Jean-François Lesueur

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Jean-François Lesueur (1818)

Jean-François Lesueur ( Le Sueur ; born February 15, 1760 in Drucat , Plessiel district, near Abbeville ; † October 6, 1837 in Paris ) was a French church musician and composer. In addition to numerous operas, Lesueur composed over thirty masses , four oratorios , a stabat mater and smaller works. Stylistically, he is considered to be the forerunner of Hector Berlioz .

Life

There is uncertainty about Jean-François Lesueur's family origins, it was reported that he was born into a respected and long-established family in Picardy and that he is said to have been a great-nephew of the famous painter Eustache Le Sueur . His later pupil, the composer Hector Berlioz , raved: "An old family from the County of Ponthieu , whose members have held many positions in the military, in court, in the pulpit and in education and the arts." But it is from René Tiron, his Companions in the boys' choir of Amiens Cathedral reported that Lesueur was the son of a "poor farmer" and a memoire from 1802 states that Lesueur was "born of a simple farmer".

Around 1767 Jean-François Lesueur was called in to serve as an altar boy and received the instruction in choral singing required for the mass in the Église collégiale Saint-Vulfran in Abbeville . In 1770 his father "snatched" him from the care of the monks of Saint-Vulfran in order to present this talented boy with a golden voice to the cathedral chapter of Amiens cathedral. In Amiens, the capital of Picardy, Lesueur deepened his vocal and musical training and he also learned Latin, with the predetermined aim of pursuing a professional musical career in sacred or profane music.

From October 1776 to July 1777 Lesueur attended the high school Collège d'Amiens run by the Jesuits , where he received an introduction to theater and ballet in addition to an expansion of his musical skills.

In 1778 he became the music director of the cathedral of Sées in Normandy appointed, a post which he made shortly afterwards to Paris, at Nicolas Roze , harmony study. Roze was entrusted with the musical direction at the Église des Saints-Innocents and was considered a master of his field, which allowed the owner of Niederer Weihen to acquire the title of Abbé without penalty . In 1779 Lesueur was appointed to the Dijon Cathedral , in 1782 he was appointed to the Cathedral of Le Mans and the following year to the Basilica of Saint-Martin de Tours , where he stayed until a few years later in Paris, he succeeded Nicolas Roze . In 1786 he won the music competition for the appointment as first conductor at the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral .

From 1783 or 1784, Lesueur also held the title of Abbé without being entitled to it. When the Paris cathedral chapter offered him an ecclesiastical office, he rejected the proposal and justified this with "his determined aversion to the clergy" ( Mémoire of 1802). This refusal from then on clouded the relationship between the musician and his employer.

On August 15, 1786, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary , Lesueur succeeded in delighting the audience with his church music accompanied by the orchestra . At Easter, Whitsun and Christmas he let the orchestra play again, which each time attracted masses of visitors to the fair and soon earned the Notre-Dame cathedral the reputation of being the “opera of the poor people”, which the world of musicians and clergy is in Uproar. In the text Exposé d'une musique imitative et particulière à chaque solennité from 1787 (German for example: presentation of a special kind of music that stimulates imitation on the occasion of every celebration ), Lesueur defended himself against polemics. The cathedral chapter in Paris reacted violently and decided to cancel the money with which Lesueur had financed the orchestral music, which led him to resign from his position in 1788. For its part, the church had already dismissed the musician in autumn 1787 for “desertion and absenteeism”. He then traveled to London and then lived from the end of 1788 until his death on June 9, 1790 with Jean Bochart de Champigny, the canon of Notre-Dame.

In 1790 Lesueur returned to Paris. The French Revolution brought the dissolution of numerous churches and monasteries and in many cases meant the loss of their jobs for both clergy and church musicians. Almost all professional musicians in France were faced with the premature end of their careers. Jean-François Lesueur also had to adapt to the changed conditions, which he did well with three operas performed at the Théâtre Feydeau : La Caverne ou le Repentir (1793), Paul et Virginie ou le Triomphe de la vertu (1794), Télémaque dans l'île de Calypso ou le Triomphe de la sagesse (1796). The composition of La Caverne was written by Jean Bochart de Champigny while he was in retirement, while Télémaque was composed as early as 1784–1785 when he was still working at the Église des Saints-Innocents.

