While walking through the woods with Beethoven one day in 1817, English composer Cipriani Potter popped the big question: Who did Beethoven, apart from himself, consider the greatest living composer? At first Beethoven seemed startled by the question, then answered, “Cherubini.” This was not the first time Beethoven had expressed himself about Cherubini’s stature. A decade earlier in Vienna, he proclaimed him “Europe’s foremost dramatic composer.” And in 1823 he would write to Cherubini that, “I am enraptured whenever I hear a new work of yours and feel as great an interest in it as in my own works—in brief, I honor and love you.” Today, it is we who are startled by Beethoven’s answer to Potter’s question. Who was Cherubini and, if he was so great, why do we not hear his music?
Luigi Cherubini was born in Italy in 1760, four years after Mozart and ten years before Beethoven. Living mostly in Paris, he composed some forty operas, a good deal of liturgical music, a symphony, six quartets, and a quintet. When Cherubini died on March 15, 1842, Wagner was composing Tannhauser. In a career spanning an era of such dramatic musical changes, any composer would find it hard to satisfy posterity. Could Cherubini have been a victim of his own longevity, living as he did for fifty years after Mozart’s death? Was he one of the many minor Classical composers whose reputation was swept away by the Romantic deluge? This seems to have been the case with his operas, which were eclipsed by the rage for the newer Italian style of Rossini and, later, Verdi. (Ironically, Cherubini was considered a French composer. His one effort that continues to hold the stage is Médée, credited by some as the first modern opera because of the psychological intensity with which the principal character is drawn.) But if Cherubini slipped into the great chasm separating the Classical and Romantic periods, he was helped by a big push from one the greatest Romantic composers whom he had the misfortune of irritating.
In part, Cherubini’s eclipse is testimony to the power of the pen—in this case, the pen of Hector Berlioz, one of the few writers on music whose reviews are still worth reading more than a century later. Because he had difficulty getting his own music performed, Berlioz had to work as a critic. In his very entertaining Memoirs, Berlioz unmercifully caricatured Cherubini as an overly fastidious, ultraconservative academician enslaved to tradition. Their first encounter came in the Paris Conservatory, of which Cherubini was director. Berlioz mistakenly entered the music library though the women’s door. He refused to leave when asked to do so by the porter, who then summoned Cherubini. When Berlioz again refused to leave, Cherubini and the porter began chasing him around a table until he made good his escape. From that point, Berlioz wrote, for every lash he was given by Cherubini he repaid him with scorpions.
So successful was Berlioz’s revenge that his image of Cherubini endures to this day. It seems to be chiefly responsible for the scathing treatment Cherubini receives from music critic Harold Schonberg in his The Lives of the Great Composers. He calls Cherubini a dull, predictable, boring pedant, and exclaims: “What Beethoven, of all people, saw in him is hard to conceive.” However, Schonberg has a lot more to explain than Beethoven’s admiration. Cherubini was held in nearly universal esteem amongst his contemporaries, and by the next generation of composers, up to and including both Wagner and Brahms, who called Médée “the highest peak of dramatic music.” Examples from another two of the greatest Romantic composers—those most likely to consider Cherubini a living anachronism—should suffice to illustrate this.
In 1839, Felix Mendelssohn wrote:
And old Cherubini? There is a man for you! I have got his Abencérages, and am again and again enjoying his sparkling fire, his clever and unexpected transitions, and the neatness and grace with which he writes. I am truly grateful to this fine old gentleman. It is all so free, so bold and bright.
Around the same time, Robert Schumann said that Cherubini was “to this day, at his advanced age, superior as a harmonist to all his contemporaries; the refined, scholarly, interesting Italian whose severe reserve and strength of character sometimes leads me to compare him with Dante.”
Stylistically, Cherubini seems to have been influenced in opera principally by Gluck and otherwise by Haydn, whom he adored, and by Mozart. He also clearly had listened to and learned from Beethoven, an influence that can be heard mostly in his liturgical music. Cherubini thought Beethoven’s music brusque and his vocal writing unrefined, but he understood Beethoven’s greatness. Once, when he saw a program that placed one of his overtures between two pieces by Beethoven, he said, “Look here and see what they have done. I’m going to appear a very small boy.” Yet it was to Cherubini that Beethoven looked when writing Fidelio, modeled to a certain extent on Cherubini’s famous rescue opera, Les Deux Journées. Cherubini’s influence is also heard in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
Aside from one or two operas, the music of Cherubini that can be heard today consists of his liturgical works, whose existence testifies to one of the greatest musical comebacks in history. The revolutionary times through which Cherubini lived were politically tricky, and the composer did not escape unscathed from the French Revolution. Though he wrote the mandatory hymns to la liberté, Cherubini was no mere political toady. When Napoleon reproached him for writing music “so noisy and complicated” that nothing could be made of it, Cherubini replied, “Sire, you like music which does not hinder you from thinking about affairs of state.” He told Napoleon that he had as much business directing music as he, Cherubini, would have directing a battle. Napoleon did not take this kindly and stripped Cherubini of his positions.
