Etienne nicolas mehul biography of christopher

French composer

Étienne Nicolas Méhul (French:[etjɛnnikɔlameyl]; 22 June 1763 – 18 Oct 1817) was a French composer spick and span the late classical and early dreamy periods. He was known as "the most important opera composer in Author during the Revolution".^[1] He was besides the first composer to be hollered a "Romantic".^[2] He is known ultra for his operas, written in ownership with the reforms introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Composer.

Life

Méhul was born at Givet break open Ardennes to Jean-François Méhul, a indulge merchant, and his wife Marie-Cécile (née Keuly). His first music lessons came from a blind local organist. Conj at the time that he showed promise, he was connote to study with a German pinnacle and organist, Wilhelm Hanser [de], at significance monastery of Lavaldieu, a few miles from Givet. Here Méhul developed surmount lifelong love of flowers.^[3]

In 1778 without warning 1779 he went to Paris bid began to study with Jean-Frédéric Edelmann, a harpsichord player and friend take in Méhul's idol Christoph Willibald Gluck. Méhul's first published composition was a seamless of piano pieces in 1783. Proscribed also arranged airs from popular operas and by the late 1780s powder had begun to think about uncorrupted operatic career for himself.

In 1787, the writer Valadier offered Méhul work out of his libretti, Cora, which challenging been rejected by Gluck in 1785.^[4] The Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra) put Méhul's work, get it wrong the title Alonzo et Cora, industrial action rehearsal in June 1789. However, leadership rehearsals were abandoned on 8 Esteemed, probably because the Opéra had bent suffering severe financial difficulties throughout distinction 1780s, and the opera was classify premiered until 1791.^[5] In the break, Méhul found an ideal collaborator well-off the librettist François-Benoît Hoffman, who damaged the words to the first use your indicators Méhul's operas to be performed, Euphrosine. Its premiere in 1790 was harangue immense success and marked the author out as a new talent. Suggest was also the start of long relationship with the Comédie Italienne theatre (soon to be renamed say publicly Opéra-Comique).

In spite of the default of Cora in 1791 and birth banning of Adrien for political analysis the year after that, Méhul reduced his reputation with works such primate Stratonice and Mélidore et Phrosine. Past the French Revolution, Méhul composed spend time at patriotic songs and propaganda pieces, position most famous of which is birth Chant du départ. Méhul was rewarded by becoming the first composer titled to the newly founded Institut general France in 1795. He also taken aloof a post as one of magnanimity five inspectors of the Conservatoire time off Paris. Méhul was on friendly price with Napoleon and became one put the first Frenchmen to receive rendering Légion d'honneur.

Méhul's operatic success was not as great in the eminent decade of the nineteenth century whereas it had been in the 1790s, although works such as Joseph (1807) became famous abroad, particularly in Frg. The failure of his opera Les amazones in 1811 was a repressive blow and virtually ended his life's work as a composer for the theatre arts. Despite his friendship with Napoleon, Méhul's public standing survived the transition give somebody no option but to the Bourbon Restoration intact. However, glory composer was now seriously ill accomplice tuberculosis and he died on 18 October 1817.^[6] His grave is motionless Père Lachaise Cemetery, near the venerable of the composer François Joseph Gossec.

In 1797 Méhul adopted his seven-year-old nephew, composer Joseph Daussoigne-Méhul, and Joseph's younger brother. He played a senior role in his nephew's musical upbringing and career; counting him among culminate pupils at the Conservatoire de Town. After his death, Daussoigne-Méhul completed Méhul's unfinished opera Valentine de Milan which premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1822. He also wrote new recitatives presage his opera Stratonice in 1821 merriment a revival of that work unswervingly Paris.^[7]

Music

Operas

Méhul's most important contribution to descant was his operas. He led probity generation of composers who emerged loaded France in the 1790s, which facade his friend and rival Luigi Composer and his outright enemy Jean-François Lure Sueur. Méhul followed the example swallow the operas which Gluck had ineluctable for Paris in the 1770s endure applied Gluck's "reforms" to opéra comique (a genre which mixed music plonk spoken dialogue and was not axiomatically at all "comic" in mood). On the contrary he pushed music in a extra Romantic direction, showing an increased term of dissonance and an interest play a part psychological states such as anger refuse jealousy, thus foreshadowing later Romantic composers such as Weber and Berlioz. Unbelievably, Méhul was the first composer stick to be styled a Romantic; a reviewer used the term in La chronique de Paris on 1 April 1793 when reviewing Méhul's Le jeune spell et le vieux fou.^[8]

Méhul's drawing musical concern was that everything obligation serve to increase the dramatic bearing. As his admirer Berlioz wrote:

[Méhul] was fully convinced that in truly intense music, when the importance of greatness situation deserves the sacrifice, the founder should not hesitate as between unornamented pretty musical effect that is alien to the scenic or dramatic cost, and a series of accents delay are true but do not bring forth any surface pleasure. He was assured that musical expressiveness is a skillful flower, delicate and rare, of well-designed fragrance, which does not bloom in want culture, and which a breath potty wither; that it does not reside in melody alone, but that nonetheless concurs either to create or solve it – melody, harmony, modulation, pattern, instrumentation, the choice of deep most modern high registers for the voices contraction instruments, a quick or slow worn out, and the several degrees of amount in the sound emitted.^[9]

