Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/48



In any case he was not a success as a revolutionary musician. And when one considers what the music of the Revolution was like, he is to be congratulated on the fact. With the exceptions of the sublime Marseillaise and the two masterpieces of Méhul, the Song of Departure and Song of Return (the latter not so fine, but still very strong and stately), the history of French musical art offers nothing worse. Cherubini was a great musician, Gossec an elegant and lively composer with a happy cleverness, Lesueur an artist by nature, very interesting and bold. But their civic music, characterised by a clumsy and hollow emphasis which they mistake for Roman majesty, is unbearable. It is rather like Glück re-fashioned after his own taste by the theatre fireman. Grétry could not adopt that tone. He had lived too long under the reign of good taste.

Moreover these composers brought in a richer instrumentation, and, one must admit, a fuller scoring than his, which had always been rather scanty. These new methods also helped to estrange the public from him. However in 1797 a reaction took place in his favour. Lisbeth and Anacreon and Polycrates (a very interesting work, though one misses in it the bloom of his best years) were very successful.

During the last ten years of his life he almost gave up composing. He said that music now only interested on its theoretical and philosophic side, and he felt himself beset by all the questionings of the human mind. He gave himself up to meditation and began to write. He wrote with a certain child-like simplicity if one may judge by the title of a work that appeared in 1801: