Abancérages

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.

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.

Gerald Larner