Étienne Méhul (1763 – 1817): Symphony no 1 in G Minor
Étienne Méhul must have been a resilient man. His career spanned countless political upheavals in his country – the French Revolution, the post-Revolution Terror, the First Republic, the Directory, the Consulate, the First Empire and then the Bourbon Restoration – and yet he not only survived each regime intact, both professionally and personally, but mostly flourished throughout. Napoleon Bonaparte was a personal friend for many years, but no-one held that against Méhul either, even after the latter’s dramatic fall from grace.
Méhul’s ability to not cause offence might be better understood had he been, artistically speaking, the shy and retiring type. But his music is bold and imaginative, and entirely unafraid of exploring the darker corners of the human experience. Although not exactly a revolutionary, he was a definite pioneer on many fronts. He was one of the first opera composers, for example, to use a device known as the “reminiscence motif”, where a certain theme is employed to provide a link or association to an earlier event. More interesting still, was Méhul’s innovative way of using the orchestra to create a certain ambience or mood, something which Hector Berlioz would later comment on appreciatively:
[Méhul] was convinced that musical expressiveness is a lovely flower, delicate and rare, of exquisite fragrance, which does not bloom without culture, and which a breath can wither; that it does not dwell in melody alone, but that everything concurs either to create or destroy it – melody, harmony, modulation, rhythm, instrumentation, the choice of deep or high registers for the voices or instruments, a quick or slow tempo, and the several degrees of volume in the sound emitted.
We can also say with confidence that Méhul was the first composer to imitate the sound of yapping dogs with French horns. And that his music was the first to be publicly described as “romantic”, in a Parisian review of his 1793 opera, Le Jeune Sage et le Vieux Fou.
Born in Givet, close to the French-Belgium border in the Ardennes, the young Méhul received his first lessons from a blind organist, before being packed off to Paris in his mid-teens to study with Jean Frederic Edelmann, a celebrated harpsichordist and friend of the famous opera composer, Wilhelm Gluck. Gluck was an early idol and from quite an early age Méhul knew he wanted to follow in his footsteps and make a similar career. He was particularly keen to emulate Gluck’s version of opéra comique (basically involving more spoken dialogue and with less emphasis on the “comique” side of things).
Although Méhul published his first piano music at the age of 20, he had to wait a few more years before finding his way towards a professional opera engagement. His opportunity eventually came in 1787, when he was offered a libretto, Alonzo et Cora (set in the times of the ancient Inca Empire), which had been turned down by Gluck. Although the first production of the opera had to be abandoned in the summer 1789, due to a lack of funding and the ongoing disruption of the French Revolution, Méhul was able to secure another operatic collaboration, Euphrosine (a story of love and redemption in the time of the Crusades), which was premiered the following year and an immediate success. He was on his way, and over the 1790s he would hardly look back, as he landed one operatic hit after another, as well as keeping his professional standing intact with several propaganda works for the new, post-Revolution regime (his output would include several national songs and cantatas for Napoleon).
It was only after 1800 that the intense and impassioned tone of Méhul’s operas began to go slightly out of fashion and his stage career entered a slow, but gentle decline. When Napoleon suggested that he too was partial to something a little more upbeat, Méhul responded with the light, one-act L’Irato (The Angry Man), which he mischievously ascribed to a fictitious composer named “Fiorelli” before finally revealing himself as its creator. But he continued to write mainly in a more serious vein, and his later offerings include the biblical Joseph, a work that numbered Wagner among its unlikelier later admirers.
Following his successful operatic career, Méhul only came to writing symphonies relatively late in life. His First (of four that he completed) was finished in 1809, when he was already 46. It nonetheless marks a new stage in his development as he sought to align himself with the great Viennese symphonists of the past fifty years. Writing after the work’s premiere, he commented, “I understood all the dangers of my enterprise; I foresaw the cautious welcome that the music-lovers would give my symphonies. I plan to write new ones for next winter and shall try to write them… to accustom the public gradually to think that a Frenchman may follow Haydn and Mozart at a distance.”
But Méhul evidently wanted his piece to be regarded as something more than just a wide-eyed tribute act. His First Symphony is notable for its dramatic boldness, as well as its angular and steely textures. And although the piece has a Classical conception (with more than a hint of Mozart’s 40th Symphony, also in G Minor, in the first movement) yet its outlook is not towards balance and poise, but rather tension and ambivalence.
The first movement is a slightly unusual sonata-form structure, with the various harmonic sections sometimes blurred at their edges rather than clearly delineated. In a further stroke of unorthodoxy, the two contrasting themes in the exposition are exactly reversed in the recapitulation, creating a near palindromic structure, and ending the movement at exactly the same dramatic pitch on which it had started.
The second movement is a set of variations, and initially the slower tempo plus the amiable theme (which is based on a French Christmas carol) seem to offer some respite from the headwinds of the first movement. But as the variations increase in complexity, there are fast rushing passages in the strings and some of the dramatic impetus returns.
Of the four movements, the third is possibly the most original of the entire piece. Its soft and enigmatic outer sections, in G minor, are built almost entirely on pizzicato strings (also not at all customary for 1809). The orchestra then rouses itself in the middle section, which moves into a rumbustious G Major and is full of fast quavers. When Robert Schumann first heard this movement, he was struck by its similarity to the equivalent movement in Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony and was sure one composer had cribbed from the other: “there must have been a remembrance on one side or the other”, Schumann pondered. “I am not able to determine on which, since I do not know the year of birth of the Méhul”. Schumann might have been surprised to discover the truth – that the two works had in fact been written at exactly the same time. And unless Méhul and Beethoven had had access to an early nineteenth century form of Facetime connecting Paris and Vienna, they would have been entirely unaware of what the other was writing.
The uncanny resemblance between the two works also holds for the fourth movement of the Méhul, although this time the main recurring idea which drives the movement is similar to that of the first movement of the Beethoven. With that said, the way in which the two composers use the motif is quite different – Beethoven’s is always more declamatory and rhetorical, whereas Méhul uses it to impel his movement forward with terrific, almost demonic energy, into a kind of musical moto perpetuo.
In little more than two years, Méhul would complete three other symphonies and he perhaps intended to write a good deal more of them. But only fragments survive for a fifth. In 1811, he returned to the stage with his late opera, Les Amazones, which then completely bombed. Critics blamed the libretto. There was also talk of a Greek god failing to appear in a descending chariot at a crucial moment as the performer in question had been chatting with some friends backstage and missed his cue. Devastated by the set-back and by now troubled with the early onset of tuberculosis, Méhul retired to his house in the outskirts of Paris. There he spent the last years of his life philosophically tending his garden.
Suggestions for Further Listening
Even with his impressive debut as a symphonist, Méhul’s subsequent three offerings in the genre maintain the high standards. The Fourth Symphony is particularly worth a listen – here the prototype is perhaps more Haydn than Mozart/Beethoven, but Méhul takes the Haydn model, with all its creative digressions, and builds it into something spacious and majestic. If there were ever a stylistic halfway point between a Haydn and Schubert symphony, it might well be this work.
As concerns his operatic writing (which so impressed Berlioz), the following “Battle Scene” from his opera Adrien (1799) demonstrates Méhul’s ability to build powerful musical drama in a manner quite unusual for its time.
A full recording of his opera Joseph is also available on Youtube.