Luigi CHERUBINI (1760-1842)
Exulta e lauda (1777) [6:07]
Cum invocarum (c.1774-1778) [17:17]
Qui habitat (c.1774-1778) [7:32]
Nunc dimittis (c.1774-1778) [5:18]
Kyrie et Pater noster (1816) [15:25]
O salutaris hostia (1816) [6:17]
Inclina, Domine (1823) [10:27]
Sybilla Rubens (soprano), Britta Schwarz (alto),
Tobias Hunger (tenor), Tobias Berndt (bass).
Kammerchor der Frauenkirche Dresden, Ensemble Frauenkirche
Dresden / Matthias Grünnert.
rec. live, February 7-9, 2019, Frauenkirche, Dresden
All world premiere recordings.
Latin texts, with German and English translations included.
RONDEAU ROP6179 [68:21]
The standing of Cherubini’s music, with critics and audiences, has always been somewhat ambiguous. In 1875, reviewing a biography of Cherubuni, Ebenezer Prout, four years before his appointment as Professor of Harmony and Composition at the Royal Academy, wrote “Few, perhaps, if any of the great composers whose names are held in honour by musicians have been so little appreciated in proportion to their real merits by the general public as the master whose name stands at the head of this article [i.e. Cherubini]”. He is seen, then, as one of “the great composers”, his “name […] held in honour by musicians”, but he is “little appreciated” by the public (passages quoted from The Academy, August 21, 1875, p.207). The same ambiguity had been registered at the time of Cherubini’s death. Adolphe Adam wrote a lengthy obituary notice of Cherubini, an anonymous English translation of which was published in The Musical World, March 31, 1842). It begins with resounding praise: “The career of very few composers has been so brilliant or so complete” (p.98), but on the very same page we are told that “Cherubini very rarely attained to much popularity… it will be for posterity to enjoy and reward what the living world have yet scarcely comprehend”. It can hardly be said, I think, that the ‘posterity’ invoked by Adam has been markedly kinder to Cherubini and his music. I offer, for example, a brief quotation from this website. Harry Downey, reviewing a recording of two of Cherubini’s string quartets in July 2000, opened up thus, “Nowadays something of a marginal figure – respected but out on the fringes – we must recall how highly Cherubini was regarded in his heyday. Beethoven regarded him as the greatest living composer”. Again, significantly, the ‘witness’ called is a musician.
Why did Cherubini’s music not capture the admiration of the public? Charles Frederick Kenyon, writing in the Musical Standard in September 1905 offered one explanation: “His one great fault was his weak lyrical impulse. He has written fine and beautiful melodies, but in the greater number of them, there is lacking that royal sweep and outburst of emotion that are discoverable in the melodies that, created a century ago, are still part of our musical life”. Almost half a century later (in Volume I of A.L. Bacharach’s The Music Masters, 1948), W.R. Anderson concluded his essay on Cherubini thus: “His defects were of the imagination; he can glow, but rarely flames; his skill was of the intellect rather than the heart; but what the easy command of every technical device could do for a composer, Cherubini cleverly made those devices do” – which has more than a little in common with Kenyon’s assessment. Prout, in the essay quoted earlier, declared “One thing Cherubini lacked, and that was warmth”. This criticism of Cherubini can perhaps be traced back to Mendelssohn. Prout himself makes use of a striking passage from Ferdinand Hiller’s Recollections of Mendelssohn, quoting a comment on Cherubini by Mendelssohn: “What an extraordinary creature he is! You would fancy that a man cannot be a great composer without sentiment, heart, feeling, or whatever else you call it; but I declare I believe that Cherubini makes everything out of his head alone.” It should be noted, however, that what Mendelssohn said, if reported correctly, was that despite his deficiency of heart or feeling, Cherubin was “a great composer”.
