Luigi Cherubini, short biography of an Italian romantic

Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini—nowadays simply remembered as Luigi Cherubini—was born in Florence in 1760 and is one of those few composers who experienced both the apogee of the classical style and the birth of the romantic movement in Europe. His father Bartolomeo, Maestro al Cembalo (principal harpsichordist) at the Pergola theatre in Florence, was his first music teacher and by the age of ten it was clear that Luigi was a very talented musician. He composed a good deal of church music in his teens, most likely influenced by the professional demands of his father’s job, but the breakthrough for his education came when, in 1777, he moved to Bologna to formally study composition with Giuseppe Sarti, an established opera composer of by then considerable international reputation. The studies with Sarti veered him from church music to opera: he completed his first opera, Quinto Fabio, in 1779, premiered in Alessandria, and two years later, in 1782, three more works—all centred around characters from the ancient world—were presented in Florence and Livorno—one, Adriano in Siria, on a libretto by the famous poet Metastasio.

Armed with growing confidence in his skills as a composer, Cherubini accepted wholeheartedly an invitation to London to produce two operas for the King’s Theatre in 1784. He stayed in London for roughly two years and his first production of La Finta Principessa in 1785 obtained considerable success. But his rise to fame began when he met, in the same year, the Italian violin virtuoso Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824), who had recently retired from the public performance space but continued to play for private aristocrats and influential people, a practice that ensured he could weave a strong network of friendships and supporters. Viotti lived in Paris where he took his new friend and introduced him to the queen Marie Antoinette as well as to a host of popular and influential people in the Parisian cultural landscape. Among these was Jean-François Marmontel, who would be the librettist for Cherubini’s first French opera, Démophon (1788). Cherubini moved to Paris in 1786 and there he would reside for most of the rest of his life. For the first six years—until Viotti departed to London in 1792—the two friends lived together in various locations throughout the city. Their apartment at 8 Rue de la Michodière—their last joint residence, where they moved in 1791—became a renown centre for musical activity during the revolution, welcoming the creme-de-la-creme of Paris musicians, poets and impresarios.

If Démophon met with cold response from the public, Lodoiska, completed in 1791, was to seal Cherubini’s reputation as an influential composer in Paris as well as to make him an advocate of the revolutionary France. The work was performed over two-hundred times in 1791 alone, and its plot fits perfectly well the revolutionary ideals of aspiration to nobility through courage, regardless of social class, that inflamed the hearts of so many young people in those tumultuous years. It tells the story of the valiant Floreski in his crusade to liberate his beloved Lodoiska held captive by a polish tyrant.

Cherubini had in the meantime been appointed director of the prestigious Théâtre de Monsieur—taking its name from Monsieur, Comte de Provence, later to become Louis XVIII after the fall of Napoleon. The theatre originally had its residence within the Palais des Tuileries, but following the arrest of the royal family it was moved to rue Feydeau and its name changed to that of Théâtre Feydeau, in a deliberate attempt to cut its relationships with the royal establishment with which it was connected before. Cherubini survived the rebranding and used his position to produce a lot of his operas at the Feydeau. Although the following years were poor of output, perhaps his best operatic achievements followed shortly the end of the revolutionary terror and the rise to power of Napoleon: Médée (1797), Les Deux Journées (1801) and the opera-ballet Anacrêon are widely considered Cherubini at his best in the operatic space.

Although these works probably lack the melodic inspiration of Mozart’s or Gluck’s—the two giants of classical opera—Cherubini clearly defines with them a style that departs from the more traditional Italian opera and sets him on an original path that, perhaps unconsciously—as it often happens with artistic revolutions—longs for the romantic invention, and finds some similarities with the art of perhaps the most influential among his contemporary composers: Beethoven.

Cherubini and Beethoven met when the former was invited to produce an opera for the Imperial Theatre in 1805. Cherubini had no hesitation in producing a German version for Les Deux Journées, which had already gained remarkable success in Austria. The opera was titled Der Wasserträger (The Water Carrier) and was presented in 1805. Beethoven was very impressed by this work, to the extent that many years later, in 1817, during a walk in the woods with the English composer Cipriani Potter, he confessed that he considered Cherubini to be the greatest living composer, apart from himself. The esteem and admiration that Beethoven nurtured for Cherubini through his life was somewhat a mystery to music critics and musicologists ever since, most notably Harold Schönberg, who states in his Lives of Great Composers: “what Beethoven, of all people, saw in him [Cherubini], is hard to conceive.” It is highly likely though that Beethoven took inspiration from the highly human content of Der Wasserträger and used it in what would remain his only work for the theatre: Fidelio. Fidelio also used a libretto by the same Bouilly who had written the libretto for Les Deux Journées. The story goes that Beethoven kept the score of Der Wasserträger on his desk as he was composing his own opera. Fidelio has indeed some remarkable similarities with Cherubini’s opera, both in the ethical dimension and in the musical development, although Beethoven is definitely more ambitious and original in the treatment of melodies and dramatic climaxes.

