[프랑스] Etienne Mehul

Etienne  Mehul

 

1763. 6. 22 프랑스 아르덴 지베~ 1817. 10. 18 파리. 프랑스의 작곡가.

낭만파 첫 음악가로 불리기도 한다.

18세기말과 19세기초의 중요한 작곡가로 프랑스 오페라 발전에 영향을 끼쳤다.

메윌은 1782년 루소의 대본에 의한 칸타타를 작곡해 연주했다. 글루크와 케루비니의 영향을 받아 극장음악으로 관심을 돌려 1787년 이후 40여 곡 이상의 오페라를 작곡했으며, 주로 오페라 코미크 극장에서 공연했다. 최초로 공연된 그의 오페라는 〈외프로진과 코라댕 혹은 교화된 폭군 Euphrosine et Coradin, ou le tyran corrigé〉(1790)이었으며, 성공적인 작품으로는 〈젊은 앙리 Le Jeune Henri〉(1797)·〈톨레도의 두 장님 Les Deux Aveugles de Tolède〉(1806)·〈우탈 Uthal〉(1806)·〈요셉 Joseph〉(1807) 등이 있다. 그는 대규모 합창과 관현악을 필요로 하는 애국적인 작품도 많이 작곡해 프랑스 혁명 축하행사에서 공연하기도 했는데, 〈이성의 찬가 Hymne à la raison〉(1793)·〈출정의 노래 Chant du départ〉(1794) 등이 그 예이다.

 

메윌은 풍부한 자질을 발휘했다는 점에서 케루비니와 르쉬외르와 함께 베를리오즈를 미리 예견한 작곡가였다. 뛰어난 대본작가를 만나지는 못했지만 대담한 화성감각을 지녔으며, 극적 요소와 관현악을 다루는 천부적 재능을 타고났다. 오페라에 있어 관현악의 역할을 강조해 음악 주제를 극내용의 전개에 따라 교향곡적으로 발전시켰다. 오페라 외에도 피아노소나타·실내악·교향곡 등을 작곡하기도 했다. 프랑스 혁명의 결과 탄생된 새로운 음악적 정신에 큰 영향을 끼쳤고, 베를리오즈는 물론 슈베르트·베버·베토벤까지 그의 개혁정신을 높이 평가했다.

 

< 주요 작품>

 

* piano 작품

• 3 Sonates for Piano, op. 1 (1783)
• 3 Sonates for Piano, op. 2 (1788)

* Orchestral music

• Ouverture burlesque (1794)
• Ouverture pour instruments à vent (1794)
• Symphony in C (1797, only parts are surviving)
• Symphony No.3 in C major (1809)
• Symphony No.5 (1810, only a first movement survives)

 

                                  * Symphony No 1 In G Minor (1808/09)

 

Orchestra Of The Gulbenkian Foundation - Michel Swierczewski, conductor

==============================================================================

 

                            * Symphony No.2 in D major (1808/09)

 

Intèrprets: The Gulbenkian Orchestra (ensemble); Michel Swierczewski (conductor)

==============================================================================

 

Symphony No.4 in E major (1810)

 

 

Mehul 은 아르드니의 기베에서 태어났다,,,그의 아버지는 찢어지게 가난했으므로 정규적인 음악교육을 받을 수 없었으며 동네의 눈멀고 가난한 오르간 연주자에게 최초로 렛슨을 받았던 것으로 알려져 있다. 그러나

그의 타고난 자질에 힘입어 10살 무렵  convent of the Recollets 의 오르간 연주자로 지명되었다..

1775년 기베로부터 몇 마일 떨어진 수도원과 계약 중이던 독일의 오르간 연주자이며 작곡가였던  Wilhelm

Hauser 의 예비 제자가 되었다.

 

1778년 혹은 1779 에 파리로가 당시 메윌의 우상이었던 글룩의 친구 Jean-Frederic Edelmann 의

제자가 되었으며 1783년 그의 최초의 작품집인 합시코드를 위한 작품집이 출판되었다,,,그는 또한 1780년대 까지 대중적인 오페라의 아리아 등을 편곡하기도 하였으며 오페라 작곡가로써 경력을 쌓아야겠다는 생각을

하게되었다..1787년 작가인 Valadier 는 그에게 Cora 라는 대본을 주었으며 이 오페라는 4년뒤에 무대에
올려지게 되엇다..메윌은 곧 대본 작가였던 Francois-Benoit Hoffman 이라는 매우 이상적인 그의

조력자를 찾아냈다..그는 메윌의 첫 오페라 Euphrosine 이 연주될 수 있도록 조력하기도 했다.

