Operas Méhul's most important contribution to music was his operas. He led the generation of composers who emerged in France in the 1790s, which included his friend and rival
Luigi Cherubini and his outright enemy
Jean-François Le Sueur. Méhul followed the example of the operas which
Gluck had written for Paris in the 1770s and applied Gluck's "reforms" to
opéra comique (a genre which mixed music with spoken dialogue and was not necessarily at all "comic" in mood). But he pushed music in a more
Romantic direction, showing an increased use of dissonance and an interest in psychological states such as anger and jealousy, thus foreshadowing later Romantic composers such as
Weber and
Berlioz. Indeed, Méhul was the first composer to be styled a Romantic; a critic used the term in
La chronique de Paris on 1 April 1793 when reviewing Méhul's
Le jeune sage et le vieux fou. Méhul's main musical concern was that everything should serve to increase the dramatic impact. As his admirer Berlioz wrote:[Méhul] was fully convinced that in truly dramatic music, when the importance of the situation deserves the sacrifice, the composer should not hesitate as between a pretty musical effect that is foreign to the scenic or dramatic character, and a series of accents that are true but do not yield any surface pleasure. He was convinced that musical expressiveness is a lovely flower, delicate and rare, of exquisite fragrance, which does not bloom without culture, and which a breath can wither; that it does not dwell in melody alone, but that everything concurs either to create or destroy it – melody, harmony, modulation, rhythm, instrumentation, the choice of deep or high registers for the voices or instruments, a quick or slow tempo, and the several degrees of volume in the sound emitted. One way in which Méhul increased dramatic expressivity was to experiment with orchestration. For example, in
Uthal, an opera set in the
Highlands of Scotland, he eliminated violins from the orchestra, replacing them with the darker sounds of violas in order to add local colour. Méhul's
La chasse du jeune Henri (Young Henri's Hunt) provides a more humorous example, with its expanded horn section portraying yelping hounds as well as giving hunting calls. (Sir
Thomas Beecham frequently programmed this piece to showcase the
Royal Philharmonic horn section.) Méhul's key works of the 1790s were
Euphrosine,
Stratonice,
Mélidore et Phrosine and
Ariodant. Ariodant, though a failure at its premiere in 1799, has come in for particular praise from critics.
Elizabeth Bartlet calls it "Mehul's best work of the decade and a highpoint of Revolutionary opera". It deals with the same tale of passion and jealousy as Handel's 1735 opera
Ariodante. As in many of his other operas, Mehul makes use of a structural device called the "reminiscence motif", a musical theme associated with a particular character or idea in the opera. This device looks forward to the
leitmotifs in
Richard Wagner's music dramas. In
Ariodant, the reminiscence motif is the
cri de fureur ("cry of fury"), expressing the emotion of jealousy. Méhul also continued to compose works in a more serious vein.
Joseph, based on the Biblical story of
Joseph and his brothers, is the most famous of these later operas, but its success in France was short-lived. In Germany, however, it won many admirers throughout the nineteenth century, including Wagner. A melody from
Joseph is very similar to a popular folk melody widely known in Germany which was used as a song in the
Imperial German Navy, and adapted, notoriously, as the tune for the co-national anthem of
Nazi Germany, the
Horst-Wessel-Lied. It is unclear, however, whether Méhul's melody was the actual provenance of the melody.
Symphonies and other works Besides operas, Méhul composed a number of songs for the festivals of the republic (often commissioned by the emperor Napoleon),
cantatas, and five symphonies in the years 1797 and 1808 to 1810. Mehul's First Symphony (1808) is notable for its dissonant and violent mood, and has been compared to
Beethoven's
Symphony No. 5, written in the same year. Taking inspiration from the more anguished works of
Haydn and
Mozart, such as Haydn's
Sturm und Drang and later Paris Symphonies of 1785–86 and
Mozart's
Symphony No. 40 (K. 550, 1788), it was revived in one of
Felix Mendelssohn's concerts with the
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1838 and 1846 to an audience including
Robert Schumann, who was impressed by the piece. (At the time of writing, only Beethoven's Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 [1799/1800 and 1802] had been performed in France.) His other symphonies also followed German and Austrian models. Commenting after the premiere of his first symphony, he noted: "I understood all the dangers of my enterprise; I foresaw the cautious welcome that the music-lovers would give my symphonies. I plan to write new ones for next winter and shall try to write them… to accustom the public gradually to think that a Frenchman may follow Haydn and Mozart at a distance." A fifth symphony was never completed—"as disillusionment and tuberculosis took their toll", in the words of David Charlton. The Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 were only rediscovered by Charlton in 1979. Interviewed 8 November 2010 on the
BBC Radio 4's
Today programme, Professor Charlton said that Méhul's 4th Symphony was the first ever to employ the
cyclical principle. == List of works ==