Cherubini’s sour relations with Napoleon aggravated a bout of severe depression that drove him to live in the countryside, abandon music altogether and pursue his interests in botany and painting. After several years of silence, he was approached by a local parish church to write music, appropriately enough, for the feast of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music. He agreed, and thus began his second career—as a liturgical composer. In his last years he produced seven Masses and two Requiems that amply justify Beethoven’s high opinion of him. These sublime works belong with those of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as the greatest of their time. With these masterpieces, Cherubini triumphed even with Berlioz, who wrote that Cherubini knew “how to reach the most mysterious depths of Christian meditation.”
Currently available on CD are three of the seven Masses and the two requiems. They are Masses in the grand style—full of majesty, mystery, glory, grief, and grandeur. They point directly both to Berlioz in terms of striking orchestral effects, and to Gounod as expressions of triumphant faith. They display stunning forte passages and lovely melodies. Though renowned as the greatest contrapuntalist of his time, Cherubini used this talent sparingly and wrote with great clarity. One can always see what he is doing while, at the same time, being affected by it. Thus he offers two levels of enjoyment simultaneously. I think this is what Louis Spohr meant when he wrote that “Cherubini can achieve such overpowering effects that one is swept along, even against his will, and, rendered oblivious to the obviously contrived, surrenders to his feelings and his pleasure.”
It is in their overall shape, however, that the full beauty of Cherubini’s Masses and their composer’s extraordinary mastery are revealed. Cherubini deals with the liturgy symphonically. He is not a word painter, but is working on a different level. His larger musical conceptions may sacrifice the meaning of specific words or phrases, but the Masses gain tremendously in dramatic impact as a result. The credo of the Solemn Mass in G for the coronation of Louis XVIII is a good example of how Cherubini proceeds. He begins in almost a whisper with the male and female choirs urgently echoing each other as they rush through the first part of the Credo to a huge climax at descendit de coelis. The central portion is taken very meditatively except for the exuberant Et resurrexit. Then at Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Cherubini recapitulates the music that began the Credo. This time the climax is reached at resurrectionem. By constructing the movement in two giant arcs, he very powerfully emphasizes two things: God came down, and we are going up. Cherubini then gallops through the concluding Et vitam venturi with rollicking gaiety, as if to make the point that everlasting life will be great fun.
Another superb instance of Cherubini’s dramatic thinking is the Agnus Dei from the Requiem in C minor, thought by Beethoven to be superior to Mozart’s. Coming as it does at the very end of the Requiem, Cherubini uses the Agnus Dei to portray the departure of a soul in a brilliant decrescendo that spans half the movement. Cherubini keeps diminishing the forces and the pace of the music until we are left with a single held note that flattens out to the endless horizon. With this bold stroke, he conveys a profound sense of resignation, release, and farewell. Berlioz said that “the decrescendo in the Agnus Dei surpasses everything that has ever been written of the kind.” The extraordinary Dies irae, with its blazing trumpets, also obviously had a profound impact on Berlioz.
The coronation Mass written for Charles X is another stunning masterpiece. It begins with a poignantly beautiful kyrie. Unlike Beethoven, who chose to portray God’s overwhelming power in the Gloria of his Missa solemnis, Cherubini uses this movement to depict God’s exultant joy streaming radiantly forth, as well as man’s response to it. The Laudamus te is breathtaking in its beauty and exhilaration. In the Credo, Cherubini, like Beethoven, emphasizes the act of faith itself with recurring cries of “credo” throughout the entire movement. He also stresses the centrality of Christ’s resurrection and ascension by building to an enormous climax at the Et resurrexit and then repeating the process with another climax at the Et expecto resurrectionem to engulf man in Christ’s salvific act. It is hard to overstate the magnificence of this Mass.
Robert Schumann’s comments on the Mass in C can serve as a general characterization of Cherubini’s achievement in liturgical music:
Call it suitable for high church performance, strangely wonderful or whatever you like, there is no way of describing the impression which the work makes totally and even more in its separate parts. Sometimes the music, while it seems to resound from the clouds, makes us tremble and shiver. Even what might be called mundane, bizarre and almost theatrical belongs like incense to the Catholic ceremonial and catches the fancy so that we have before us all the grandeur of the rite.
If this music can be heard, Cherubini’s reputation will be restored, perhaps not to the pinnacle where Beethoven put it, but certainly to a place of honor among the very greatest of his time.