François Dufaut, also spelled Dufault, was a French lutenist and composer probably born in Bourges around 1604 and active through the mid-seventeenth century, dying around 1670 in England. Almost nothing is documented about his personal life, but contemporary accounts consistently praised him as one of the finest lutenists of his generation. He trained with, or was closely associated with, Denis Gaultier, whose refined manner shaped Dufaut’s own writing, and he appears to have traveled widely, including extended time in England. His surviving output includes twelve pieces printed in the 1631 anthology Tablature de luth de differens autheurs sur les accords nouveaux, along with numerous manuscript suites and tombeaux scattered across libraries in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Rostock, and Besançon.

Dufaut was among the leading exponents of the French style brisé, the arpeggiated, broken-chord texture that came to define seventeenth-century French lute — and later harpsichord — writing. His harmonically adventurous, quasi-improvisatory suites and tombeaux, including his tribute to the lutenist Blancrocher, were admired and imitated by contemporaries and helped transmit the Gaultier school’s aesthetic to later French and German composers, making him a key link in the lineage that shaped Baroque keyboard and lute style alike.

Sources:

• https://sites.google.com/view/another-lute-website/d/francois-dufault
• https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Dufaut,_Fran%C3%A7ois