You may be wondering at this time why I used images of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Versailles, and the Guillotine for my mockups.
The reason is that Cherubini's Requiem in C Minor was commissioned by King Charles X to commemorate the execution of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution on January 21, 1793.
The Requiem was performed in the Basilica of Saint Denis near Paris, where most of the French Kings are buried, and the ashes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were transferred there on January 21, 1816.
It has been performed on the same date nearly every year since, in Saint Denis and other locations, in a Celebratory Mass attended by famous French "royalists" (including various Bourbon "heirs" to the long defunct "throne".of France), as well as throngs of royal nostalgia kooks... A bit of a Carnaval Show unfortunately.
Yet, very few today have heard of Cherubini or his Requiem, nor of his thirty Operas and other works...
Beethoven won the grand prize of Eternal Fame, and justly so if you ask me. And we will get to hear the Fifth just before Cherubini's Requiem next year, with hopefully projected views of the conductor and the orchestra never seen before in such detail and from such angles...
Cherubini indeed composed beautiful music, and was no doubt a wonderful technician, but he was stuck in a time warp and stubbornly refused to even consider any changes to what he learned as a child prodigy from his Italian Masters of counterpoint in the 1770's.
Cherubini was in attendance for the first performances of Beethoven's opera Fidelio, to which he reacted sneeringly.
He also described Beethoven's piano style as "rough", and more famously the man himself as "an unlicked bear cub". It is remarkable, therefore, that Beethoven, normally so quick to take offence, named Cherubini as the greatest contemporary composer other than himself(!!!).
His students at the Paris Conservatory in the 1820's and 30's had to follow his staid regulations, and young up and coming innovators like Berlioz resented his conservative rules, and his rigid devotion to "by the book" (HIS book) Counterpoint and Fugue.
I will copy a couple of citations that, though admitedly extremely judgmental and quite nasty, probably give a pretty good idea of the kind of man he probably was:
"If his melodic invention had been as warm as Gluck's, his immensely superior technique in every branch of the art would have made him one of the greatest composers that ever lived. But his personal character shows in quaint exaggeration the same asceticism that in less sour and more negative form deprives even his finest music of the glow of that lofty inspiration that fears nothing."
"It is too much to expect that the mighty genius of Beethoven, which broke through all rules in vindication of the principles underlying them, would be comprehensible to a mind like Cherubini's, in which, while the creative faculties were finely developed, the critical faculty was atrophied and its place supplied by a mere disciplinary code inadequate even as a basis for the analysis of his own works.
However, one has to admit most of his music sounds quite good, if somewhat uninspired, definitely lacking the originality of a Mozart, a Beethoven, or even a Vivaldi in my book.
I am neither a musician nor a musicologist, just a guy that was raised on "classical music" in the 50's and 60's, and kept listening to it all day every day for more than forty years. I am using the term "classical music" very loosely, including in it anterior Baroque Music, even down to Early and Renaissance music, and the posterior Romantic Era, and Modern Music. I didn't catch on to most of the more recent HighModern and Contemporary "experiments", and things stop for me with Satie, Ravel, Chabrier, Carl Orff, Debussy, Copeland, Gershwin, Villa Lobos, Albeniz, Piazzolla, Bernstein...
Sorry Carlos, Ginastera didn't make my list...
My favorite contemporary composer is a nearly unknown Belgian genius called Nicholas Lens. Unfortunately, I like his work less and less as he evolves over the years, and still prefer by far his first two Oratorios: Flamma Flamma and Terra Terra. I would love for the ASO to tackle these some day...
The reason is that Cherubini's Requiem in C Minor was commissioned by King Charles X to commemorate the execution of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution on January 21, 1793.
The Requiem was performed in the Basilica of Saint Denis near Paris, where most of the French Kings are buried, and the ashes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were transferred there on January 21, 1816.
It has been performed on the same date nearly every year since, in Saint Denis and other locations, in a Celebratory Mass attended by famous French "royalists" (including various Bourbon "heirs" to the long defunct "throne".of France), as well as throngs of royal nostalgia kooks... A bit of a Carnaval Show unfortunately.
Yet, very few today have heard of Cherubini or his Requiem, nor of his thirty Operas and other works...
Beethoven won the grand prize of Eternal Fame, and justly so if you ask me. And we will get to hear the Fifth just before Cherubini's Requiem next year, with hopefully projected views of the conductor and the orchestra never seen before in such detail and from such angles...
Cherubini indeed composed beautiful music, and was no doubt a wonderful technician, but he was stuck in a time warp and stubbornly refused to even consider any changes to what he learned as a child prodigy from his Italian Masters of counterpoint in the 1770's.
Cherubini was in attendance for the first performances of Beethoven's opera Fidelio, to which he reacted sneeringly.
He also described Beethoven's piano style as "rough", and more famously the man himself as "an unlicked bear cub". It is remarkable, therefore, that Beethoven, normally so quick to take offence, named Cherubini as the greatest contemporary composer other than himself(!!!).
His students at the Paris Conservatory in the 1820's and 30's had to follow his staid regulations, and young up and coming innovators like Berlioz resented his conservative rules, and his rigid devotion to "by the book" (HIS book) Counterpoint and Fugue.
I will copy a couple of citations that, though admitedly extremely judgmental and quite nasty, probably give a pretty good idea of the kind of man he probably was:
"If his melodic invention had been as warm as Gluck's, his immensely superior technique in every branch of the art would have made him one of the greatest composers that ever lived. But his personal character shows in quaint exaggeration the same asceticism that in less sour and more negative form deprives even his finest music of the glow of that lofty inspiration that fears nothing."
"It is too much to expect that the mighty genius of Beethoven, which broke through all rules in vindication of the principles underlying them, would be comprehensible to a mind like Cherubini's, in which, while the creative faculties were finely developed, the critical faculty was atrophied and its place supplied by a mere disciplinary code inadequate even as a basis for the analysis of his own works.
However, one has to admit most of his music sounds quite good, if somewhat uninspired, definitely lacking the originality of a Mozart, a Beethoven, or even a Vivaldi in my book.
I am neither a musician nor a musicologist, just a guy that was raised on "classical music" in the 50's and 60's, and kept listening to it all day every day for more than forty years. I am using the term "classical music" very loosely, including in it anterior Baroque Music, even down to Early and Renaissance music, and the posterior Romantic Era, and Modern Music. I didn't catch on to most of the more recent HighModern and Contemporary "experiments", and things stop for me with Satie, Ravel, Chabrier, Carl Orff, Debussy, Copeland, Gershwin, Villa Lobos, Albeniz, Piazzolla, Bernstein...
Sorry Carlos, Ginastera didn't make my list...
My favorite contemporary composer is a nearly unknown Belgian genius called Nicholas Lens. Unfortunately, I like his work less and less as he evolves over the years, and still prefer by far his first two Oratorios: Flamma Flamma and Terra Terra. I would love for the ASO to tackle these some day...
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