Great Italian and French Composers 29 – Ferris · Verses Across
Literature · Music
Great Italian and French Composers 29Part 5 · Chapter 8
18
Literature · Music
Great Italian and French Composers 29
Part 5 · Chapter 8
FerrisEnglish
As a man Cherubini presented himself in many different aspects. Extremely nervous, brusque, irritable, and absolutely independent, he was apt to offend and repel. But under his stern reserve of character there beat a warm heart and generous sympathies. This is shown by the fact that, in spite of the unevenness of his temper, he was almost worshiped by those around him. Auber, Halevy, Berton, Boieldieu, Mehul, Spontini, and Adam, who were so intimately associated with him, speak of him with words of the warmest affection. Halevy, indeed, rarely alluded to him without tears rushing to his eyes; and the slightest term of disrespect excited his warmest indignation. It is recorded that, after rebuking a pupil with sarcastic severity, his fine face would relax with a smile so affectionate and genial that his whilom victim could feel nothing but enthusiastic respect. Without one taint of envy in his nature, conscious of his own extraordinary powers, he was quick to recognize genius in others; and his hearty praise of the powers of his rivals shows how sound and generous the heart was under his irritability. His proneness to satire and power of epigram made him enemies, but even these yielded to the suavity and fascination which alternated with his bitter moods. His sympathies were peculiarly open for young musicians. Mendelssohn and Liszt were stimulated by his warm and encouraging praise when they first visited Paris; and even Berlioz, whose turbulent conduct in the Conservatory had so embittered him at various times, was heartily applauded when his first great mass was produced. Arnold gives us the following pleasant picture of Cherubini:
"Cherubini in society was outwardly silent, modest, unassuming, pleasing, obliging, and possessed of the finest manners. At the same time, he who did not know that he was with Cherubini would think him stern and reserved, so well did the composer know how to conceal everything, if only to avoid ostentation. He truly shunned brag or speaking of himself. Cherubini's voice was feeble, probably from narrow-chestedness, and somewhat hoarse, but was otherwise soft and agreeable. His French was Italianized.... His head was bent forward, his nose was large and aquiline; his eyebrows were thick, black, and somewhat bushy, overshadowing his eyes. His eyes were dark, and glittered with an extraordinary brilliancy that animated in a wonderful way the whole face. A thin lock of hair came over the center of his forehead, and somehow gave to his countenance a peculiar softness."
The picture painted by Ingres, the great artist, now in the Luxembourg gallery, represents the composer with Polyhymnia in the background stretching out her hand over him. His face, framed in waving silvery hair, is full of majesty and brightness, and the eye of piercing luster. Cherubini was so gratified by this effort of the painter that he sent him a beautiful canon set to wrords of his own. Thus his latter years were spent in the society of the great artists and wits of Paris, revered by all, and recognized, after Beethoven's death, as the musical giant of Europe. Rossini, Meyerbeer, Weber, Schumann--in a word, the representatives of the most diverse schools of composition--bowed equally before this great name. Rossini, who was his antipodes in genius and method, felt his loss bitterly, and after his death sent Cherubini's portrait to his widow with these touching words: "Here, my dear madam, is the portrait of a great man, who is as young in your heart as he is in my mind."
Actively engaged as Director of the Conservatory, which he governed with consummate ability, his old age was further employed in producing that series of great masses which rank with the symphonies of Beethoven. His creative instinct and the fire of his imagination remained unimpaired to the time of his death. Mendelssohn in a letter to Moscheles speaks of him as "that truly wonderful old man, whose genius seems bathed in immortal youth." His opera of "Ali Baba," composed at seventy-six, though inferior to his other dramatic works, is full of beautiful and original music, and was immediately produced in several of the principal capitals of Europe; and the second Requiem mass, written in his eightieth year, is one of his masterpieces.
On the 12th of March, 1842, the old composer died, surrounded by his affectionate family and friends. His fatal illness had been brought on in part by grief for the death of his son-in-law, M. Tureas, to whom he was most tenderly attached. His funeral was one of great military and civic magnificence, and royalty itself could not have been honored with more splendid obsequies. The congregation of men great in arms and state, in music, painting, and literature, who did honor to the occasion, has rarely been equaled. His own noble Requiem mass, composed the year before his death, was given at the funeral services in the church of St. Roch by the finest orchestra and voices in Europe. Similar services were held throughout Europe, and everywhere the opera-houses were draped in black. Perhaps the death of no musician ever called forth such universal exhibitions of sorrow and reverence.
Cherubini's life extended from the early part of the reign of Louis XVI. to that of Louis Philippe, and was contemporaneous with many of the most remarkable events in modern history. The energy and passion which convulsed society during his youth and early manhood undoubtedly had much to do in stimulating that robust and virile quality in his mind which gave such character to his compositions. The fecundity of his intellect is shown in the fact that he produced four hundred and thirty works, out of which only eighty have been published. In this catalogue there are twenty-five operas and eleven masses.
As an operatic composer he laid the foundation of the modern French school. Uniting the melody of the Italian with the science of the German, his conceptions had a dramatic fire and passion which were, however, free from anything appertaining to the sensational and meretricious. His forms were indeed classically severe, and his style is defined by Adolphe Adam as the resurrection of the old Italian school, enriched by the discoveries of modern harmony. Though he was the creator of French opera as we know it now, he was free from its vagaries and extravagances. He set its model in the dramatic vigor and picturesqueness, the clean-cut forms, and the noble instrumentation which mark such masterpieces as "Faniska," "Aledee," "Les Deux Journees," and "Lodoiska." The purity, classicism, and wealth of ideas in these works have always caused them to be cited as standards of ideal excellence. The reforms in opera of which Gluck was the protagonist, and Wagner the extreme modern exponent, characterize the dramatic works of Cherubini, though he keeps them within that artistic limit which a proper regard for melodic beauty prescribes. In the power and propriety of musical declamation his operas are conceded to be without a superior. His overtures hold their place in classical music as ranking with the best ever written, and show a richness of resource and knowledge of form in treating the orchestra which his his contemporaries admitted were only equaled by Beethoven.
Cherubini's place in ecclesiastical music is that by which he is best known to the musical public of to-day; for his operas, owing to the immense demands they make on the dramatic and vocal resources of the artist, are but rarely presented in France, Germany, and England, and never in America. They are only given where music is loved on account of its noble traditions, and not for the mere sake of idle and luxurious amusement. As a composer of masses, however, Cherubini's genius is familiar to all who frequent the services of the Roman Church. His relation to the music of Catholicism accords with that of Sebastian Bach to the music of Protestantism. Haydn, Mozart, and even Beethoven, are held by the best critics to be his inferiors in this form of composition. His richness of melody, sense of dramatic color, and great command of orchestral effects, gave him commanding power in the interpretation of religious sentiments; while an ardent faith inspired with passion, sweetness, and devotion what Place styles his "sublime visions." Miel, one of his most competent critics, writes of him in this eloquent strain: "If he represents the passion and death of Christ, the heart feels itself wounded with the most sublime emotion; and when he recounts the 'Last Judgment' the blood freezes with dread at the redoubled and menacing calls of the exterminating angel. All those admirable pictures that the Raphaels and Michael Angelos have painted with colors and the brush, Cherubini brings forth with the voice and orchestra." In brief, if Cherubini is the founder of a later school of opera, and the model which his successors have always honored and studied if they have not always followed, no less is he the chief of a later, and by common consent the greatest, school of modern church music.
