Biography
An organist as well as a harpsichordist, he held simultaneous posts at both St Eloi and Notre Dame de la Ronde, relying on his sister Marie-Anne-Agathe to cover duties whenever travel or other obligations kept him away. Although never regarded as an outstanding performer at the organ, he retained those appointments chiefly to finance his move to Paris, where his real focus shifted to the harpsichord. In the capital his reputation grew quickly through both performance and instruction; Rameau’s own keyboard works formed the foundation of his self-directed study. Among his peers he stood on equal footing with A.-L. Couperin, Balbastre and LeGrande as a teacher, yet much of the pedagogical material later printed under his name in Rousseau’s Dictionnarie had in fact been taken without acknowledgment from Rameau. After 1767 he composed almost nothing further and withdrew so completely from public view that, for the final two decades of his life, few people could say where he lived or how he occupied his time. The modest body of music that survives appears in a set of four volumes whose pieces stay close in style to those of his contemporaries and display little that sets them apart.