Médée

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.

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.