On November 21, 1793, Lesueur became a professor at the Officers School of the National Guard . In 1795 he was elected to the committee of the Commission des études and was appointed inspector at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, founded by the revolutionary government . With Étienne-Nicolas Méhul , Honoré Langlé , François-Joseph Gossec and Charles-Simon Catel , he wrote Principes élémentaires de la Musique et des Solfèges du Conservatoire (German: principles of the musical elementary teaching of the Conservatory ). However, he had to accept that his two works Ossian ou Les Bardes and La Mort d'Adam were not accepted at the Paris Opera , because they preferred the Sémiramis of his colleague Catel. Bitter about this, Lesueur published the pamphlet Projet d'un plan général de l'instruction musicale en France . In it he attacked the conservatory, its methods and its director directly, which earned him the removal of all offices on September 23, 1802.

By losing his position, Lesueur found himself increasingly troubled economically until he was appointed court conductor of the Chapelle de Tuileries and successor to Giovanni Paisiello by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1804 . After Nicolas Dalayrac's earlier work Le Pavillon du Calife was canceled, Lesueur's best-known composition Ossian ou Les Bardes was finally performed and brought its author a resounding success. The performance at the Opéra de Paris was so popular with the “Emperor of the French”, whose “favorite opera” it was soon to be considered, that Lesueur was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor at Napoleon's instigation . Lesueur then composed a triumphal march for Napoleon's self-coronation and insisted on personally accompanying the imperial coronation of Napoleon I in the Notre-Dame Cathedral with a mass by Paisiello and a vivat by his mentor Nicolas Roze. In 1813 Lesueur was accepted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts , where he took the seat of André Grétry .

During the time of the Restoration , Lesueur again managed to come to terms with the changed political conditions as court composer and conductor, as well as chief d'orchestre at the Paris Opera. On January 1, 1818, he also became a composition teacher at the Conservatory, where Hector Berlioz , Ambroise Thomas , Charles Gounod , Xavier Boisselot , Louis Désiré Besozzi and Antoine François Marmontel were among his students. One of his last works is a coronation mass for Charles X , the performance of which he directed in the Cathedral of Reims . He died in Paris in 1837 and was buried in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise (Division 11).

plant

Works for orchestra

  • 1804 Ossian ou Les Bardes

Works for wind orchestra

  • Marche du Sacre de Napoléon
  • Scène patriotique pour chœur d'hommes et orchester d'harmonie
  • Hymn de triomphe de la République Française
  • Hymn pour le 27 juillet (Chant du IX thermidor)
  • Chant dithyrambique
  • Hymn pour le festival de l'Agriculture
  • Hymn pour l'Inauguration d'un Temple de la Liberte

Oratorios and sacred works

  • 1826 Christmas Oratorio
  • 1833 Super flumina Babylonis , oratorio
  • Rachel , oratorio
  • Ruth et Booz , oratorio

Stage works

Fonts

  • Projet d'un plan général de l'instruction musicale en France , around 1800
  • Notice sur la Melopée, la Rhythmopée, et les grandes caractères de la musique ancienne , 1793

literature

  • Félix Lamy: Jean-François Lesueur (1760-1837). Essai de contribution à l'histoire de la musique française. Fischbacher, Paris 1912.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Clive Unger-Hamilton, Neil Fairbairn, Derek Walters; German arrangement: Christian Barth, Holger Fliessbach, Horst Leuchtmann, et al .: The music - 1000 years of illustrated music history . Unipart-Verlag, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-8122-0132-1 , p. 100 .
  2. ↑ a b René Tiron: La vérité sur Lesueur, ou lettre à Monsieur Raoul Rochette au sujet de la notice qu'il a lue à l'Institut en octobre 1839 sur ce célèbre compositeur, par un de ses anciens compagnons d'enfance . In: France musicale . Paris April 1840 (published April 10 and April 17 given).
personal data
SURNAME Lesueur, Jean-François
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Sueur, Jean-François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French church musician and composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1760
PLACE OF BIRTH Drucat , district of Plessiel, near Abbeville
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1837
Place of death Paris