Luigi Cherubini (1760 – 1842): Marche Funèbre
In the 1820s and 30s, Luigi Cherubini was the notoriously short-tempered, officious director of the Paris Conservatoire, an institution he ran with the rigour of a crack SAS unit. Punctuality, order and discipline were all sacrosanct to him. He once physically chased a young student, a certain Hector Berlioz, off the premises after the latter had accidentally entered via a wrong door*.
*As comically recalled in Berlioz’s Memoirs.
To Berlioz and his contemporaries, Cherubini was a relic from the past: a “mummy”, according to Chopin, or even an “extinct volcano” (Mendelssohn). But to the likes of Beethoven and Schumann and many others, he was the greatest living composer of their age. At around this time Beethoven would write gushingly to him, “I honour and love you… you for ever remain of all my contemporaries the one whom I esteem the most.” Many nineteenth century musicians and musicologists would share Beethoven’s sentiments.
So who exactly was Cherubini?
He was certainly a man of considerable charisma, an Italian émigré who had made Revolutionary France his home, a man who had stood up to Napoleon, an artist who had suffered many setbacks in his career (partly down to his uncompromising integrity), and whose creative spirit had for a time been almost completely crushed in middle age. He was one of life’s great survivors and many would recognize in him – and in his music – a granite resilience, as strong and solid as one of the pillars in the Duomo di Firenze, the great Gothic cathedral in the city of his birth.
He was a near exact contemporary of Mozart but would outlive him by half a century. His compositions spread across a seventy-year period. Although he never embraced the new Romantic sensibilities of the early nineteenth century (such a thing would have been foreign to his nature), yet his early training in Renaissance and Baroque counterpoint allowed him to the create the highly elaborate, monumental sound-worlds of his mature sacred music. Dismissed by some as old-fashioned, it was these very same pre-Classical elements which would greatly appeal to the likes of Beethoven and Schumann, as well as a new generation (both Brahms and Wagner were later big fans). Even Mendelssohn would have to concede that the “extinct volcano” was still throwing out “flashes and sparks” in old age.
Life to begin with had been relatively easy for Cherubini. Growing up in Florence, he received his first music lessons from his father, a professional harpsichord player, and the boy’s talent was soon evident. By the age of 13 he had already composed several sacred works. Five years later a local duke offered him a pension to further his education in Bologna and Milan.
Cherubini had by now worked out that he wanted to write for the stage and not church. But he found the Italian opera scene unsympathetic to his artistic aims and therefore went abroad to seek work as soon as he was able, firstly to London and then to Paris in 1786. He would settle more or less permanently in the French capital for the rest of his life.
After an influential friend had introduced him to Marie Antoinette, Cherubini initially directed an Italian opera company set up in the city by the queen’s hairdresser. All went well until the Revolution came and swept all before it. Cherubini survived the country’s violent changes, if at times only just. For two years he was forced to live in an obscure corner of the French countryside. Then, with many of the main theatres shut in Paris, his works were performed for many years in much smaller, sometimes inadequate venues.
These were his peak years as an opera composer, even as they were also some of his most frustrating. Alongside his close friend, Etienne Méhul – and following in the example of Christoph Willibald Gluck – he wanted to create a more serious and integrated form of opéra-comique, cutting down on spoken dialogue, enhancing the dramatic roles of both chorus and orchestra, and making increasing use of recurring “reminiscence” motifs, where a certain theme provides a link to an earlier event.
Some consider Cherubini’s Lodoïska (1791), his second French-language opera, to be one of the earliest Romantic operas – though mainly for its subject matter rather than musical style. Containing speeches about liberty, justice and humanity, and a storyline based around a grand melodramatic “rescue” (an increasingly popular theme in the supposed liberating aftermath of the French Revolution), the opera was well-received and ran for more two hundred performances.
Cherubini’s harvest of stage writing would peak with Les Deux Journées (1800), which many consider to be his greatest opera. With another audience-pleasing story (depicting ordinary people standing up to a repressive, tax-imposing tyranny), Les Deux Journées would also directly inspire Beethoven’s opera Fidelio five years later (Beethoven is said to have kept copies of Cherubini’s score on his desk and sometimes even copied out passages).
