François-André Danican Philidor was the best chess player alive for fifty years and did not regard it as his career. He was a working composer with two dozen stage works to his name, and chess was the thing he happened to do better than anyone in Europe. In 1749 he wrote the book that changed how the game was understood — the one that said the pawns are the soul of chess and then proved it — and no one overtook him in his lifetime.
A musician who played chess
He was born into a dynasty of court musicians at Dreux in 1726 and trained as a choirboy in the royal chapel. Chess came at the Café de la Régence in Paris, the room where French chess lived, and he learned it from Legall de Kermeur — the only player who ever gave him odds and the last to hold an advantage over him.
The music never stopped. Philidor wrote more than twenty stage works, Tom Jones and Le Maréchal ferrant among them, and was one of the founders of the French comic opera. For most of his life the chess was what paid when the music did not.
The pawns are the soul of chess
L'Analyze des Echecs appeared in 1749 and made pawn play the basis of a plan. In its preface, Philidor argued that the arrangement of the pawns determined the attack, the defence and the outcome. Their chains, their advances and the squares they surrender decide where a game can be won. He compared a player who could not explain a pawn move to a general with plenty of practice and little theory.
In the expanded Analyse du jeu des échecs of 1777, he credited the first book's success to its explanatory notes and the general rules readers could draw from them. He kept that method in a supplement of openings and endgames. A note to the first model game explains that the original examples did not always use the correct move: they were designed to give frequent demonstrations of how to play the pawns.
It ran to more than forty editions and stayed the leading textbook in Europe for a century. The defence he advocated, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6, still carries his name, as does the standard drawing method in rook and pawn against rook — the Philidor position, which every endgame course still teaches.
“The pawns are the soul of chess!”
“To those who understand chess, this exertion of Mr. Philidor’s abilities must appear one of the greatest of which the human memory is susceptible.”
Blindfold, and exile
In London he gave blindfold displays against two and three opponents at once at Parsloe's Club. The 1790 Analysis of the Game of Chess reproduces a newspaper report published on 9 May 1783 describing the previous day's three-board display against Count Brühl, Thomas Bowdler and Francis Maseres. Philidor sat with his back to the boards while an intermediary announced the opponents' moves and played his replies. Brühl and Bowdler received the first move; Maseres received a pawn as well. The book printed their names to preserve a feat that later generations might doubt.
Three simultaneous games did not always mean three blindfold boards. The same book records that on 13 March 1790 he played Captain Smith and Sheldon without seeing their boards while looking at Conway's game. All three opponents received the first move.
The Revolution stranded him. Philidor was in London when his name appeared on the list of émigrés, and he was never able to return to France or to his family. He died in London on 31 August 1795, aged sixty-eight.
Legacy
Philidor is the first modern chess thinker. Before him the game was a catalogue of attacks; after him it had a theory, and the theory was structural. Players spent the next hundred years catching up with the 1749 book, and the two things that carry his name today — a defence to 1.e4 and the drawing position in rook endings — are both still live, still played, still taught.
Books
Books François-André Philidor wrote, co-wrote, edited, or contributed to. Translations and reprints are grouped under the same work.