17 - Pieces into Works: Cherubini’s Substitute Arias for the Théâtre Feydeau

Summary

At the end of 1788 the composer and violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti, together with Marie-Antoinette’s hairdresser, Leonard Autie, acted as frontmen in a rapacious capitalist venture to seize control of the Parisian opera. They were granted a royal privilege to open a new theatre for the staging of mostly Italian operas with some French operas and plays. In 1791 the institution, originally called the Theatre de Monsieur, was renamed the Theatre Feydeau and was merged with the Opera Comique in 1801. Viotti had shared his apartment with Luigi Cherubini since the latter’s arrival in Paris in 1786. Although Cherubini’s rising stardom had just been dented by the cool reception of his tragédie lyrique Démophoon at the Academie Royale de Musique in December 1788, he was hired as house composer for the new theatre: ‘Viotti assigned me an annual salary of 4,000 francs with the obligation to compose all necessary pieces in the Italian works as well as two French operas.’ According to Cherubini, it was to fulfil the latter part of his contract that he wrote Lodoiska (1791) and Eliza (1794): ‘Since these two works were, by virtue of the contract, the property of the administration, I had no copyright whatsoever. I also composed an opera entitled Koukourgi in fulfilment of my contract. But this work never reached the stage.’ In addition, Cherubini mentions that he had the score of Démophoon printed at his own expense and that in May 1789 he began writing the first act of an opera with a royalist topic, Marguerite d’ Anjou, but abandoned the project in 1790, probably for political reasons.

Cherubini’s employment can thus be described as encompassing a terminological field of ‘morceaux’, ‘ouvrages’, ‘operas’, as well as the ‘printed score’ and works over which he had no ‘droits d’ auteur’. My enquiry into the textual, performative and aesthetic aspects of Cherubini’s compositional activities is related to the twentieth-century debate about the historical crises and cultural functions of the ‘work-concept’, which rose to prominence at the height of modernism after the Second World War and which has been thriving in musicology during the last fifteen years.