Despite the critical acclaim of his stage-works, Cherubini’s life and career were becoming a deepening struggle. He was tainted by his past royal connections and regarded with suspicion by the new regime. Cherubini was never a man to be impressed by social rank (when later running the Paris Conservatoire, he would vigorously tick off some royal representatives who had arrived late for a ceremony). His inability to show due deference would cause immediate problems with France’s new emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. In one of their first meetings, Napoleon ventured a light criticism of one of Cherubini’s operas, to which the latter replied, “your Majesty knows no more about it than I about a battle.” On another occasion, Cherubini could barely hide his contempt when Napoleon voiced his partiality towards two minor light opera composers of the day. When Napoleon explained that he liked cheerful, undemanding music, Cherubini replied, “yes I understand, Citoyen Général – you want music that won’t keep you from thinking about affairs of state.”
Napoleon did not forget this subtle put-down, and for the rest of his reign made sure Cherubini never occupied any important official positions in France – something that frustrated the composer both personally and financially, not least as he now had a wife and young family to support. When Cherubini’s own operas began to go out of fashion in the early 1800s, he fell into a deep slump. He was now in his mid-forties and his career appeared to be going nowhere.
His depression became so bad that he eventually gave up composing entirely. Subsisting on a little teaching, and a (then) menial administrative role at the Paris Conservatoire, he turned to painting and botany for a few years. Every day he would visit the famous Jardin des Plantes in Paris. At one point he ended up staying at the chateau of his friend, the Prince of Chimay (and his wife). During the day he painted, gardened and took restorative walks in the surrounding parklands. But then a local village church in the area heard the composer was in town and asked him to write them a mass.
Cherubini at first refused adamantly – “no, it’s impossible!” he responded, declared the matter closed and went back to tending his flowers. The next day, Madame Chimay noticed Cherubini taking an unusually long walk, as if thinking matters over, and discreetly set out some music paper on his writing desk. On his return, and without another word, Cherubini set to work on sketching out the mass, only breaking off from time to time to play billiards in an adjoining games room. Somehow the distraction of the billiards room became vital to the creation of the mass – and to the re-birth of Cherubini the composer. The resultant Mass in F Major (also known as Messe de Chimay) was a great success at its first performance, kick-starting the second (and arguably) greater part of Cherubini’s career. He was then almost fifty years old.
Further masses and a Missa Solemnis would follow, all leading up to Cherubini’s crowning achievement in sacred music, his 1816 Requiem, written to commemorate the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution in 1793. It is one of his very finest works, drawing on all his experience of operatic drama and pre-Classical counterpoint: Beethoven thought the work superior to the Mozart Requiem and asked for it to be performed at his own funeral. Schumann described it as “without equal in the world” and even Berlioz declared that certain passages in the work surpassed “anything that has ever been written of the kind.”
His powerful Marche Funèbre from 1820 is a work closely associated with the 1816 Requiem – indeed, Cherubini himself sometimes used it as an introduction to Requiem performances. With its majestic flourishes and anguished dissonances, repeatedly interrupted by drum-rolls and crashing tam-tams, this is a highly emotive type of death-march. As a musical icon of ceremonial grief, the piece has a passing similarity to the opening of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, written some 125 years earlier in London. In Cherubini’s case, the music was composed in commemoration of a member of the royal Bourbon family who had been murdered outside a Parisian opera house.
With the French monarchy having been now restored after the fall of Napoleon, the once struggling Cherubini would be positively feted with France’s highest honours during his last years. By the time he became director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1822, he was country’s most famous composer and very much an establishment figure.
Aside from his devotion to the Conservatoire (where his draconian ways were usually tempered with an ability to know when to be flexible), he kept himself very busy, well into old age. He composed yet more sacred music and turned, with surprising assurance, to writing string quartets. Having learned that the church authorities disapproved of the female voices in his own Requiem, Cherubini stoically wrote another (in D Minor) at the age of 76 for men only. He died six years later in his wife’s arms and surrounded by his family. The second Requiem was premiered at his own funeral, according to his wishes.