Cherubini Contrepoint

Faniska is an opéra comique 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.

In the second half of 18th century, keyboard music in Tuscany was flourishing. Many composers wrote music for both the fortepiano and the harpsichord: the former, which was invented just before the turn of the 18th century in Florence by harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731), rose to an incredible degree of popularity in the last decades of the century at the expense of the latter, which experienced the last moments of its glorious history. At any rate, it was by no means uncommon that composers published music intended to be played on either instrument, as almost all keyboard pieces written in Tuscany during the 1780s were explicitly addressed per il clavicembalo o fortepiano (for the harpsichord or piano).

Luigi Cherubini has earned a little place in posterity thanks to his Requiem Mass in D minor, written for his own funeral, and above all to his opera Medea, whose revival was one of the highlights of Maria Callas’ career. This strange, unclassifiable composer, not completely classical and only reluctantly romantic, late in life wrote six string quartets, of which Hausmusik London performs the first and last, on period instruments. The former (1814) pays an expected tribute to opera, the first violin frequently showing off in the foreground as a kind of instrumental prima donna.

In 1824, while waiting for the the ninth symphony it commissioned from Beethoven, the Philharmonic Society of London ordered a backup symphony in D major from the Italian-turned-French composer Luigi Cherubini. The Society had been founded ten years earlier to perform music by ‘the greatest masters’, notably Beethoven, Cherubini and Carl Maria von Weber.