Although immensely popular in his own time, the vast majority of music from Marin Marais dropped from the repertoire soon after his death, and he remained an almost completely unknown figure until the early music revival of the later half of the twentieth century. This precipitous decline had less to do with the range and quality of his music than that he wrote for the viola da gamba, a stringed instrument like the cello, which the violin completely superseded as the standard stringed instrument. The vast majority of Marais' music—over 700 pieces—was written for the gamba, an instrument upon which he was acknowledged to be the supreme master. But of all of those pieces—the joyful, the melancholy, the funny, the militant, the sophisticated, the simple, the abstract, the descriptive, the programmatic, the funeral works, and the celebratory works—only one held its place in the repertoire after Marais' death: Les folies d'Espagne. Published as part of Marais' second book of pieces for the gamba published in 1701, Les folies d'Espagne is an enormous set of 32 variations on a Spanish dance, familiar to many by the name La Folia. The word folies in the title refers not to the English word follies—that is, foolishness or silliness—but rather to the highly imaginative and even fantastic approach that the composer took to the Spanish theme. Indeed, Les folies is astoundingly imaginative: the variations or couplets have the whole emotional range of Marais' music in them. Equally important, however, is the compositional skill with which Marais creates his variations. From simple but beautiful melodies to extraordinarily difficult virtuoso writing, from tunes with chordal accompaniment to complex counterpoint, from the lowest to the highest points on the gamba's range, Marais' Les folies d'Espagne is a tour de force of his abilities as a composer and performer. Oddly, though, Les folies d'Espagne retained its place in the repertoire because it also exists in a transcription for flute. Although this arrangement is clearly inferior to the gamba original, it did allow the work to continue to exist in the repertoire for the quarter of a millennium until the early music revival.

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