Antoine Francisque (born around 1570 in Saint-Quentin; died October 1605 in Paris) was a French lutenist and composer.
Little is known about the details of Francisque’s life. Francisque was born around 1570 in Saint-Quentin. On February 23, 1596, he married Marguerite Behour [Bonhour], the daughter of an innkeeper, in Cambrai. Francisque’s profession is not mentioned in the marriage contract registered in 1605.
Shortly thereafter, he moved to Paris and published his work Le trésor d’Orphée in 1600. On September 28, 1601, he is identified as “Anthoine François, lute player in Paris” in a document recording a mutual benefit agreement between him and his wife. The couple had no children at that time and lived on Rue Sainte-Geneviève in the parish of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, opposite the Collège de Navarre.
He died in Paris on October 5, 1605. He lived on Rue de la Huchette and was buried in the parish of Église Saint-Séverin.
Le trésor d’Orphée, livre de tablature de luth contenant une Susane un jour, plusieurs fantaisies, préludes, passemaises, gaillardes, pavanes d’Angleterre, pavane espagnolle, fin de gaillarde, suittes de bransles tant à cordes avalées qu’austres, voltes & courantes mises par Antoine Francisque. – Paris: Pierre I Ballard, 1600. – 2°, 32 f., French tablature.
The only surviving copy of Le trésor d’Orphée is located in Paris, in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, under the shelfmark RES VM7-369. The volume is dedicated to Henri II de Bourbon-Condé (who was only 12 years old in 1600), with a fairly detailed preface rich in allusions to antiquity. This dedication suggests that this nobleman was Francisque’s pupil. The volume contains 71 pieces, including a transcription of Susanne un jour by Roland de Lassus and a gaillarde based on a lavolta by Perrichon. These are purely instrumental pieces: preludes and fantasias, passemaises and pavanes, gaillardes, branles (simple, double, from Poitou, and Montirandé) and gavottes, a prelude followed by Lavoltas, a ballet, and finally a Cassandre. There is no mention of court ballets of the time.
The music in Francisque’s collection Le trésor d’Orphée from 1600 stylistically falls between the Renaissance and the Baroque and exhibits a number of progressive features. The collection contains only one vocal intabulation (Suzanne un jour), two contrapuntal fantasias, and five préludes; most of the seventy-one pieces are dances. Most of the 71 pieces are dances, including not only older Renaissance types such as bransle and passamezzo, but also newer Baroque types such as courantes and the first printed gavottes written for the lute. It also makes considerable use of the stile brisée and contains the first French lute music to use an altered tuning. This last point is particularly significant because around 1620, French composers were to begin exploring a bewildering array of altered tunings, a period of experimentation that would last for about five decades before stabilizing around the standard Baroque tuning in D minor, a radically different system from the fifth tuning that had been in use since the Middle Ages. Francisque can therefore rightly be considered a pioneer of an important historical development.
His altered tuning, which he described as accordes avalées, tuned the notes from bottom to top to B, E flat, F, G, B, F, B, D, G; he deviated from the standard tuning or vieil ton by raising the third note by a semitone, lowering the fifth note by a whole tone, and lowering the ninth note by a major third.
In his large lute collection Testudo Gallo-Germanica, printed in Nuremberg in 1615, Georg Fuhrmann included German-language instructions for intabulating polyphonic vocal music for the lute, which are said to be based on a French text by Francisque. However, Francisque’s original has not been found. The only surviving copy of Le trésor d’Orphée is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and does not contain such instructions. If Francisque’s authorship of Fuhrmann’s material is correct, this suggests another publication by Francisque that is now lost. If, on the other hand, it was invented by Fuhrmann, this suggests that his reputation was so great that Fuhrmann believed he could use it to lend more prestige to his own work.
Francisque’s compositional style has been described as similar to that of Jacobus Reys, who served as lutenist to the French kings Henry III and Henry IV and whose music is known for its bold use of dissonance and difficulty of execution.
Henri Quittard’s 1906 edition of Le trésor d’Orphée for piano is possibly the only transcription of lute music into modern notation that takes into account the octave stringing in the lower registers and its effects on voice leading. He achieved this by using small note heads in brackets in the higher octave where deemed appropriate, similar to later editions of Baroque guitar music, such as Robert Strizich’s edition of de Visée.