1763–1817 · France · Romantic
Étienne Méhul (1763–1817) was a French composer of the era of the French Revolution. He wrote mostly operas, was the author of the Chant du départ of 1794, and in 1795 took the post of inspector of teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. The site has an edition of his Symphonie en sol mineur at an advanced level.
Étienne Nicolas Méhul was born in 1763 in Givet, in the Ardennes. He was the son of a wine merchant. The family could not afford a regular musical education, so the boy had his first lessons from a blind local organist. When the teacher died, ten-year-old Étienne began serving as organist at the Franciscans' church in Givet.
Next Méhul was sent to the German organist and musician Wilhelm Hanser, who taught at the Lavaldieu monastery not far from Givet, where Hanser had been engaged to found a music school. Méhul took lessons from him now and then, counterpoint among them, and in 1778 began to stand in for him. It was at the monastery that his lifelong passion for flowers, tulips above all, took root.
In the late 1770s the very young Méhul came to Paris. He travelled with a letter of recommendation to Gluck, and a patron who had heard him play the organ helped to arrange the journey. Méhul received his professional education in Paris from Jean-Frédéric Edelmann, a harpsichord player and a friend of Christoph Willibald Gluck, whom Méhul regarded as his idol. Soon after arriving he attended the premiere of Iphigénie en Tauride and was deeply moved.
Méhul's first steps as a composer were arrangements of airs from popular operas. In 1782 his Ode sacrée to a text by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau was performed at the Concert Spirituel. In 1783 Méhul's first published composition appeared: a book of three sonatas for piano. A new set of sonatas came out in 1788 and became his Opus II. In 1786 he joined one of the Parisian Masonic lodges, in its musical section. Haydn's Paris symphonies were performed in that lodge in 1787.
By the end of the 1780s Méhul was already thinking of a career as an opera composer. Gluck supported and encouraged him, helping him to recognise his vocation.
The writer Valadier gave Méhul his libretto Cora, which Gluck had turned down. The Paris Opéra scheduled it, as Alonzo et Cora, for rehearsals in June 1789, but they were stopped in August, most likely because of the house's serious money troubles. The first performance came only on 4 February 1791, and it failed.
Meanwhile Méhul found his preferred collaborator in the librettist François-Benoît Hoffman, whose text became Euphrosine, the first Méhul opera to reach the stage. Its premiere on 4 September 1790 at the Salle Favart was a huge success that made the composer's name, and it began his long association with the Comédie Italienne, renamed the Opéra-Comique later.
The failure of Cora in 1791 and the political ban on Adrien in 1792 left Méhul's standing intact. Works like Stratonice and Mélidore et Phrosine strengthened it.
Throughout the Revolution Méhul wrote a great many patriotic songs and propaganda pieces. The best known is the Chant du départ (1794), set to words by Joseph Chénier, which was nicknamed the Marseillaise's sister. Together with Gossec he counted as a composer of the Revolution.
In 1795 Méhul was named to the Institut de France. In the same year the National Institute of Music in Paris, one of whose organisers Méhul had been, was transformed into the Conservatoire, and he was appointed inspector of teaching, in effect a co-director. The post was held with him by Gossec, Grétry, Lesueur and Cherubini. The Conservatoire was founded on 3 August 1795 on the initiative of Bernard Sarrette, a captain of the National Guard. From then on Méhul took an active part in all the work of the new school, in teaching and in the organisation of national festivals. His best-known pupil was Ferdinand Hérold.
In 1797 Méhul took in his nephew Joseph Daussoigne-Méhul, then seven and later a composer too, together with the boy's younger brother. He was a major influence on the nephew's musical training and career, and Joseph was one of his students at the Conservatoire.
Méhul got on well with Napoleon and in 1804 was among the first Frenchmen awarded the cross of Knight of the Légion d'honneur. Over the first ten years of the nineteenth century his operas did less well than in the 1790s, though Joseph (1807) and some others became well known.
Around 1800 the taste for such stormy dramas faded, giving way to lighter comic operas, Boieldieu's for instance. Napoleon too let Méhul know that he wanted a more comic style. Méhul's answer was L'irato, a comedy in one act, which in 1801 was passed off as the work of an Italian composer called "Fiorelli"; once it proved an instant hit, he confessed to the trick. He kept writing in a more serious manner as well. The best known of those later operas is Joseph, drawn from the Biblical tale of Joseph and his brothers. In France its success was short-lived, but in Germany it kept many admirers through the nineteenth century, Wagner among them.
Les amazones was staged at the Opéra on 17 December 1811 and flopped. It hit Méhul hard and all but ended his theatre career. He withdrew to his house at Pantin to grow carnations, ranunculuses, hyacinths and tulips. His love of flowers made him known among professional gardeners.
In spite of his friendship with Napoleon, Méhul's standing survived the Bourbon Restoration intact, and in 1816 he was appointed to the Conservatoire. However, the composer was by then seriously ill with tuberculosis; he spent some time in Hyères to rest and ease his illness.
Méhul died in the morning of 18 October 1817, at home in the rue de Montholon in Paris, aged 54. He lies in Père Lachaise Cemetery, close to the grave of Gossec; the tomb was rebuilt in the 1980s. That evening his favourite pupil Ferdinand Hérold put on his opera La Clochette at the Opéra-Comique. Valentine de Milan, a comic opera and Méhul's last dramatic work, remained unfinished; Daussoigne-Méhul completed it, and the Opéra-Comique staged it in 1822.
Operas were Méhul's main legacy: he wrote over 40 of them, plus three ballets and instrumental pieces. Following the path of Gluck's Paris operas, he carried Gluck's reforms into opéra comique, a genre with spoken dialogue between musical numbers whose mood need not be comic. Heroic and mythological plots gave way in his work to simple human drama. His music leaned further toward Romanticism, using more dissonance and exploring feelings such as anger and jealousy, which anticipates later Romantics like Weber and Berlioz.
For Méhul everything had to heighten the drama, and he looked for expressive means in orchestration as well. For Uthal, set in the Scottish Highlands, he dropped the violins and gave the orchestra the darker colour of the violas, to evoke the place. La chasse du jeune Henri (Young Henri's Hunt) uses an enlarged group of horns to depict barking dogs and hunting calls. In Ariodant, as in many other operas of his, he uses a "reminiscence motif", a theme tied to a character or idea, a technique that anticipates Wagner's leitmotifs.
The operas that stand out from the 1790s are Stratonice, Euphrosine, Ariodant and Mélidore et Phrosine. Ariodant did not succeed at its premiere in 1799, yet critics single it out for particular praise. It retells the story of passion and jealousy that Handel had set in Ariodante in 1735. Its reminiscence motif expresses jealousy and is called the cri de fureur, or cry of fury. Méhul's operas had a deep influence on Berlioz, and later in Germany Joseph was loved throughout the nineteenth century.
Apart from operas, Méhul wrote songs for the republic's festivals, frequently on Napoleon's orders, along with cantatas and symphonies. The First Symphony of 1808 has a harsh, turbulent character and has been likened to Beethoven's Fifth, composed the same year. Méhul's other symphonies likewise took German and Austrian music as their model. A fifth symphony was left unfinished.
Among Méhul's piano works are the sets of sonatas published in 1783 and 1788. The site has an orchestral edition of Symphonie en sol mineur by Méhul, rated at an advanced level.