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Marmontel had furnished the libretto of an opera to Cherubini, and the composer shortly after his return from Turin to Paris had it produced at the Royal Academy of Music. Vogel's opera on the same text, "Demophon," was also brought out, but neither one met with great success. Cherubini's work, though full of vigor and force, wanted color and dramatic point.
Several years of hard work and bitter privation finally culminated in the acceptance of an opera, "La Famille Suisse," at the Théâtre Faydeau in 1796, where it was given on alternate nights with Cherubini's "Médée."
Night came; and after paying a hasty visit to the zoological garden, where all the animals were asleep, except a dozen long-tailed paroquets and cockatoos, who were screaming from their perches, pluming themselves, and raising their crests, I returned to my hotel to strap my trunk and betake myself to the Hamburg railway station, as the train would leave at ten, a circumstance which prevented me from going, as I had intended, to the opera to hear Cherubini's "Deux Journées," and to see Louise Taglioni dance the Sevillana....
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.
At a performance in her own house, where the choruses from Cherubini's Water-Carrier were given, she herself had rehearsed the music with those who were to take part, and to hear her play on the piano was a treat. This lady, a remarkable woman in every respect, who gave me many tokens of maternal affection, insisted on the right to warn me.
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