Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime

Abstract

France receives little attention in narratives about the sublime in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This article will argue that the cataclysmic tableau at the climax of Cherubini's first opera for the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, Lodoïska (1791), can be understood as part of a coherent and distinctively French discourse of the sublime, rooted in revolutionary experience that can be understood in relation to wider European trends.

Music, Romanticism, and Politics

“…Harmonic detours, barbaric transitions, exaggerated chromaticism, that is the truck of fools and fanatics'. 14 Harmonic detours, barbaric transitions, exaggerated chromaticism: these sounds might be of the Revolution -but does that make them always an incitement to revolution, intended or perceived, whether in a French or other national context? Many of the features that appeared so dramatically new in Beethoven's music can be traced to Cherubini, whose influence the German composer was happy to admit.…”