Luigi Cherubini

Luigi Cherubini was born in Florence in September 1760, the son of a maestro al cembalo at the Teatro della Pergola. He studied with Sarti from 1778, and across the 1780s built a successful career as a composer of opera seria in the Italian houses. He moved to London briefly in 1784, then settled permanently in Paris from 1788, where the upheaval of the Revolution shaped both his career and his style.

He produced a series of operas in Paris that influenced Beethoven and shaped the French *opéra comique* and rescue-opera traditions: *Lodoïska* (1791), *Médée* (1797), *Les deux journées* (1800), and *Faniska* (1806). His sacred music — the *Requiem in C minor* (1816), composed for the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, and the *Requiem in D minor* (1836), composed for his own funeral — were widely admired by his contemporaries and by Beethoven, who considered Cherubini the greatest of his living contemporaries. He served as Director of the Paris Conservatoire from 1822 until shortly before his death.

Cherubini died in Paris in March 1842 and was buried at Père Lachaise. Music Preserved’s archive includes a selection of his sacred and operatic work in twentieth-century performance.