8 Overtures

Asked one day in 1817 who was the greatest living composer, apart from himself, Beethoven is said to have looked puzzled for a moment and then to have exclaimed “Cherubini!” Although the initial puzzlement is at least as significant as the eventual answer, Beethoven could surely have chosen no one else at that time. Certainly, if an elevated classical style was a necessary qualification for greatness, no composer practised it more consistently and more successfully than Cherubini. Brought up in Florence on a regime of strict Palestrinan counterpoint, experienced in both opera seria and opera buffa, inspired by the radical developments in the music of Haydn and Mozart, long resident in Paris where he had absorbed the operatic reforms of Gluck and rescued the repertoire of the Opéra-Comique from triviality, he was the high priest of the classical style. Beethoven, who had the opportunity to meet the composer and to hear his work performed in Vienna, was clearly aware of his example when writing Fidelio.

Much more interested in church music than opera in the last thirty years of his long life and universally celebrated for his Requiem in D minor - which Beethoven preferred even to Mozart’s - Cherubini would probably not be too disappointed to find that all but a few of his thirty or forty operas are now completely forgotten. He would, on the other hand, be surprised to learn that most of the eight or nine which are not forgotten are remembered only for their overtures. He was, in fact, a master of the art of the overture, resourceful in setting the atmosphere of the opera in comparatively few bars, imaginative in orchestration, expressive in harmony and - since he was writing in the tradition of the Italian operatic sinfonia rather than the Viennese sonata-form overture - dramatically flexible in construction. It was through his overtures as much as his operas that, by way of composers like Berlioz in France and Weber in Germany, Cherubini’s influence extended well into the romantic movement - even as far as Wagner.

A rare, though entertaining, miscalculation among his overtures is the one he provided in 1833 for Ali-Baba - the opera with which, after deserting the theatre in disillusion for as long as twenty years, Cherubini made one last effort to score a success at the Paris Opéra. Drawing on material for a forty-year-old unfinished opera, Koukourgi, and described as a tragédie lyrique, Ali-Baba is a serious work with an overture which sounds anything but serious. Facing for the first time the challenge of the extravagantly colourful, rhythmically dynamic Rossini overture, Cherubini both exaggerated the exotic element on percussion and overdid the driving coda with irresistibly comic effect. In these circumstances, the intervention of more lyrical material, including one of Cherubini’s most attractive melodies, is particularly welcome.

Cherubini’s earliest opéra comique, Lodoïska, was first produced at the recently opened Théâtre Feydau in Paris in 1791 and ran for 200 performances. An escape opera not unlike Beethoven’s masterpiece, it was staged in Vienna in 1803, two years before Fidelio was completed. The overture,which begins like most of Cherubini’s with a slow introduction, is one of his best. The dramatically impulsive Allegro vivace is organised in such a way as to admit at the crucial point, just where the climax ought to be, a comparatively broad Moderato section based on happy melodic material from the third-act finale.

One reason why so few of Cherubini’s operas have survived is that most of them are based on weak libretti. Médée is the major exception. Considered by both Beethoven and Goethe as one of the finest libretti of the period, F.B. Hoffman’s text, derived (via Seneca and Corneille) from the Greek legend of Medea’s terrible revenge on her faithless husband Jason, is not quite as good as that. It did, on the other hand, inspire in Cherubini a score which Brahms in his turn described as “the highest peak of dramatic music.” The passionate intensity of the opera is evident from the beginning of the overture, which has no time for the customary slow introduction and plunges straight into an impulsive Allegro in F minor - with, as several prophetic harmonies and melodic phrases in the overture clearly suggest, a lasting effect on the imagination of the young Felix Mendelssohn.

There are anticipations of Schubert in the Largo introduction to the overture to Les Abencérages, of Mendelssohn again in the Allegro spiritoso and of Berlioz in the dramatic use of trombones near the end. Although the opera - a tragédie lyrique written for the Paris Opéra in 1813 - is set in medieval Spain, Cherubini offers no local colour in an overture which is remarkable more for its economical construction than for any sense of place or time.

Anacréon, an opéra-ballet based on an imaginary episode in the life of the Greek poet, was a disaster when it was first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1803. The overture, on the other hand, is uncommonly interesting. There is no evidence that Cherubini’s great Viennese contemporary ever heard it or read the score, but the anticipations of the mature Beethoven are remarkable - in the simple but effective use of the two horns in the Largo introduction, in the melodic shape of the stirring first subject of the Allegro, in the central storm episode, and in the poetic recall of the horns towards the end.

L’Hôtellerie portugaise, one of three one-act opéras comiques written in 1798 and 1799, is based on the familiar plot of the lovers who have to outwit the old guardian bent on marrying his pretty young ward himself. Set in an inn on the border between Spain and Portugal, the story this time moved Cherubini to make a discreet application of local colour, in the form of allusions to the popular Portuguese tune La Folia, in the slow introduction to the overture. The main Allegro section is a skilfully achieved accumulation of eager expectation which reaches its climax just before the end.

The favourite Cherubini opera during his life time was Les deux Journées, a comédie lyrique written for the Théâtre Feydau in 1800. Based on another story of escape from political persecution - the rescue act in this case being carried out by a humble Savoyard water carrier - Les deux Journées (or The Water Carrier as it is known outside France) eventually fell out of favour together with most others of its kind, leaving only Médée to represent Cherubini in the opera house through decades of neglect. The overture was always much admired: “The whole of the drama is contained in the overture,” said Wagner; “The first three bars,” Mendelssohn wrote in 1834, “are worth more than our entire repertoire.” The Andante sostenuto, pregnant with anticipations of Beethoven and Berlioz, is in fact the most dramatically inspired of Cherubini’s slow introductions. The Allegro masterfully sustains the tension and a Presto coda is timed to add yet another layer of intensity.

The last of Cherubini’s escape operas, Faniska, which was first performed at the Kärntnertor Theatre in 1806, was clearly written to appeal to a Viennese audience. Mozart seems to have been the model at least in the overture which, after the gently teasing slow introduction, rejoices in a succession of bright ideas in orchestration, cheerful melody and witty counterpoint. Contemplating his operatic come-back in 1833, Cherubini at first considered reviving Faniska but, feeling that it was too Viennese for Paris, turned instead to Ali-Baba.

Gerald Larner©