Luigi Cherubini

Luigi Cherubini (Florence, 1760 - Paris, 1842) was an Italian composer, conductor, teacher and theorist who spent most of his career in France, where he took citizenship around 1794. For half a century he was a central figure in Parisian musical life: he enjoyed success as an opera composer during the Revolutionary period, achieved comparable success with religious music from the beginning of the Restoration, and directed the Paris Conservatoire, consolidating its leading place in European music education.

Florentine Training

Born in Florence on 14 September 1760, Cherubini had his first lessons from his father, Bartolomeo, who was maestro al cembalo at the Teatro della Pergola. From 1769 he studied composition with Bartolomeo Felici and the latter's son Alessandro, and later with Pietro Bizzarri and Giuseppe Castrucci. His early works, including sections of masses for solo voices, chorus and orchestra, a cantata and an intermezzo, already show lively writing and the imprint of Neapolitan models, particularly Pergolesi's buffo style.

Apprenticeship with Sarti

Between 1778 and 1781 he trained in Bologna and Milan under Giuseppe Sarti, from whom he felt he learnt counterpoint and the idiom of dramatic music. In those years he also wrote motets and antiphons for several voices in the manner of Palestrina, along with his first sonatas for harpsichord. Between 1779 and 1784 he produced a series of mostly serious operas on historical subjects, with texts in the Metastasian tradition, for various Italian cities. They show his craft, though their dramatic treatment remains conventional.

London and First Contact with Paris

After a period of ties with Florentine nobility and, in particular, with the English patron Lord Cowper, he secured a contract in 1784 as house composer at the King's Theatre in London. The season was difficult, and his opera Il Giulio Sabino was performed only once, to little success. By 1785 he had already spent the summer in Paris, where he struck up a friendship with Giovanni Battista Viotti, who introduced him to Queen Marie Antoinette and several writers. In 1786 he settled permanently in the French capital.

Establishment in French Opera

In Paris he found his own voice. Ifigenia in Aulide (1788), written in Turin, and above all Démophon (1788), his first commission for the Opéra, revealed a more intense drama, with arioso recitative supported by an orchestra that develops motifs. From 1789 to 1791 he directed the Théâtre de Monsieur, devoted to the Italian comic repertory, and in 1791 he moved to the Théâtre Feydeau. His major international success came with Lodoïska (1791), a heroic comedy mixing serious and comic registers, which had considerable repercussions, including a influence later detectable in the characterization of Don Pizarro in Beethoven's Fidelio.

During the Revolution the climate changed. After a year of retreat near Rouen, he composed Eliza (1794), with its celebrated avalanche scene, and in 1797 Médée, perhaps his most admired work, in which he portrayed the protagonist's passion and vengeance with unusual severity. That opera marks the peak of his opera writing of the decade.

The Final Parisian Operas

After Médée his style underwent a change. The three one-act comic operas of 1798 and 1799 were unsuccessful, but Les deux journées (1800) brought him an enduring triumph that remained in the international repertory for much of the nineteenth century. In 1803 he staged the opéra-ballet Anacréon, a notable failure which he attributed to the Opéra's hostility towards his link with the Conservatoire. In 1805 he travelled to Vienna, where he witnessed the premiere of Fidelio, and there he composed Faniska (1806) before returning to Paris. His last operas, Pimmalione, Le crescendo and Les abencérages (1813), failed to regain public favour.

Depression and Sacred Music

After his return he suffered a severe depression, which would recur throughout his life and kept him from writing for two years. Around 1809 he resumed composition with a large-scale mass. With the Bourbon Restoration he was appointed superintendent of the Royal Chapel in 1816, a post he held until its dissolution in 1830, and his output now focused chiefly on religious music. He wrote masses, motets and two major requiems: the first in C minor, from 1817, commemorating Louis XVI, and the second in D minor, from 1836, for male chorus and orchestra. His sacred music, with its clear, homophonic writing and an austerity that contrasts with his operas, enjoyed great influence in the nineteenth century.

Director of the Conservatoire

In 1822 he was appointed director of the Paris Conservatoire, a post he held until 1842, which allowed him to exercise meticulous control over administration and teaching. He reorganised the institution several times, reduced and purged the student body, created new instrumental classes, instituted annual prizes, promoted a pension fund for employees and encouraged the creation of branches in Lille, Toulouse and Marseilles. In 1828 the Conservatoire's Société des Concerts, founded by Habeneck with his support, introduced Beethoven's symphonies to Paris and enhanced his prestige. His final opera, Ali-Baba (1833), was an ambitious project that was hardly performed.

Instrumental and Theoretical Work

His instrumental music includes six string quartets, written mainly between 1834 and 1837, and a single symphony from 1815. In these he applies a style in which the first violin dominates and themes unfold in fragments, with unexpected harmonic shifts. His French overtures became independent concert pieces. In pedagogy, his Cours de contrepoint et de fugue (1835) established a theory of modern strict counterpoint that became the official doctrine in nineteenth-century France.

Legacy

Cherubini was recognised in his lifetime by Beethoven, who called him the greatest living composer, and by Brahms, who valued Médée. Yet his work fell outside the great national schools, which hindered its dissemination and explains why much of his music remained unpublished. His autograph collection ended up in Berlin, and his music regained interest only in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to conductors and ensembles that returned to his operas and quartets. Today he is remembered as one of the bridges between the tradition of Gluck and Romanticism, and as the great organiser of the Paris Conservatoire.