Life
Denis Gaultier was a French lutenist and composer born in Paris, though sources differ on whether his birth year was 1597 or 1603; he died in 1672. A cousin of the lutenist Ennemond Gaultier, Denis Gaultier’s career was so closely intertwined with his older cousin’s early on that contemporaries often referred to either man simply as ‘Gaultier,’ making no attempt to distinguish between them. Unlike many court musicians of his era, Denis Gaultier held no official court position, instead building his reputation through private salon performances for the Parisian aristocracy. His principal legacy is the manuscript collection La Rhétorique des dieux, compiled between roughly 1648 and 1652, containing fifty-six pieces arranged into suites spanning eleven of the twelve traditional modes.
Impact
Denis Gaultier stands as one of the supreme masters of the French Baroque lute, and his intricately contrapuntal, non-metrical dance suites crystallized the style brisé, the arpeggiated ‘broken style’ that later shaped François Couperin and the great French harpsichordists. His La Rhétorique des dieux, with its allegorical mode-suites, became a model for the Baroque suite’s internal logic and helped elevate lute music to a status of art comparable to poetry and rhetoric.
Repertoire
Tombeau de Mademoiselle Gaultier, c. 1650s
A mournful tombeau written for a member of the Gaultier family, exemplifying the elegiac allemande style Denis Gaultier helped popularize.
Denis GAULTIER: Tombeau de Mademoiselle Gaultier | MICHAŁ GONDKO, Baroque lute — Performed by Michał Gondko · baroque lute
Apollon Orateur, c. 1652
A piece from La Rhétorique des dieux whose evocative title likens Gaultier’s eloquence on the lute to the oratory of Apollo.
Denis Gaultier – Appolon Orateur – Baroque Lute — Performed by Yuichi Sasaki · baroque lute