“At this time,” we are told by Laf age, “Cherubini had two distinct styles, one of which was allied to Paisiello and Cimarosa by the grace, elegance, and purity of the melodic forms; the other, which attached itself to the school of Gluck and Mozart, more harmonic than melodious, rich in instrumental details.”  This manner was the then unappreciated type of a new school destined to change the forms of musical art.

In 1790 the Revolution broke out and rent the established order of things into fragments.  For a time all the interests of art were swallowed up in the frightful turmoil which made Paris the center of attention for astonished and alarmed Europe.  Cherubini’s connection had been with the aristocracy, and now they were fleeing in a mad panic or mounting the scaffold.  His livelihood became precarious, and he suffered severely during the first five years of anarchy.  His seclusion was passed in studying music, the physical sciences, drawing, and botany; and his acquaintance was wisely confined to a few musicians like himself.  Once, indeed, his having learned the violin as a child was the means of saving his life.  Independently venturing out at night, he was arrested by a roving band of drunken Sansculottes, who were seeking musicians to conduct their street chants.  Somebody recognized Cherubini as a favorite of court circles, and, when he refused to lead their obscene music, the fatal cry, “The Royalist, the Royalist!” buzzed through the crowd.  At this critical moment another kidnapped player thrust a violin in Cherubini’s hands and persuaded him to yield.  So the two musicians marched all day amid the hoarse yells of the drunken revolutionists.  He was also enrolled in the National Guard, and obliged to accompany daily the march of the unfortunate throngs who shed their blood under the axe of the guillotine.  Cherubini would have fled from these horrible surroundings, but it was difficult to evade the vigilance of the French officials; he had no money; and he would not leave the beautiful Cecile Tourette, to whom he was affianced.

One of the theatres opened during the revolutionary epoch was the Theatre Feydeau.  The second opera performed was Cherubini’s “Lodoiska” (1791), at which he had been laboring for a long time, and which was received throughout Europe with the greatest enthusiasm and delight, not less in Germany than in France and Italy.  The stirring times aroused a new taste in music, as well as in politics and literature.  The dramas of Racine and the operas of Lulli were akin.  No less did the stormy genius of Schiller find its counterpart in Beethoven and Cherubini.  The production of “Lodoiska” was the point of departure from which the great French school of serious opera, which has given us “Robert le Diable,” “Les Huguenots,” and “Faust,” got its primal value and significance.  Two men of genius, Gluck and Gretry, had formed the taste of the public in being faithful to the accents of nature.