Cherubini: Stage Works
View all works by Cherubini in the main appExplore the complete catalog of Stage compositions by Cherubini. This curated list includes composition years, historical Wikipedia context, and interactive audio to add specific tracks directly to your listening queue.
| Title | Year | Actions |
|---|---|---|
| Anacréon ou L'amour fugitif |
Anacréon, ou L'amour fugitif is an opera-ballet in two acts by Luigi Cherubini with a French libretto by C. R. Mendouze. It was premiered on 4 October 1803 by the Paris Opéra at the Salle Montansier. The choreography was by Pierre-Gabriel Gardel. The work proved to be a complete failure, ending its run on 1 January 1804 after only seven performances. The subject matter, a love affair of the Ancient Greek poet Anacreon, was completely alien to the spirit of the time. One critic complained that in his protagonist Cherubini had represented "un vieux debauché déguisé en héros d'opéra" ("an old debauchee disguised as an opera hero"). The overture was praised by Weber and Berlioz and has frequently been recorded. The complete opera was revived by the Italian radio company RAI in 1973 and on stage at La Scala in 1983 with Gianandrea Gavazzeni conducting. |
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| Démophoon |
Démophoon (sometimes spelt Démophon) is an opera by the composer Luigi Cherubini, first performed at the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opera) on 2 December 1788. It takes the form of a tragédie lyrique in three acts. The libretto, by Jean-François Marmontel, is based on Demofoonte by Metastasio. |
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| Faniska |
Faniska is an opera eroica in three acts by Luigi Cherubini. The German libretto, by Joseph Sonnleithner, is based on the melodrama Les mines de Pologne (1803) by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt. |
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| Les Abencérages ou Létendard de Grenade | ||
| Les Deux journées, ou Le porteur d'eau |
Les deux journées, ou Le porteur d'eau (The Two Days, or The Water Carrier) is an opera in three acts by Luigi Cherubini with a libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. It takes the form of an opéra comique, meaning not that the subject matter is humorous, but that the piece is a mixture of spoken dialogue and musical numbers. Bouilly claimed he took the story from a real-life incident during the French Revolution but, for fear of censorship, he moved the action back to 1647 and the time of Cardinal Mazarin. The opera was first performed on 16 January 1800 at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. Les deux journées is sometimes considered Cherubini's most successful opera, though revivals have been rare in the past hundred years. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ludwig van Beethoven both felt that Bouilly's libretto was one of the best of its day; Beethoven kept Cherubini's score on his desk and copied out passages from it while composing Fidelio. |
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| Lo sposo di tre, marito di nessuna |
Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini ( KERR-uu-BEE-nee; Italian: [luˈiːdʒi keruˈbiːni]; 8 or 14 September 1760 – 15 March 1842) was an Italian Classical and Romantic composer. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest living composer of his era. Cherubini's operas were heavily praised and interpreted by Rossini. |
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| Lodoïska |
Lodoïska is an opera by Luigi Cherubini to a French libretto by Claude-François Fillette-Loraux after an episode from Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai's novel, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. It takes the form of a comédie héroïque (a type of opéra comique) in three acts, and was a founding work of rescue opera. It has also been called one of the first Romantic operas, though Cherubini's work was basically classical. Stephen Willis has explained the importance of the work: "With Lodoïska Cherubini turned his back on his training as an Italian composer of opera seria, choosing the freer form of opéra comique over the more stilted and confining tragédie lyrique and embarking on a course of development of opéra comique which was to lead to the eradication of almost all differences between the two genres, except for the spoken dialogue." Basil Deane has called the opera "entirely original in its depth of psychological insight, dramatic tension, and musical depth." |
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| Médée |
Médée is a French language opéra-comique by Luigi Cherubini. The libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman (Nicolas Étienne Framéry) was based on Euripides' tragedy of Medea and Pierre Corneille's play Médée. It is set in the ancient city of Corinth. The opera was premiered on 13 March 1797 at the Théâtre Feydeau, Paris. It met with a lukewarm reception and was not immediately revived. During the twentieth century, it was usually performed in Italian translation as Medea, with the spoken dialogue replaced by recitatives not authorized by the composer. More recently, some performances have used Cherubini's original version. The long-lost final aria, which Cherubini appears to have elided from his original manuscript, was discovered by researchers from the University of Manchester and Stanford University by employing x-ray techniques to reveal the blackened out areas of Cherubini's manuscript. |