The qualities Cherubini is said to lack, hindering his chances of popularity, are essentially those of a Romantic composer. But should we expect Romanticism from Cherubini? If one looks only at the date of his death – 1842 – it might seem a reasonable expectation. However, if one views his life and work in the context of those of other composers, the situation doesn’t appear so simple. He was born only four years after Mozart, though he outlived him by more than half a century. In his youth he was taught by Giuseppe Sarti (1729-1802). He was invited to London and made a favourable impression, in 1785, some six years before Haydn first came to London. Remarkably, as Michael Pauser points out in his booklet notes for this CD: Cherubini “was born one year after Handel’s death and died in the year of the premiere of Wagner’s ‘Rienzi.’” Cherubini’s roots very much lay in late-classicism and, behind and beyond that, in the study of Palestrina in his native Italy (in the obituary cited above Adolphe Adam wrote “I cannot help thinking that if Palestrina had survived to these days, he would have been another Cherubini”).
If one compares Cherubini’s date of birth (1760) with those of a number of the major Romantic composers – Weber (1786), Berlioz (1803), Mendelssohn (1809), Robert Schumann (1810), Chopin (1810) and Liszt (1811) – it is immediately obvious that (using the conventional measure of 25 years for a ‘generation), Cherubini was either one generation or, in most cases, two generations older than such figures. Cherubini, as a man and a composer, was instinctively attracted to tradition (though not incapable of musical innovation), and thus inherently unlikely to adopt much from the music of these composers so much younger than himself. Still, our view of Cherubini’s ‘conservatism’ should not be unduly influenced by what Berlioz says of him in his Mémoires, in a mischievous account which reads as if exaggerated almost to the point of caricature.
It is unsurprising – and was perhaps inevitable – that nineteenth-century listeners should have heard and judged Cherubini’s music with ears and minds attuned to the music of Romanticism. But we, now, are surely at a sufficient distance to recognize in Cherubini a composer who remained faithful to his own sensibility and temperament during a period of enormous changes in musical style, without half-damning him because his music doesn’t sweep us off our feet like the best of Liszt or break our hearts like Chopin.
In an age less in thrall to the idea that the primary measure of music’s worth is its emotional ‘warmth’, now would seem to be the ideal time for a serious reassessment of Cherubini’s music. Fortunately, there have been signs in recent years that such a process is under way. Under the auspices of the International Cherubini Society / Internationale Cherubini-Gesellschaft – “A particular concern of the International Cherubini Society is the promotion, indexing and scientific processing as well as the performance of Cherubini's works. The results are incorporated into the Cherubini edition”. The ongoing edition of Cherubini’s considerable output is being published by Simrock of Berlin, under the general editorship of Professor Helen Geyer of the Institute for Musicology Weimar-Jena. It was only towards the end of the 1970s that the significant collection of Cherubini manuscripts formerly in the Berlin State Library and now stored in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków became accessible, accessibility which has made possible a fresh and better-informed approach to Cherubini’s work. It has sparked a renewed awareness of Cherubini – so that discoveries have also been made elsewhere – of the works on this new disc, ‘Cum invocarem’, the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ and ‘Qui habitat’ – three previously unknown/forgotten works were discovered (in 2017) by Michael Pauser in the Bibliothčque National in Paris, in a manuscript marked Compietta (Compline). Before the discovery of these works – in Cherubini’s own hand – it had been thought that the youthful composer had written only one Italian motet with orchestral accompaniment (‘Exulta e lauda’) or that if he had written others they had been lost. Now these other three motets, written at around the same time as ‘Exulta e lauda’ form the opening sequence on this rewarding new disc. (Like everything else on this disc these are world premiere recordings).
