Marmontel had furnished the libretto of an opera to Cherubini, and the
composer shortly after his return from Turin to Paris had it produced
at the Royal Academy of Music. Vogel's opera on the same text,
"Demophon," was also brought out, but neither one met with great
success. Cherubini's work, though full of vigour and force, wanted
colour and dramatic point. He was disgusted with his failure, and
resolved to eschew dramatic music; so for the nonce he devoted himself
to instrumental music and cantata. Two works of the latter class,
"Amphion" and "Circe," composed at this time, were of such excellence
as to retain a permanent hold on the French stage. Cherubini, too,
became director of the Italian opera troupe, "Les Bouffons," organised
under the patronage of Léonard, the Queen's performer, and exercised
his taste for composition by interpolating airs of his own into the
works of the Italian composers, which were then interesting the French
public as against the operas of Rameau.
"At this time," we are told by Lafage, "Cherubini had two distinct
styles, one of which was allied to Paisiello and Cimarosa by the
grace, elegance, and purity of the melodic forms; the other, which
attached itself to the school of Gluck and Mozart, more harmonic than
melodious, rich in instrumental details." This manner was the then
unappreciated type of a new school destined to change the forms of
musical art.
In 1790 the Revolution broke out and rent the established order of
things into fragments. For a time all the interests of art were
swallowed up in the frightful turmoil which made Paris the centre of
attention for astonished and alarmed Europe. Cherubini's connection
had been with the aristocracy, and now they were fleeing in a mad
panic or mounting the scaffold. His livelihood became precarious, and
he suffered severely during the first five years of anarchy. His
seclusion was passed in studying music, the physical sciences,
drawing, and botany; and his acquaintance was wisely confined to a few
musicians like himself. Once, indeed, his having learned the violin as
a child was the means of saving his life. Independently venturing out
at night, he was arrested by a roving band of drunken _Sansculottes_,
who were seeking musicians to conduct their street chants. Somebody
recognised Cherubini as a favourite of court circles, and, when he
refused to lead their obscene music, the fatal cry, "The Royalist,
the Royalist!" buzzed through the crowd. At this critical moment
another kidnapped player thrust a violin in Cherubini's hands and
persuaded him to yield. So the two musicians marched all day amid the
hoarse yells of the drunken revolutionists. He was also enrolled in
the National Guard, and obliged to accompany daily the march of the
unfortunate throngs who shed their blood under the axe of the
guillotine. Cherubini would have fled from these horrible
surroundings, but it was difficult to evade the vigilance of the
French officials; he had no money; and he would not leave the
beautiful Cécile Tourette, to whom he was affianced.
One of the theatres opened during the revolutionary epoch was the
Théâtre Feydeau. The second opera performed was Cherubini's "Lodoïska"
(1791), at which he had been labouring for a long time, and which was
received throughout Europe with the greatest enthusiasm and delight,
not less in Germany than in France and Italy. The stirring times
aroused a new taste in music, as well as in politics and literature.
The dramas of Racine and the operas of Lulli were akin. No less did
the stormy genius of Schiller find its counterpart in Beethoven and
Cherubini. The production of "Lodoïska" was the point of departure
from which the great French school of serious opera, which has given
us "Robert le Diable," "Les Huguenots," and "Faust," got its primal
value and significance. Two men of genius, Gluck and Grétry, had
formed the tastes of the public in being faithful to the accents of
nature. The idea of reconciling this taste, founded on strict truth,
with the seductive charm of the Italian forms, to which the French
were beginning to be sensible, suggested to Cherubini a system of
lyric drama capable of satisfying both. Wagner himself even says, in
his _Tendencies and Theories_, speaking of Cherubini and his great
co-labourers, Méhul and Spontini--"It would be difficult to answer
them, if they now perchance came among us and asked in what respect we
had improved on their mode of musical procedure."
"Lodoïska," which cast the old Italian operas into permanent
oblivion, and laid the foundation of the modern French dramatic school
in music, has a libretto similar to that of "Fidelio" and Grétry's
"Coeur de Lion" combined, and was taken from a romance of Faiblas by
Fillette Loraux. The critics found only one objection: the music was
all so beautiful that no breathing time was granted the listener. In
one year the opera was performed two hundred times, and at short
intervals two hundred more representations took place.
The Revolution culminated in the crisis of 1793, which sent the King
to the scaffold. Cherubini found a retreat at La Chartreuse, near
Rouen, the country-seat of his friend, the architect Louis. Here he
lived in tranquillity, and composed several minor pieces and a
three-act opera, never produced, but afterwards worked over into "Ali
Baba" and "Faniska." In his Norman retreat Cherubini heard of the
death of his father, and while suffering under this infliction, just
before his return to Paris in 1794, he composed the opera of "Elisa."
This work was received with much favour at the Feydeau theatre, though
it did not arouse the admiration called out by "Lodoïska."