Cherubini, on its part, is not known to have reciprocated the admiration that Beethoven bestowed on him. He is known to have commented on the brusqueness of the German master (“Il était toujours brusque”) and of being puzzled by the lack of clarity in his compositions. It is said that after hearing the Leonore overture (it is not specified which one of the 2 that had been composed at the time, most likely the one that goes by Opus number 72a) he could not say which key the piece was in. At the same time he has also been known to express respect for the musical genius of Beethoven: “I am going to look like a very small boy,” he is said to have commented upon seeing that one of his overtures had been inserted between two works by Beethoven on a concert programme. On the other hand, Beethoven’s influence on Cherubini will be stronger in his later liturgical works.

Alas, Der Wasserträger did not gain the swathing success that Cherubini had hoped for, also due to the escalating political situation that would have Napoleon seizing Vienna in November, after the Austrian army was forced to surrender at Ulm in September. This apparent failure in establishing himself as a leading composer in Vienna as he had been in Paris, plunged Cherubini in a deep creative crisis and his output was very poor until 1809. A sour relationship with Napoleon also embittered him during the years of consolidation of power ahead of the disastrous Russian campaign. He fell out completely with the Emperor for allegedly pointing out to him, after being criticised for composing music too difficult to comprehend, that “he [Napoleon] had as much business directing music as he [Cherubini] would have directing a battle.”

Upset and developing the first signs of manic-depression that would affect him for the rest of his life, Cherubini retired to the countryside, at the residence of the Count de Chimay. Here, at the request of some of his friends, he composed a Mass in F major—now commonly referred to as the Mass de Chimay— that, although probably not his best work in the liturgical repertoire, started a second phase in his life as a composer where opera, although not completely absent, became progressively less predominant.

In his brief return in power for the Hundred days, Napoleon made Cherubini Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, perhaps in an attempt to gain as much support from influential French citizens. But the fall of the Corsican warmonger at Waterloo was to bring Cherubini more stability and prestige in the age of the restoration. He was appointed director of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1822, a post he would hold until his death twenty years later. In the second decade of the century Cherubini produced some of his best choral works: the Missa Solemnis in D minor (1811), the Requiem in C minor (1816), also performed at Beethoven’s funeral in 1827, and the Missa Solemnis in E (1818). But perhaps the peak of his liturgical music is the Requiem in D minor (1836), written for his own funeral.

Cherubini was by now a very established figure in Paris musical life and, as such, he was also making some enemies. The one ongoing altercation that has gone down in history as being worth remembering—mostly because of it amusing nature—is the one with the composer Hector Berlioz, who dedicated a conspicuous number of pages of his Mémoires drawing a derogatory caricatural picture of Cherubini, one of a stiff old-fashion music tyrant, stuck in traditional and ultraconservative mannerism. It seems like it all began when Cherubini threw Berlioz out of the library of the Conservatoire, when the latter had used the women entry to access the room and as a result had been asked to leave by the porter. Refusing to leave, the director, Cherubini, was summoned and, in Berlioz’s account, started chasing him around the tables without being able to catch him. Berlioz—a very difficult character himself— is elsewhere known to have appreciated the musical mastery of Cherubini, having praised it as well in letters that were, perhaps deliberately, omitted from his official Mémoires. Be it as it may, it is known from written testimonies that Cherubini favoured Berlioz on a number of occasions, including writing to the minister to appoint him as director-adjoint to the library in 1838 and even renouncing to having his Requiem performed on the occasion of the commemoration, in 1837, of the death of the Marshal Mortier and forty other people, killed in a terrorist attack on 28 July 1835, as well as of those who died in the 1830 July Revolution. On such occasion Cherubini interceded with the minister Gasparin to have Berlioz appointed to compose his Requiem—which he did—when he could have lobbied to have his Requiem presented to commemorate such occasion.

His last work for the stage was Ali Baba, composed in 1833 and featuring some particularly noisy elements that, whilst making it very popular among the Parisian public, caused a few high-browsed critics to go cold at Cherubini’s late style. Even Felix Mendelssohn, otherwise an admirer of Cherubini’s, is said to have commented negatively on this opera.

His most relevant contribution of the very last years is the Treatise on Counterpoint and Fugue, completed in 1841, an academic work that has been referenced ever since, although its cryptic ambiguity about the role of the classics in the history of music has not failed to generate misinterpretations and erroneous judgments of the classical style among later generations of scholars. He spent the last years dedicating himself to a variety of interests—including painting, which he learned eagerly from his friend Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres—and his popularity and affable character gained him the friendship of musicians including Frederyk Chopin, Gioacchino Rossini and Franz Liszt.

Cherubini died in Paris in 1842 and was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, only a few metres away from his friend Chopin, who survived him by seven years. His relevance in guiding the transition between the classical and the romantic period is arguably greater than what the history of music acknowledges, despite many giants of the late nineteenth-century voiced for him. Johannes Brahms is said to have defined Medea the “absolute peak of dramatic art”: from somebody who refused categorically to write for the stage, it is an ambiguous statement, but surely one that testifies to the endurance of Cherubini’s contribution to history of music.