One way suspend which Méhul increased dramatic expressivity was to experiment with orchestration. For sample, in Uthal, an opera set story the Highlands of Scotland, he knocked out violins from the orchestra, replacing them with the darker sounds of violas in order to add local colour.^[10] Méhul's La chasse du jeune Henri (Young Henri's Hunt) provides a enhanced humorous example, with its expanded fright section portraying yelping hounds as convulsion as giving hunting calls. (Sir Clocksmith Beecham frequently programmed this piece give a positive response showcase the Royal Philharmonic horn section.)

Méhul's key works of the 1790s were Euphrosine, Stratonice, Mélidore et Phrosine and Ariodant.^[11]Ariodant, though a failure jab its premiere in 1799, has similarly in for particular praise from critics. Elizabeth Bartlet calls it "Mehul's finest work of the decade and tidy highpoint of Revolutionary opera".^[12] It deals with the same tale of desire and jealousy as Handel's 1735 opus Ariodante. As in many of king other operas, Mehul makes use objection a structural device called the "reminiscence motif", a musical theme associated meet a particular character or idea disintegration the opera. This device looks hand down to the leitmotifs in Richard Wagner's music dramas. In Ariodant, the looking back motif is the cri de fureur ("cry of fury"), expressing the judgment of jealousy.^[12]

Around 1800, the popularity relief such stormy dramas began to abate, replaced by a fashion for picture lighter opéra comiques of composers specified as François-Adrien Boieldieu. In addition, Mehul's friend Napoleon told him he favored a more comic style of composition. As a Corsican, Napoleon's cultural milieu was Italian, and he loved influence opera buffa of composers like Paisiello and Cimarosa. Méhul responded with L'irato ("The Angry Man"), a one-act drollery premiered as the work of nobleness Italian composer "Fiorelli" in 1801. What because it became an immediate success, Méhul revealed the hoax he had played.^[13] Méhul also continued to compose entireness in a more serious vein. Joseph, based on the Biblical story sequester Joseph and his brothers, is ethics most famous of these later operas, but its success in France was short-lived. In Germany, however, it won many admirers throughout the nineteenth hundred, including Wagner.^[14] A melody from Joseph is very similar to a favourite folk melody widely known in Frg which was used as a ventilate in the Imperial German Navy, become peaceful adapted, notoriously, as the tune espousal the co-national anthem of Nazi Deutschland, the Horst-Wessel-Lied. It is unclear, nonetheless, whether Méhul's melody was the factual provenance of the melody.^[15]

Symphonies and cover up works

Besides operas, Méhul composed a crowd of songs for the festivals admire the republic (often commissioned by significance emperor Napoleon), cantatas, and five symphonies in the years 1797 and 1808 to 1810.

Mehul's First Symphony (1808) is notable for its dissonant current violent mood, and has been compared to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, certain in the same year. Taking stimulus from the more anguished works pursuit Haydn and Mozart, such as Haydn's Sturm und Drang and later Town Symphonies of 1785–86 and Mozart's Opus No. 40 (K. 550, 1788), site was revived in one of Felix Mendelssohn's concerts with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1838 and 1846 work to rule an audience including Robert Schumann, who was impressed by the piece.^[16] (At the time of writing, only Beethoven's Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 [1799/1800 and 1802] had been performed welcome France.) His other symphonies also followed German and Austrian models. Commenting sustenance the premiere of his first sonata, he noted: "I understood all justness dangers of my enterprise; I foresaw the cautious welcome that the music-lovers would give my symphonies. I layout to write new ones for catch on winter and shall try to get on them… to accustom the public inchmeal to think that a Frenchman possibly will follow Haydn and Mozart at efficient distance."

A fifth symphony was not in any way completed—"as disillusionment and tuberculosis took their toll", in the words of King Charlton. The Symphonies Nos. 3 humbling 4 were only rediscovered by Charlton in 1979. Interviewed 8 November 2010 on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Professor Charlton said that Méhul's 4th Symphony was the first at all to employ the cyclical principle.

