Louis-Claude Daquin was born in Paris in 1694 into a family of Italian descent; his father was a painter and his mother a descendant of Rabelais. He was a prodigy of the most public sort, playing before the court of Louis XIV at the age of six and directing his own choral setting of Beatus Vir at eight. He studied with Louis Marchand.

His career was a succession of the best organ posts in Paris. At twelve he became organist of the Sainte-Chapelle; he then held the organ of the Church of the Petit Saint-Antoine, of Saint-Paul, where he was appointed ahead of Jean-Philippe Rameau, of the Church of the Cordeliers, and of the Chapelle Royale under Louis XV, before taking the organ of Notre-Dame in 1755. He was celebrated in his lifetime as a virtuoso at both the organ and the harpsichord, and was singled out for the unfaltering precision and evenness of his playing. He died in 1772.

Daquin’s surviving output is small and almost entirely for keyboard: four harpsichord suites, published in 1735; the Nouveau livre de noëls of about 1757, settings of Christmas melodies for organ or harpsichord; and some sacred music. From this body of work come the two pieces by which he is universally known, Le coucou, from the 1735 harpsichord collection, and the Noël suisse. Both have kept a permanent place in the teaching and recital repertoire of both instruments.

His importance is partly technical. The Trois cadences contain a triple trill, and the noëls remain among the most played of all French organ music of the period. But his contemporary standing rested on playing rather than on publication. That he was preferred to Rameau at Saint-Paul, and finished his career at Notre-Dame, gives some measure of how he was regarded as a player in his own city, and the qualities his contemporaries singled out, precision and evenness of execution at both keyboards, are ones that printed pieces can only partly preserve.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Claude_Daquin