 

1790년 새로운 재능을 가진 작곡가라는 평가와 아울러 첫 거대한 성공을 거두었다...이는 코미크라는 오페라와의 오랜 밀월 관계를 예고하는 것이었다.오페라 "코라"의 실패와 오페라 Adrien이 정치적인 이유로 공연 금지되었으나 Stratonice 과 Me lidore et Phrosine 와 같은 작품을 통해 그의 명성을 확고한 것으로 만들었다...

 

 

프랑스혁명기 동안 그는 애국심을 고취하기 위한 내용의 노래들과 선전 선동의 목적을 가진 작품을 작곡했다..그중 가장 대표적인 작품이 Chant du depart 이다...그는 1795년 새롭게 창단된 Institut de France 의

멤버로서 보수를 받는 최초의 작곡가였다...그는 또한 Conservatoire de Paris 의 5명의 감찰사중의 한사람

이었다...

 

메윌은 나폴레옹과 스스럼 없을 정도로  친근한 사이로 Legion d'honneur 를 받은 최초의 프랑스인 가운데 한 사람이기도 했다...

 

오페라 Joseph (1807) 이 특별히 독일과  세계적으로 널리 알려졌다고는 하나 19세기 초 10년간 메윌의
오페라는  그닥 커다란 성공을 거두지는 못햇다.. 1811년 그의 오페라 Les Amazones 의 실패는 심한 타격을 주었으며 사실상 극음악 작곡가로서 그의 경력은 끝이난 것이었다...나폴레옹과의 친분에도 불구하고 부르봉 왕조가 복귀했을 때 그는 작곡가로서 생명력을 잃지는 않았으나 결핵으로 이미 많이 쇠약해져 있었다... 

1817년에 삶을 마감했으며 Pere Lachaise 묘지에 그와 동시대 작곡가였던 고섹의 곁에  안장되었다...

 

메윌의 가장 중요하게 언급되어야할 분야의 음악은 오페라이다..그는 그의 친구이자 라이벌이었던 케루비니와 노골적인 적대자였던 Jean-Francois Lesueur 를 포함하여 1790년대 활동했던 프랑스 작곡가 세대를 이끌었던 작곡가이다...그는 글룩이 파리에서 1770년대에 발표했던 작품들의 예를 따라 글룩의 작품을 재편성하고 수정한 오페라 코미크를 주로 작곡하엿다...그러나 그는 보다 낭만적인 요소를 집어 넣었으며 불협화음을 즐겨 사용했으며 분노와 질투 등 극단적 심리를 표현하는데 흥미를 가졌다. 이는 베버와 베를리오즈와 같은 낭만파 작곡가들의 작품을 예고하는 것으로 중요한 의미를 갖는 것이다...이러한 점들은 그를 초기 낭만주의 작곡가로 보는 경향의 단서를 제공하는 것이다..

 

오페라 이외에 혁명기의 공화정의 축제를 위한 노래들을 많이 작곡했다...가끔 나폴레옹이 작품에 대한 댓가를 지불했다고 전한다...칸타타와 1797년과 1808년에서 1810년까지 작곡된  5곡의 교향곡이 있다...그의 첫번째 교향곡은 멘델스죤의 한 콘서트에서 Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra 에의해 1838년과 1846년에 연주된 바 있는데 이 때 청중 가운데는 메윌에 깊은 인상을 받은  슈만이 있었다,,슈만의 지적에 의하면 이 교향곡의 4개 악장은 불협화음과 격렬한 감정을 드러내는 첫악장, 현의 피치카토의 3번 째 악장 등 베토벤의 교향곡 5번과 상당한 유사성을 드러내고 있다..실제로 당시에 베토벤의 교향곡 1번과 2번은 프랑스에서 연주된 바 있으며 베토벤의 5번 교향곡과 메윌의 1번 교향곡은 1808년에 작곡되었고 1809년에 출간 되었다...메윌은 그의 농익은 교향곡들 안에서 19세기 초반 프랑스에서 유행했던 하이든과 모짤트에게로 난 다양한 길을 확보하고 있다.그의 5번 째 교향곡은 결핵이 키운 좌절과 환멸감에 의해 완성되지 못한 채 남겨져있다..