From its opening bars the 16-year-old Cherubini’s ‘Exulta e lauda’ is full of almost irresistible energy and a growing sense of drama. It is a setting of Isaiah Chapter 12, verses 5-6 and only the most dully unresponsive would not react to the setting’s opening words: “Exulta e lauda abitatio Sion” (Cry out in joy and shout, thou inhabitant of Sion) on hearing this fervent, but controlled performance by the Kammerchor of the Frauenkirche Dresden. The energy of this motet may have something of the youthful about it, but it is by no means merely youthful in its control and craftsmanship. Like most of Cherubini’s sacred works this youthful motet doesn’t have the air of being any kind of very ‘personal’ expression of faith; the dominant sense is of public ceremonial. In an anonymous contribution published in The Musical World (March 24, 1883, p.173), the writer quotes (without citing a source) Cherubini’s daughter: “‘He was no mystic in religion,’ said Cherubini’s daughter. ‘He understood it liberally, like a man of high intelligence, and not according to the narrow ideas of the Catholic Church.’”. In discussing Cherubini’s Mass in F major (1808/9), the same author writes thus: “Cardinal Caprara, the Papal Legate, sent by his Holiness to the First Consul, Bonaparte, when it was proposed to re-establish religion in France, was present at the performance; going up to the composer, he said to him: ‘Caro figlio, siete degno di cantar le lodi de Dio.’ In saying to Cherubini, “Dear Son, you are worthy to the praise of God” the Cardinal was making a judgement on the skill and power of his music, not an assessment of how ‘good’ a Catholic Cherubini was.
The three newly discovered works (perhaps above all the very beautiful setting of the ‘Nunc dimittis’) confirm what ‘Exultata e laude’ had already suggested, that Cherubini, even before he reached his twentieth birthday, was writing church music of genuine power and quality. For the next quarter of a century Cherubini’s work as a composer was largely devoted to the operatic stage. It was with his appointment in 1815 as ‘Surintendant de la musique du Roi’ in 1815, after the Bourbon restoration, that Cherubini’s energies (which were clearly still considerable) again found regular expression in sacred works – as illustrated by the last three works on this disc.
The revival of Cherubini’s interest in the writing of sacred music seems, in part, to have come about through a set of chance circumstances. After his return to Paris from his visit to Vienna (1707/8), Cherubini was in relatively low spirits, for reasons that needn’t be explored here. The Prince de Chimay invited him to stay with him at his Château de Chimay (Chimay is now in the Belgian province of Hainault). After Cherubini had enjoyed a period of rest, spent in drawing and botanical studies, it happened that a church in Chimay was to be dedicated. Cherubini was persuaded to write a mass for the occasion. What he produced was the Mass in F (1809), sometimes referred to, indeed, as the Messe de Chimay. This was to be the first in a series of sacred works – which included the Requiem in C-minor (1816), marking the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI; the Missa solemnis in E (1818); the Mass in G (1819), written for the coronation of Louis XVIII; the Messe solennelle (1825), written for the coronation of Charles X and the Requiem in D minor (1836) written with his own funeral in mind – which represent the pinnacle of Cherubini’s achievements as a composer. In them the sense of pathos, a strong sense of the dramatic and the theatrical and an almost epic scale are fused (in differing proportions).
In contrast to the quotations from nineteenth-century views of Cherubini quoted earlier, I offer a passage from Anthony Lewis’s discussion of the Requiem in C minor (taken from The New Oxford History of Music, Vol. VIII, p.623): “The setting of the Introit ‘Requiem aeternam’ at once creates an atmosphere of sincerity and reverence in which one feels the influence of [Cherubini’s] long study of Palestrina and other Italian polyphonic masters […] the discreet use of discipline gives his style a strength and dignity in the highest traditions of Italian church music. In an epoch of increasing emotional extravagance Cherubini had a rare sense of poise”. Rather than being criticized for a lack of emotional ‘warmth’, Cherubini is now valued for the ‘rational’ qualities of ‘discipline’ and ‘poise’, by means of which he can avoid ‘emotional extravagance’.
