Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)
Médée is a freak in the history of opera history, remaining famous (or notorious) for its title role long after it had ceased to be performed, except for rare revivals. Only when a singer could be found to meet the extraordinary demands of Medea’s part was the opera staged again. The first Medea, in 1797, was Madame Scio, described by a contemporary critic as ‘not only a great singer, but a skillful tragic actress: she was in turn touching and impassioned, harrowing and arrogant, wild and timid to a degree that baffles description’. So prodigally did this singer give of herself that her death from pneumonia, during the opera’s run, was said to be due to the over-exacting demands of the role.
There are shades of Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Wagner’s first Tristan, a more than fortuitous parallel, since not until Wagner would a composer dare again to write so strenuous a part. Wagner himself recognised the extent to which Medea herself dominates Cherubini’s opera. He remarked, not altogether unfairly, that Cherubini’s Jason was not a hero, but a tenor. Thus, the extraordinary power of Médée is explained, but also perhaps why it isn’t more popular.
The legendary Greek subject of Medea has not lacked treatments as an opera, from Cavalli in 1640 to Milhaud in 1939, but the tortured Medea, betrayed woman and avenging sorceress, a mother driven by her husband’s treachery to slay her own children demands a harrowing portrait, almost exclusively delineating the psyche of a single character. This does not make for a varied entertainment. Not surprisingly, it is the most single-minded Medea opera, Cherubini’s, that remains the most famous. Indeed, since the eclipse of this composer, Médée is just about the only work by which he is remembered, and even so is rarely seen or heard.
For mid-20th century opera lovers this ‘cult’ opera is bound up with the legendary Maria Callas, for whom Médée was revived in Florence in 1953. Callas appeared in the role in many other houses, and made a film version of the drama (Pasolini’s) fixing the identification Medea-Callas in more people’s minds. Callas is certainly more famous than Cherubini, and even those who don’t have the reaction ‘who was he?’ may have trouble remembering when they heard a note of his music.
Beethoven paid tribute: when asked to name the greatest living composer (apart from himself), after some head-scratching he exclaimed ‘Cherubini!’ Art-lovers may have seen in the Louvre Museum the remarkable portrait by the composer’s friend Ingres. To Cherubini’s great annoyance, Ingres added the figure of a muse saluting the musician.
Cherubini’s reputation has suffered (as Basil Deane suggests in his valuable short book on this composer) from having straddled two national cultures. Born in Florence in 1760, he studied under his father, a musician at the Pergola Theatre, and then under Giuseppe Sarti in Venice. In 1788 Cherubini took up residence in Paris and began to compose French operas; he never returned to live in Italy, and Italians have neglected his music. French musicians, embarrassed perhaps that so much of their music has been written by foreigners, have also been reluctant to give Cherubini his due.
Just what is his due? Beethoven was not the only great musician to admire Cherubini. Haydn regarded him as the greatest dramatic composer of his time. Médée was said to be Schumann’s favourite opera, Brahms called it ‘the work we musicians recognise among ourselves as the highest peak of dramatic music’, and Beethoven went night after night to Cherubini’s operas when they were produced in Vienna. He gained from them an understanding how to wed sung drama to a symphonic orchestral style; Fidelio is inconceivable without Cherubini (whose Les deux journées set a similar plot by the same author).
The true founders of Romantic opera were the French, Cherubini in particular: Edward Dent, in The Rise of Romantic Opera claims that French opéra comique of the Cherubini type is the principal source of 19th century German symphonic and instrumental style. Calling Médée a ‘comic’ opera may seem paradoxical, but explaining this category may settle what kind of opera this is, and goes to the heart of what is special about the Swedish production adopted by The Australian Opera.