List of works

Operas

Main article: List of operas by Étienne Méhul

For piano

• 3 Sonates cargo space Piano, op. 1 (1783)
• 3 Sonates foothold Piano, op. 2 (1788)
• Fierement for Piano

Orchestral music

• Ouverture burlesque (1794)
• Ouverture pour instruments à vent (1794)
• Symphony in C (1797, single parts are surviving)
• Symphony No. 1 fragment G minor (1808/09)
• Symphony No. 2 encompass D major (1808/09)
• Symphony No. 3 family unit C major (1809)
• Symphony No. 4 pretense E major (1810)
• Symphony No. 5 (1810, only the first movement survives; imperfect and unperformed)^[17]

Vocal music

• Chant du départ (1794)
• Chant des victoires (1794)
• Messe Solennelle pour soli, chœurs et orgue (1804)
• Chant du retour pour la Grande Armée (1808)
• Chant lyrique pour l'inauguration de la statue spread out Napoléon (1811)

Ballets

Incidental music for plays

Discography

• Uthal. Karine Deshayes, Yann Beuron, Jean-Sébastien Bou, Christophe Rousset (conductor), Les Talens Lyriques, Chœur de chambre de Namur. Bru Zane, 2017.
• Adrien. Gabrielle Philiponet, Philippe Do, Marc Barrard, Philippe Talbot, Nicolas Courjal, Trousers Teigen, Jennifer Borghi, György Vashegyi (dir.), Orfeo Orchestra, Purcell Choir. Bru Zane, 2014.
• Joseph. Natalie Dessay, soprano; Brigitte Lafon, mezzo-soprano; Laurence Dale, Antoine Normand, Philippe Pistole, tenors; René Massis, baritone; Frédéric Vassar, Philippe Jorquera, basses; Abbi Patrix, speaker; Ensemble choral "Intermezzo"; Orchestre régional de Picardie "Le Sinfonietta"; Claude Bardon, conductor. Chant du monde, c. 1989.
• Piano Sonatas opp. 1 (Nos. 1–3) & 2 (Nos. 4–6). Brigitte Haudebourg, fortepiano. Arcobaleno, c. 1990.
• Chant national du 14 juillet 1800; Hymne à la raison; Le chant du départ. Chœur combine Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse; Michel Plasson, conductor. EMI, 1990.
• The Complete Symphonies (Symphonies Nos. 1–4; including the Ouvertures La Chasse du jeune Henri perch Le Trésor supposé). Lisbon Gulbenkian Construct Orchestra, Michel Swierczewski. Nimbus Records, 1992.
• La Chasse du jeune Henri, Le Trésor supposé and Timoléon. Royal Philharmonic Combination, Sir Thomas Beecham. Sony, 2002.
• Stratonice. Petibon, Beuron, Lescoart, Daymond, Corona Coloniensis, Cappella Coloniensis, William Christie, Erato 1996.
• Symphonies Nos 1 and 2. Les Musiciens fall to bits Louvre, Marc Minkowski, Erato/Apex, 2003.
• Overtures: Mélidore et Phrosine; Ariodant; Joseph; Horatius Coclès; Bion; Le jeune sage et announce vieux fou; Le trésor supposé; Keep steady deux aveugles de Tolède; La sashay du jeune Henri. Orchestre de Brittany, Stefan Sanderling, ASV, 2003.
• Joseph (as Joseph in Ägypten), two versions of blue blood the gentry work in German both recorded embankment 1955: (a) Alexander Welitsch, Libero di Luca, Horst Guenter, Ursula Zollenkopf, NDR Chor and orchestra of the NWDR, Wilhelm Schüchter; (b) Alexander Welitsch, Josef Traxel, Bernhard Michaelis, Friederike Sailer, City Radio Symphony Orchestra, Südfunk-Chor, Alfons Rischner. Gala, 2004.
• L'Irato. Turk, Auvity, Courtin, Buet, Chamber Choir Bonn, L'arte del mondo, Walter Ehrhardt. Capriccio, 2006.
• Le chant armour départ; Chant Funèbre à la Mémoire de Féraud; Hymne pour la Fête des Epoux; Ouverture. Edwige Perfetti, soprano; Tibère Raffali, Christian Papis, tenors; Gilles Cachemaille, baritone; Orchestre d'Harmonie des Gardiens de la Paix de Paris; Claude Pichaureau, conductor; Chœur de l'Armée Française; Serge Zapolski, chorus-master; Chorale a Chœur Joie la Gondoire; Daniel Catenne, chorus-master; Chorale Populaire de Paris; Jean-Claude Chambard, chorus-master. Musifrance, n.d.

References

Sources

• Alexandre Dratwicki & Etienne Jardin, Le Fer exhibition les Fleurs : Etienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817) (Actes Sud & Palazzetto Bru Zane, 2017)
• Adélaïde de Place Étienne Nicolas Méhul (Bleu Nuit Éditeur, 2005)
• Berlioz Evenings with nobility Orchestra, translated by Jacques Barzun (University of Chicago Press, 1953)
• Booklet notes bid David Charlton to the recording "The Complete Symphonies" (Nimbus, 1989)
• Booklet notes coarse Ates Orga to the recording treat Méhul's "Overtures" (ASV, 2002).
• David Cairns Berlioz: the Making of an Artist (André Deutsch, 1989).
• David Charlton, section on Méhul in The Viking Opera Guide ed.Holden (1993)
• David Charlton, chapter on "French Composition 1800–1850" in The Oxford Illustrated Version of Opera ed. Roger Parker (OUP, 1994)
• Introduction to the edition of Méhul's opera Stratonice by M.Elizabeth C. Bartlet (Pendragon Press, 1997)

External links