Tone Poem Tuesday

Luigi Cherubini is a composer with whom I am almost completely unfamiliar, except by reputation…and that reputation is via the impressions left behind by another composer with whom I am very familiar. Unfortunately for Cherubini, that composer is Hector Berlioz, who found Cherubini a conservative and pedantic obstacle in his youthful efforts to pursue his own philosophies of music and composition during his time at the Paris Conservatoire.

Now, how accurate Berlioz’s feelings about Cherubini might have been is an open question, as frankly is how accurate Berlioz’s depictions of those feelings in his Memoirs might have been. It seems likely that the two were in fact in conflict, and that Cherubini did in fact find this young and arrogant composer-in-waiting too brash and his music too harsh and unfocused. Those charges are not entirely unfair, after all, when one has listened to the early output of Berlioz, and when one has read a bit about the details of his life.

Cherubini was essentially a classicist, living as he did during the shift from music’s Classical era into the Romantic, and he is one of those figures who is not performed a great deal today, perhaps a bit unfairly; if his music presents certain challenges to contemporary ears, there is still reward to be found within, as Cherubini’s Classical influence can still be detected in Berlioz, who for all his bombast still preferred a degree of balance in his eruptions (Berlioz loved Gluck, for example), and surely a composer shouldn’t be relegated to second-rate status if he was counted as an influence by the likes of Beethoven and Rossini.

Cherubini’s opera-ballet Anacreon premiered in 1803 (the year of Berlioz’s birth!), whereupon it was greeted with complete indifference. The work failed utterly, likely due to the story (about the love life of a Greek poet) being completely out of style at the time, and from what I can tell, the work was pretty much forgotten entirely until the 1970s when it was finally recorded. The overture, however, did survive, being praised by many composers (including Berlioz!) and basically being one of the few pieces to keep Cherubini’s name alive into the 21st century. The overture is thrilling and lyrical in the best “classical” way (meaning in the manner of the Classical era), and listening to it now I find myself slotting it, stylistically, into exactly where it goes: between, say, the overtures of The Magic Flute and Der Freischutz. Chronologically, that’s pretty much where it falls, too.

Here is the Overture to Anacreon by Luigi Cherubini.