The French found that their language simply would not adapt to the pacey, natural-speech-like recitative of Italian opera buffa, so in their comic operas they substituted speech for the tragic declamation of the tragédies lyriques of Lully and Rameau. When the French Revolution brought serious subjects back into favor, the dialogue in serious operas was also spoken, but in verse rather than prose. Spoken dialogue was used even in operas like those of Cherubini where the musical elements have been greatly expanded. The Théâtre Feydeau, where Médée was premiered, was one of the two theatres in Paris devoted to the genre called opéra comique, even though it presented some operas with serious plots.
The libretto of Médée was by François Benoît Hoffmann, the critic writing for the Journal des débats. He based his version of the Medea story on the play by Pierre Corneille (1685). Corneille had adapted the drama of Euripides (with contributions from Seneca’s version). The result was an imitation of classical drama: not representing physical action and changes of time and place, but concentrating on movement in the mind, clash of will and temperament. Médée was an ideal subject, because the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece was so well known.
Corneille had already dealt with the preceding events in another play, so he concentrated on the culmination of the drama, Medea’s arrival in Corinth at the moment of Jason’s intended marriage. Cherubini’s librettist starts where Corneille starts, and follows his version.
It is essential to grasp that Hoffmann wrote tragic verse (in alexandrines – twelve-syllable lines). Some of this text was intended to be spoken, other verses were for setting to music, as monologues, ensembles, and choruses. This may come as a surprise to those who know Cherubini’s Médée from stage productions or recordings; almost without exception these are sung throughout.
By the 1850s Cherubini’s music still had some currency in Germany, but in tragic opera spoken dialogue was unacceptable. For an 1855 production of Medea in Munich, in German, Franz Lachner composed recitatives used ever since, in place of the original spoken dialogue. Lachner, as a young man, had belonged to Schubert’s circle in Vienna. In his recitatives for Cherubini’s opera he does not deny himself harmonic resources of high Romanticism – there are even extraordinary anticipations of Wagner’s Tristan.
Lachner’s recitatives are a superior example of their type (superior to those Guiraud composed, for similar reasons, to adapt Bizet’s opéra comique Carmen). Nevertheless, they produce a hybrid result, from both the musical and the historical point of view. Opera critic Andrew Porter suggests it is as if Puccini had composed strong dramatic scenes to link the musical numbers of Fidelio. More seriously, the recitatives upset Cherubini’s design, his careful gradation of speech, melodrama (speaking over orchestral accompaniment), accompanied recitatives and numbers with full orchestra.
The damage to Cherubini’s scheme is obvious at Medea’s first entry. In Lachner’s version she is presented as a spitfire from the start, whereas Cherubini’s tenderly pathetic first music for her shows her as a deserted wife and mother deprived of her children. The version of Médée seen in opera houses nowadays (and used in all the recordings so far) should really be described as by Cherubini and Lachner – a different piece. Translated into Italian for a revival at La Scala in 1909, this is the version in modern vocal scores, including those used by the Australian Opera.
But the version about to be performed by that company is a far-reaching act of restitution, though not exactly to the opera’s original form. Médée, in this production first mounted in Sweden (with the same conductor, Carlo Felice Cillario, and the same director, Ann-Margret Pettersson), is an opera with spoken dialogue. It is sung and spoken in the original French of Hoffmann’s libretto – the dialogue has been restored.
The musical decisions behind this production can be seen in two complementary lights: first as reflecting a search for authenticity, doing the opera as the composer intended; second, as showing conviction that the opera can be more effective in the theatre in its original form rather than the fully sung adaptation.
To put the audience in the dramatic picture, the Swedish production has come up with a fascinating idea (no doubt its most intriguing feature): an actress will speak a prologue before the overture, and will speak once more later in the action. She will use words, in English, selected and translated from a French classical (i.e. 17th century) translation of Euripides’ play Medea. The period language is chosen to harmonise with the rest of the text.
