On the 12th of March, 1842, the old composer died, surrounded by his affectionate family and friends.  His fatal illness had been brought on in part by grief for the death of his son-in-law, M. Tureas, to whom he was most tenderly attached.  His funeral was one of great military and civic magnificence, and royalty itself could not have been honored with more splendid obsequies.  The congregation of men great in arms and state, in music, painting, and literature, who did honor to the occasion, has rarely been equaled.  His own noble Requiem mass, composed the year before his death, was given at the funeral services in the church of St. Roch by the finest orchestra and voices in Europe.  Similar services were held throughout Europe, and everywhere the opera-houses were draped in black.  Perhaps the death of no musician ever called forth such universal exhibitions of sorrow and reverence.

Cherubini’s life extended from the early part of the reign of Louis XVI. to that of Louis Philippe, and was contemporaneous with many of the most remarkable events in modern history.  The energy and passion which convulsed society during his youth and early manhood undoubtedly had much to do in stimulating that robust and virile quality in his mind which gave such character to his compositions.  The fecundity of his intellect is shown in the fact that he produced four hundred and thirty works, out of which only eighty have been published.  In this catalogue there are twenty-five operas and eleven masses.

As an operatic composer he laid the foundation of the modern French school.  Uniting the melody of the Italian with the science of the German, his conceptions had a dramatic fire and passion which were, however, free from anything appertaining to the sensational and meretricious.  His forms were indeed classically severe, and his style is defined by Adolphe Adam as the resurrection of the old Italian school, enriched by the discoveries of modern harmony.  Though he was the creator of French opera as we know it now, he was free from its vagaries and extravagances.  He set its model in the dramatic vigor and picturesqueness, the clean-cut forms, and the noble instrumentation which mark such masterpieces as “Faniska,” “Aledee,” “Les Deux Journees,” and “Lodoiska.”  The purity, classicism, and wealth of ideas in these works have always caused them to be cited as standards of ideal excellence.  The reforms in opera of which Gluck was the protagonist, and Wagner the extreme modern exponent, characterize the dramatic works of Cherubini, though he keeps them within that artistic limit which a proper regard for melodic beauty prescribes.  In the power and propriety of musical declamation his operas are conceded to be without a superior.  His overtures hold their place in classical music as ranking with the best ever written, and show a richness of resource and knowledge of form in treating the orchestra which his his contemporaries admitted were only equaled by Beethoven.