“In the morning the guillotine was kept busy,” it was remarked during the days of the Terror, “and in the evening one could not get a seat at the theater.” It was in this atmosphere that Luigi Cherubini acclaimed by Beethoven as the greatest musician of his time conducted and sought to extract from the artistic bombast of the French Revolution a true voice. He had made his reputation before the tumbrels became vehicles for slaughter, and in the years that followed, he turned the revolutionary “horror and escape” opera into important music drama and gave Wagner the cri de fureur of the leitmotif a device that the German carried to sometimes boring heights.
Napoleon, a patron of music who demanded obedience in matters of taste from lesser composers, resented Cherubini’s independence, and there are accounts of the two men glowering at each other during rehearsals at the Conservatoire. But Cherubini continued to write compositions that Berlioz called “sublime” and that his contemporaries placed against the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Clementi the classical masters.
Comments