Alongside such massive works, Cherubini also composed smaller-scale sacred works, like the ‘Kyrie and Pater noster’, the setting of ‘O salutaris hostia’ and ‘Inclina, Domine’ – all recorded here. The best of them share something of the power of those larger works as well as their discipline and poise, that sense of “sincerity and reverence” which Lewis identifies in the passage just quoted. The opening of ‘Inclina, Domine’ (setting Psalm 83, 1-3) is dignified, grave and relatively austere. But that dignity, as the expression of a petition to God – “Bow down Thine ear, O Lord, to me and hear me” – is emotionally powerful too, in its fully committed reverence. The mood is utterly different in the ensuing setting of Psalm 85, verse 4 and the ‘Gloria Patri’ – with the brass much in evidence. In ‘Inclina, Domine’ the mature Cherubini (now in his sixties) provides a master class in how to balance and deploy the resources of soloists, choir and orchestra. His use of his ‘forces’ is sensitive, thoughtful and moving. The ‘Gloria Patri’ heard in the superb acoustic of the restored Frauenkirche makes a powerful and fitting close to the CD (not least in the magnificent fugal ‘Amen’ at its very end).
As Michael Pauser points out in his booklet essay, Cherubini set St. Thomas Aquinas’ verses beginning ‘O salutaris hostia’ several times. Its two verses are the last in Aquinas’s Eucharistic hymn ‘Verbum Supernum’. In 1816 he set, for alto and strings, just the penultimate verse of that hymn:
O salutaris hostia,
quae caeli pandis hostium.
Bella premunt hostilia;
Da robus, fer auxilum.
O saving Victim,
Opening wide the gate of heaven to all below.
Our enemies press in from every side;
Supply Thine aid, bestow Thy strength.
Unlike the forceful and dramatic ‘Inclina, Domine’, this slow setting of ‘O salutaris hostia’ is beautifully lyrical. I find it hard to believe that anyone hearing this piece, especially as sung by Britta Schwarz with the sixteen strings of the Ensemble Frauenkirche Dresden, could feel that Cherubini wrote only with his head and not with his heart. (The same might be said, I think, of Cherubini’s better-known ‘Ave Maria’).
The ‘Kyrie et pater noster’ is somewhat unusual. The ‘Kyrie’ is based on the setting in Cherubini’s Messe solonelle in D minor (1811), but here it is followed, not by the remainder of a Mass, but only by a setting of the Pater noster; Michael Pauser writes that “Numerous copies and arrangements document the great popularity that the ‘Pater noster’ enjoyed throughout Europe in the 19th century”.
All in all, this is both a thoroughly enjoyable disc and a further step in the ongoing rehabilitation of Cherubini’s music and its reputation. This is not Matthias Grünert’s first contribution to that process. In 2017 Rondeau issued his recording of Cherubini’s C minor Requiem (review). This disc also included a powerful performance of his ‘Chant sur la mort de Haydn’ (1809), a work of which Stendhal acidly, but truthfully, observed: “The text of this work is, as usual, drearily uninspired; but the music is worthy of the great man whom it is designed to honour” (Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio (1814), translated by Richard Coe, 1972).
Matthias Grünert certainly understands the way Cherubini’s music works, and on this disc he and the singers and musicians with whom he is working respond both to the discipline in Cherubini’s writing and to the emotional force (which is rarely, if ever, ‘extravagant’) of his music. Both those who already admire the best of Cherubini’s music and those who haven’t quite rid themselves of the inherited suspicion of it will surely find much of value in this recording. The choir (32-strong) is very impressive, the Ensemble Frauenkirche Dresden (29-strong) does all that is required of it very competently, as do the four solo singers – most markedly Sybilla Rubens (notably in ‘Inclina, Domine’) and Britta Schwarz (especially in ‘O salutaris hostia’). This is billed as a live recording; the audience/congregation must have been very quiet, perhaps rapt in attention to the music they were hearing. The recorded sound captures, to something like perfection, the excellent acoustic of the ‘new’ Frauenkirche.
Glyn Pursglove
