While a certain universality guided the language of organ music in Europe until the late sixteenth century, nurtured on polyphony and transcriptions of vocal repertory, on free preludes or fantasias, the French school began to go its own way in the course of the following decades. The names of François Couperin and Nicolas de Grigny are inscribed on the pediment of this classical edifice, in acknowledgment of the heights to which these two composers raised an art that is at once functional, given its liturgical dimension, and concertato, thanks to its emancipation under the diverse influences of the theatre, the aesthetics of dance, and the world of the harpsichord. These two men – the former a link in a dynasty of artists that survived uninterrupted over three centuries, the latter a meteoric figure who died at the age of just thirty-one – were not, however, the only luminaries of this school in the final years of the Grand Siècle.
