composer's salary to be withheld and paid to her. Marchand, in response, broke off in the middle of a mass where he was playing and, when the king questioned him, responded, "Sire, if my wife gets half my salary, she may play half the service."

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