In 1795 the Paris Conservatory was founded, and Cherubini appointed
one of the five inspectors, as well as professor of counterpoint, his
associates being Lesueur, Grétry, Gossec, and Méhul. The same year
also saw him united to Cécile Tourette, to whom he had been so long
and devotedly attached. Absorbed in his duties at the Conservatory, he
did not come before the public again till 1797, when the great tragic
masterpiece of "Médée" was produced at the Feydeau theatre. "Lodoïska"
had been somewhat gay; "Elisa," a work of graver import, followed; but
in "Médée" was sustained the profound tragic power of Gluck and
Beethoven. Hoffman's libretto was indeed unworthy of the great music,
but this has not prevented its recognition by musicians as one of the
noblest operas ever written. It has probably been one of the causes,
however, why it is so rarely represented at the present time, its
overture alone being well known to modern musical audiences. This
opera has been compared by critics to Shakespeare's "King Lear," as
being a great expression of anguish and despair in their more stormy
phases. Chorley tells us that, when he first saw it, he was
irresistibly reminded of the lines in Barry Cornwall's poem to Pasta--
"Now thou art like some wingèd thing that cries
Above some city, flaming fast to death."
The poem which Chorley quotes from was inspired by the performance of
the great Pasta in Simone Mayer's weak musical setting of the fable of
the Colchian sorceress, which crowded the opera-houses of Europe. The
life of the French classical tragedy, too, was powerfully assisted by
Rachel. Though the poem on which Cherubini worked was unworthy of his
genius, it could not be from this or from lack of interest in the
theme alone that this great work is so rarely performed; it is because
there have been not more than three or four actresses in the last
hundred years combining the great tragic and vocal requirements
exacted by the part. If the tragic genius of Pasta could have been
united with the voice of a Catalania, made as it were of adamant and
gold, Cherubini's sublime musical creation would have found an
adequate interpreter. Mdlle. Tietjens, indeed, has been the only late
dramatic singer who dared essay so difficult a task. Musical students
rank the instrumental parts of this opera with the organ music of
Bach, the choral fugues of Handel, and the symphonies of Beethoven,
for beauty of form and originality of ideas.
On its first representation, on the 13th of March 1797, one of the
journals, after praising its beauty, professed to discover imitations
of Méhul's manner in it. The latter composer, in an indignant
rejoinder, proclaimed himself and all others as overshadowed by
Cherubini's genius: a singular example of artistic humility and
justice. Three years after its performance in Paris, it was given at
Berlin and Vienna, and stamped by the Germans as one of the world's
great musical masterpieces. This work was a favourite one with
Schubert, Beethoven, and Weber, and there have been few great
composers who have not put on record their admiration of it.
As great, however, as "Médée" is ranked, "Les Deux Journées,"[P]
produced in 1800, is the opera on which Cherubini's fame as a dramatic
composer chiefly rests. Three hundred consecutive performances did not
satisfy Paris; and at Berlin and Frankfort, as well as in Italy, it
was hailed with acclamation. Bouilly was the author of the
opera-story, suggested by the generous action of a water-carrier
towards a magistrate who was related to the author. The story is so
interesting, so admirably written, that Goethe and Mendelssohn
considered it the true model for a comic opera. The musical
composition, too, is nearly faultless in form and replete with
beauties. In this opera Cherubini anticipated the reforms of Wagner,
for he dispensed with the old system which made the drama a web of
beautiful melodies, and established his musical effects for the most
part by the vigour and charm of the choruses and concerted pieces. It
has been accepted as a model work by composers, and Beethoven was in
the habit of keeping it by him on his writing-table for constant study
and reference.
Spohr, in his autobiography, says, "I recollect, when the 'Deux
Journées' was performed for the first time, how, intoxicated with
delight and the powerful impression the work had made on me, I asked
on that very evening to have the score given me, and sat over it the
whole night; and that it was that opera chiefly that gave me my first
impulse to composition." Weber, in a letter from Munich written in
1813, says, "Fancy my delight when I beheld lying upon the table of
the hotel the play-bill with the magic name _Armand_. I was the first
person in the theatre, and planted myself in the middle of the pit,
where I waited most anxiously for the tones which I knew beforehand
would elevate and inspire me. I think I may assert boldly that 'Les
Deux Journées' is a really great dramatic and classical work.
Everything is calculated so as to produce the greatest effect; all the
various pieces are so much in their proper place that you can neither
omit one nor make any addition to them. The opera displays a pleasing
richness of melody, vigorous declamation, and all-striking truth in
the treatment of situations, ever new, ever heard and retained with
pleasure." Mendelssohn, too, writing to his father of a performance of
this opera, speaks of the enthusiasm of the audience as extreme, as
well as of his own pleasure as surpassing anything he had ever
experienced in a theatre. Mendelssohn, who never completed an opera,
because he did not find until shortly before his death a theme which
properly inspired him to dramatic creation, corresponded with Planché,
with the hope of getting from the latter a libretto which should unite
the excellences of "Fidelio" with those of "Les Deux Journées." He
found, at last, a libretto, which, if it did not wholly satisfy him,
at least overcame some of his prejudices, in a story based on the
Rhine myth of Lorelei. A fragment of it only was finished, and the
finale of the first act is occasionally performed in England.