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Updated: June 15, 2025
I found out also where the printer's son, who had married Barbaruccia, lived, but I put off the pleasure of seeing him till another time, and also my visit to the Reverend Father Georgi, who was a man of great repute in Rome. Gaspar Vivaldi had gone into the country. My brother took me to Madame Cherubini. I found her mansion to be a splendid one, and the lady welcomed me in the Roman manner.
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.
Cherubini kept in the background, when the sarcasm, "I do not see Monsieur Cherubini," pronounced in the French way, as if to indicate that Cherubini was not worthy of being ranked with the Italian composers, brought him promptly forward. "Well," said Napoleon, "the French are in Italy." "Where would they not go," answered Cherubini, "led by such a hero as you?"
One of the most accomplished of historians and critics, Oulibischeff, sums up the place of Cherubini in musical art in these words: "If on the one hand Gluck's calm and plastic grandeur, and on the other the tender and voluptuous charm of the melodies of Piccini and Zacchini, had suited the circumstances of a state of society sunk in luxury and nourished with classical exhibitions, this could not satisfy a society shaken to the very foundations of its faith and organization.
The Erards, who were destined to owe so much to Liszt, and to whom Liszt throughout his career owed so much, at once provided him with a magnificent piano; but Cherubini put in force a certain by-law of the Conservatoire excluding foreigners, and excluded Franz Liszt. This was a bitter pill to the eager student. He hardly knew how little he required such patronage.
Cherubini, however, refused to even read the letters of recommendation, saying no foreigner, however talented, could be admitted to the French National School of Music. Franz was deeply hurt by this refusal, and begged with tears to be allowed to come, but Cherubini was immovable. However they soon made the acquaintance of Ferdinand Paër, who offered to give the child lessons in composition.
Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Cherubini, how she flung herself that night, with all her gifts, into their highest compositions! As she rose and was walking away from the piano, after singing an air from the "Medea" with a pathos that no musically uneducated pen like mine can or ought to attempt a description of, some one intercepted her and whispered a request.
Bonaparte had conversed with Cherubini after a representation of one of his operas, and, while he congratulated him, he however added that this opera did not please him as much as the other pieces of Cherubini that he thought it somewhat sober and scientific, and that he missed in it the accustomed richness of the maestro's melodies.
Cherubini, too, became director of the Italian opera troupe, "Les Bouffons," organized under the patronage of Léonard, the Queen's performer, and exercised his taste for composition by interpolating airs of his own into the works of the Italian composers, which were then interesting the French public as against the operas of Rameau.
The unity of idea and musical color between "Faniska" and "Fidelio" seems to have been noted by many critics both of contemporary and succeeding times. Cherubini would gladly have written more for the Viennese, by whom he had been so cordially treated; but the unsettled times and his homesickness for Paris conspired to take him back to the city of his adoption.
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