Louis Couperin was born about 1626 at Chaumes-en-Brie, some forty kilometres south-east of Paris, the son of Charles Couperin, a small landowner and part-time church organist. By 1650 he was an accomplished harpsichordist and violinist and already composing, but had no connections among the important musicians of the day. According to Titon du Tillet’s Le Parnasse François of 1732, Louis, his younger brothers Charles and François and some friends called on Jacques Champion de Chambonnières on his name day and played several of Louis’s pieces; Chambonnières, the leading French harpsichordist and a musician to the King, took him as a pupil, persuaded him to move to Paris and introduced him at court. He was living in the city by 1651, almost certainly met Froberger in 1651–52, and on 9 April 1653 became organist of St Gervais at 400 livres a year plus lodgings, then among the senior organ posts in France. He died on 29 August 1661, aged thirty-five.

Nothing of his was printed in his lifetime, and what survives is some two hundred pieces in manuscript copies, several of them not rediscovered until the mid-twentieth century; the whole body has traditionally been given to him without direct evidence. He was the first significant musician of the Couperin family and contributed to both the French organ school and the French harpsichord school: he wrote organ pieces for specified registrations, and invented the unmeasured prelude for harpsichord along with a special notation to write it in. Most of what is known about his life comes from Titon du Tillet and from about thirty organ pieces that carry both a date and a place of composition.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Couperin
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q50185