 

[해설 출처] Etienne Mehul (1763 -1817)프랑스 혁명기의 오페라 작곡가 혹은 최초의 낭만파 음악가|작성자 레인트리

 

Méhul was born at Givet in Ardennes to Jean-François Méhul, a wine merchant, and his wife Marie-Cécile (née Keuly). His first music lessons came from a blind local organist, but he had innate aptitude and was sent to study with a German musician and organist, Wilhelm Hanser, at the monastery of Lavaldieu, a few miles from Givet. Here Méhul developed his lifelong love of flowers.^[3]

In 1778 or 1779 he went to Paris and began to study with Jean-Frédéric Edelmann, a harpsichord player and friend of Méhul's idol Christoph Willibald von Gluck. Méhul's first published composition was a book of piano pieces in 1783. He also arranged airs from popular operas and by the late 1780s he had begun to think about an operatic career for himself.

In 1787, the writer Valadier offered Méhul one of his libretti, Cora, which had been rejected by Gluck in 1785.^[4] The Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra) put Méhul's work, under the title Alonzo et Cora, into rehearsal in June 1789. However, the rehearsals were abandoned on 8 August, probably because the Opéra had been suffering severe financial difficulties throughout the 1780s, and the opera was not premiered until 1791.^[5] In the meantime, Méhul found an ideal collaborator in the librettist François-Benoît Hoffman, who provided the words to the first of Méhul's operas to be performed, Euphrosine. Its premiere in 1790 was an immense success and marked the composer out as a new talent. It was also the start of his long relationship with the Comédie Italienne theatre (soon to be renamed the Opéra-Comique).

Méhul in 1799, portrait by Antoine Gros.

In spite of the failure of Cora in 1791 and the banning of Adrien for political reasons the year after that, Méhul consolidated his reputation with works such as Stratonice and Mélidore et Phrosine. During the French Revolution, Méhul composed many patriotic songs and propaganda pieces, the most famous of which is the Chant du départ. Méhul was rewarded by becoming the first composer named to the newly founded Institut de France in 1795. He also held a post as one of the five inspectors of the Conservatoire de Paris. Mehul was on friendly terms with Napoleon and became one of the first Frenchmen to receive the Légion d'honneur.

Méhul's operatic success was not as great in the first decade of the nineteenth century as it had been in the 1790s, although works such as Joseph (1807) became famous abroad, particularly in Germany. The failure of his opera Les amazones in 1811 was a severe blow and virtually ended his career as a composer for the theatre. Despite his friendship with Napoleon, Méhul's public standing survived the transition to the Bourbon Restoration intact. However, the composer was now seriously ill with tuberculosis and he died on 18 October 1817.^[6] His grave is at Père Lachaise Cemetery, near the grave of the Belgian composer, his contemporary François Joseph Gossec.

In 1797 Méhul adopted his seven-year-old nephew, composer Joseph Daussoigne-Méhul, and his younger brother. He played a major role in his nephew's musical education and career; counting him among his pupils at the Conservatoire de Paris. After his death, Daussoigne-Méhul notably completed his unfinished opera Valentine de Milan which premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1822. He also wrote new recitatives for his opera Stratonice in 1821 for a revival of that work in Paris.^[7]

 

Méhul's most important contribution to music was his operas. He led the generation of composers who emerged in France in the 1790s, which included his friend and rival Luigi Cherubini and his outright enemy Jean-François Le Sueur. Méhul followed the example of the operas which Gluck had written for Paris in the 1770s and applied Gluck's "reforms" to opéra comique (a genre which mixed music with spoken dialogue and was not necessarily at all "comic" in mood). But he pushed music in a more Romantic direction, showing an increased use of dissonance and an interest in psychological states such as anger and jealousy, thus foreshadowing later Romantic composers such as Weber and Berlioz. Indeed, Méhul was the very first composer to be styled a Romantic; a critic used the term in La chronique de Paris on 1 April 1793 when reviewing Méhul's Le jeune sage et le vieux fou.^[8]

Méhul's main musical concern was that everything should serve to increase the dramatic impact. As his admirer Berlioz wrote:

