Great Players: François-André Danican Philidor

 Welcome to Great Players, an occasional series in which I talk about chess players who might reasonably be considered prominent figures in the game. Feel free to suggest future subjects for this series in the comments.

Two of my great loves in life are chess and musical theatre, and today's subject was a pioneering figure in both. François-André Danican Philidor (1726-1795)  was one of a large family of notable musicians, and composed an impressive body of work, largely in the opera comique genre. His most famous opera was Tom Jones, based on Fielding's novel.


Philidor's chess, sadly, is not as well preserved as his compositions. His great achievements as a chess player came during the 1740s and 50s - during which he became known as the best player in the world after defeating his former teacher, Legall de Kermeur, in a match - but the games we have of his are mostly from the 1780s and 90s, and not many of those at that. (My copy of BigBase has ten games of his that he played with the normal starting position.)

Fortunately, his great work on the subject, Analyse du jeu des Échecs, has survived, and some of the analysis in it - on the endings of R+P v R, Q v R, and R+B v R - still holds up today; there are positions in all three endings that bear his name. He also gave his name to Philidor's Defence (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6); there are, as far as I can tell, no surviving games of his that feature his playing this opening, but this is because none of his opponents played 2.Nf3 against him. (An English translation of this work can be found here.)

How strong a player was he by today's standards? It's difficult to tell; from the games I've looked at, his positional ability was very strong, but his tactics were not so impressive; this is a sharp contrast to most of his 19th-century successors.





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