It would harmonise better, in fact, with the play of Corneille than with the stilted language of the libretto Hoffmann modeled on it. There is a further discrepancy: the actress will speak in prose, the prose of Euripides, whereas the libretto is in alexandrine verses. It is a compelling idea, for all that: the most obvious need for a prologue is to remind an audience less familiar with the story of the events leading up to Medea’s arrival in Corinth. Using an actress to speak these words, taken from the nurse’s speech in Euripides, is a reminder of the classical mold of Cherubini’s music drama, of illustrious descent. It may also help the audience appreciate an unfamiliar genre, and make them more aware of how in Cherubini’s powerful conception intensity, sometimes almost unbearable, constantly breaks the bounds of classical formality.
The actress’ second intervention could be playing to the modern gallery: she delivers a fighting feminist harangue on woman’s predicament, immediately after the ensemble where Medea begs King Creon for a stay of exile. Euripides gives Medea this speech as her first words in the play. She seeks to justify her action to the chorus, who represent the people of Corinth – but her action, as the play makes clear, is not unequivocally justified.
Euripides’ ending has Medea making her escape from the mob intent on lynching her, in an airborne dragon chariot. Does he deliberately make this ending hard to believe? Typically, this playwright leaves the audience to make its own judgment on Medea’s behavior. Cherubini’s opera ends in inexorable tragedy, with the murder of Jason’s children. One ironic benefit of the opéra comique genre was that it enabled Cherubini to do this, whereas an opera for the Opéra National would have had to have a happy ending with a ballet to follow. Instead, Cherubini’s opera develops in a crescendo to the powerful close.
To his contemporaries Cherubini’s music seemed full of passion and excitement ‘broad, expressive, majestic and terrible’, one of them said. Most modern critics find this reaction difficult to share. Edward Dent says ‘there is something cold-blooded about Cherubini’s operas’. The long and formal duos, trios and quartets, with very developed orchestral parts (often repeating short phrases separated by dramatic pauses) seem uneventful beside Mozart or even Beethoven. But there is evidence that audiences around 1800 preferred opera music to be like this. Cherubini gives the public plenty of opportunity to savour his remarkable orchestral devices, as in several long introductions, such as the opening of the third act.
Napoleon, who preferred the music of Spontini, complained in Cherubini of ‘too much accompaniment’. In these illustrative orchestral passages the expatriate Italian showed he had absorbed the French tradition. For an Italian, it is striking how devoid are Cherubini’s operas in vocal charm, brilliance, or display. There is a certain amount of lighter relief in the first act, such as the aria of Dircé (Glauce in the Italian version), to paint the happiness Medea’s appearance will destroy. Once the drama begins in earnest, Cherubini eschews mere entertainment for intensity without compromise.
The 19th century critic Chorley compared Médée to King Lear. Cherubini’s focus, even more than Shakespeare’s, is on the central character. His method was truly original, and brought complaints that he was mistreating the voice: Medea cries, even jerks in her passion, breaking the flow of the melodies. This was deliberate. Cherubini (Basil Deane points out) projects Medea’s mental torment in the physical strain imposed on the singer – the often awkward tessitura (where the role lies in the voice), surprising intervals, and sudden alternations of loud and soft. In this too Cherubini was heir to the French tradition of tragic declamation in music, but he is less constrained than was Lully by the formalities of classic diction – more like Gluck, who wanted his Orpheus’s cries to give voice to pain.
A further strain on the singer of Medea is having to switch repeatedly from intense speech to intense song and back. This is essential to the whole conception of Médée. Lachner’s recitatives make it easier for the singer, but it is right, as the Australian Opera production does, to restore not only an abbreviated form of the dialogue but also many passages where the tragic power is heightened by Medea’s speaking comments over music, then breaking into song at a tellingly chosen moment, as in the wedding scene closing the second act.
In a sense Médée is a horror opera, but it has a restraint, sometimes an austerity, demonstrating Cherubini’s greatest strength: his single-minded focus on essentials. In Médée he created one of music drama’s great roles. Experiencing Médée enacted with his music can be gripping, when a singer is found who can cope with the demands and carry the audience with her.
First printed in Opera Australia, 1987