[Méhul] was fully convinced that in truly dramatic music, when the importance of the situation deserves the sacrifice, the composer should not hesitate as between a pretty musical effect that is foreign to the scenic or dramatic character, and a series of accents that are true but do not yield any surface pleasure. He was convinced that musical expressiveness is a lovely flower, delicate and rare, of exquisite fragrance, which does not bloom without culture, and which a breath can wither; that it does not dwell in melody alone, but that everything concurs either to create or destroy it - melody, harmony, modulation, rhythm, instrumentation, the choice of deep or high registers for the voices or instruments, a quick or slow tempo, and the several degrees of volume in the sound emitted.^[9]

One way in which Méhul increased dramatic expressivity was to experiment with orchestration. For example, in Uthal, an opera set in the Highlands of Scotland, he eliminated violins from the orchestra, replacing them with the darker sounds of violas in order to add local colour.^[10] Méhul's La chasse du jeune Henri (Young Henri's Hunt) provides a more humorous example, with its expanded horn section portraying yelping hounds as well as giving hunting calls. (Sir Thomas Beecham frequently programmed this piece to showcase the Royal Philharmonic horn section.)

Méhul's key works of the 1790s were Euphrosine, Stratonice, Mélidore et Phrosine and Ariodant.^[11] Ariodant, though a failure at its premiere in 1799, has come in for particular praise from critics. Elizabeth Bartlet calls it "Mehul's best work of the decade and a highpoint of Revolutionary opera".^[12] It deals with the same tale of passion and jealousy as Handel's 1735 opera Ariodante. As in many of his other operas, Mehul makes use of a structural device called the "reminiscence motif", a musical theme associated with a particular character or idea in the opera. This device looks forward to the leitmotifs in Richard Wagner's music dramas. In Ariodant, the reminiscence motif is the cri de fureur ("cry of fury"), expressing the emotion of jealousy.^[12]

Around 1800, the popularity of such stormy dramas began to wane, replaced by a fashion for the lighter opéra comiques of composers such as François-Adrien Boieldieu. In addition, Mehul's friend Napoleon told him he preferred a more comic style of opera. As a Corsican, Napoleon's cultural background was Italian, and he loved the opera buffa of composers like Paisiello and Cimarosa. Méhul responded with L'irato ("The Angry Man"), a one-act comedy premiered as the work of the Italian composer "Fiorelli" in 1801. When it became an immediate success, Méhul revealed the hoax he had played.^[13] Méhul also continued to compose works in a more serious vein. Joseph, based on the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, is the most famous of these later operas, but its success in France was short-lived. In Germany, however, it won many admirers throughout the nineteenth century, including Wagner.^[14] A melody from Joseph is very similar to a popular folk melody widely known in Germany which was used as a song in the Imperial German Navy, and adapted, notoriously, as the tune for the co-national anthem of Nazi Germany, the Horst-Wessel-Lied. It is unclear, however, whether Méhul's melody was the actual provenance of the melody.^[15]

Symphonies and other works

Besides operas, Méhul composed a number of songs for the festivals of the republic (often commissioned by the emperor Napoleon), cantatas, and five symphonies in the years 1797 and 1808 to 1810.The First Symphony was revived in one of Felix Mendelssohn's concerts with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1838 and 1846 to an audience including Robert Schumann, who was impressed by the piece. In all four movements there are some stylistic similarities with Beethoven's Symphony No.5 (including the dissonant, furious mood of the first movement and the string pizzicatos in the third), which were also noted by Schumann. Actually at this date only Beethoven's Symphonies No.1 and 2 (1799/1800 and 1802) had been performed in France and both Beethoven's Fifth and Mehul's First were composed in the same year, 1808, were published in the following, 1809. In his mature symphonies, Mehul continued the path taken by Haydn (the Paris Symphonies, 1785–86, for example) and Mozart (Symphony No. 40, K.550, 1788), two composers who enjoyed great popularity in France in the early 19th century. A fifth symphony was never completed—"as disillusionment and tuberculosis took their toll", as David Charlton pointed out. The Symphonies nos.3 and 4 were only rediscovered by Charlton in 1979. Interviewed 8 November 2010 on the on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Professor Charlton said that Méhul's 4th Symphony was the first ever to employ the cyclical principle.