Le Sueur [Lesueur], Jean-François

(b Drucat-Plessiel, nr Abbeville, 15 Feb 1760; d Paris, 6 Oct 1837). French composer and writer on music. He was one of the most prominent French musicians during the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, distinguishing himself primarily as a composer of operas and religious music.

1. Life.

He came from a background of modest Picardy peasants and seems to have had no family connections (despite his own claims) with the 17th-century French painter Eustache Le Sueur. He showed musical talent at an early age, which led his family to send him to the choir schools of Abbeville and Amiens. He left Amiens in 1776 and spent the next ten years as a choirmaster at various provincial choir schools. While in Sées, he was summoned to Paris for a few months as assistant choirmaster at the church of the Holy Innocents. It was during his stay in the capital that he had lessons in harmony and composition with the Abbé Nicolas Roze, who remained one of his closest friends.

Le Sueur’s first appointments were as choirmaster of St Etienne in Dijon, St Julien in Le Mans and St Martin in Tours. He aroused the hostility of the chapter in Tours by attempting to introduce novel musical practices in the church; shortly afterwards this involved him in still more serious difficulties at Notre Dame in Paris. During this time he made his mark as a composer with performances of his grands motets at the Concert Spirituel, 1782–6. He returned to the church of the Holy Innocents as choirmaster in 1784, and two years later became choirmaster of Notre Dame. He was to remain there only a year, time enough to cause a great stir by presenting what he called his ‘reform of sacred music’. By introducing ‘imitative’ (i.e. essentially theatrical) music into church and by taking great liberties with Latin texts, including the Ordinary of the Mass, he incurred the wrath of the clergy. All his scores of this period are lost, but the young composer subsequently published several treatises that provide a good idea of his intentions.

At about the same time Le Sueur, who had hitherto restricted himself to sacred music, turned to opera. With the help and advice of Sacchini, then in Paris, he undertook the composition of Télémaque. The work was not performed until 1796, and then in a modified and adapted version with additional spoken dialogue.

After spending a number of years in seclusion not far from Paris, Le Sueur reappeared on the scene during the Revolution. He made his début as an opera composer at the Théâtre Feydeau in 1793 with La caverne. Its success placed him, together with Méhul and Cherubini, firmly in the public’s attention during the Revolution. At the same time he became equally well known for his ten hymns, performed at the great festivals of the Revolution. His contemporaries, most notably Napoleon, particularly admired his Chant du Ier vendémiaire an IX, performed at the Hôtel des Invalides by four orchestras and four choirs, a work in which the composer made remarkable use of the effects of acoustic spatialization. There followed two more operas, Paul et Virginie and Télémaque, which were also given successful performances at the Théâtre Feydeau. Le Sueur was associated with the Institut National de Musique (the forerunner of the Paris Conservatoire) from 1793; when the Conservatoire opened in 1795 he became one of the inspectors of teaching. After a disagreement with the Conservatoire’s director, Bernard Sarrette, he left in 1802, though not before he had eloquently defended himself in his Lettre en réponse à Guillard.

In a difficult situation both materially and morally, Le Sueur was saved by Napoleon, who in 1804 appointed him Paisiello’s successor as director of the Tuileries Chapel, which had been restored in 1802. He held this position on his own during the Empire; during the Restoration he shared it first with Martini (until his death in 1816) and then with Cherubini until 1830, when the royal chapel was closed down. It was at the start of this new period in his life that he gained his greatest triumph with Ossian, ou Les bardes. Although it is an uneven work certain scenes undoubtedly brought a breath of fresh air to the French musical stage, foreshadowing the birth of the Romantic sensibility. In this sense the piece, which did not long survive the Napoleonic era (it was last performed in 1817), provides an important date in the history of French opera. Another opera, La mort d’Adam, adapted from Klopstock’s play, failed at the Opéra in 1809. He also collaborated (no doubt to a very minor degree) in two occasional works of musical drama at the Opéra in 1807, L’inauguration du temple de la victoire and Le triomphe de Trajan, most of the music being written by the composer Louis-Luc Loiseau de Persuis. The second work, wholly devoted to an apologia for the ruler and his regime and conjuring up Roman antiquity, with processions of chariots on stage, was an outstanding success and remained popular even under the restored monarchy. His last opera, Alexandre à Babylone, was never performed.

From 1 January 1818 until his death Le Sueur taught composition at the Conservatoire. After the Tuileries Chapel was closed in 1830 he devoted himself to long labours of erudition and compilation, covering innumerable folios with his delicate, cramped handwriting; a few of these have survived, including numerous works on the history of ancient and medieval music, interspersed with moral, religious and philosophical thoughts. At this time, too, he resumed work on his vast Histoire de la musique, which had been announced as early as 1810 but was never published; the manuscript is lost.

2. Achievements and influence.

The substance of Le Sueur’s ideas on theory and history is found in his four-volume Exposé d’une musique (1787). Here the young musician gave evidence of a resolute and sometimes bold intellect, showing himself a true successor to the great 18th-century theorists, above all Rousseau. He took up some of the major aesthetic problems of imitation. For Le Sueur, the essential aim of music is imitation of nature or human passions; divorced from a literary text, music loses nearly all its meaning. The function of imitation is not, he considered, to make a literal copy of an object, but to evoke in the soul of the listener what he called ‘the sensations which one experiences in looking at an object’ (following along these lines, Rousseau had claimed that ‘even silence could be depicted by sounds’). Thus in the ‘Hymn of the Indian Savages’ in Act 1 of Paul et Virginie, the depiction of the sunrise is achieved by a passage consisting almost exclusively of simple triads that produce a curious, almost religious effect of freshness and peace. This theory of imitation, when interpreted strictly, implies a condemnation of instrumental music which affected many French composers and may explain Le Sueur’s exclusive interest in vocal music.

The discussion of Greek music in the Exposé went no further than the views of the 18th-century theorists, but Le Sueur attempted to discover the rhythms of ancient poetry in French versification, thus reviving an old idea of the poets of the Pléiade. He also claimed to have introduced Greek rhythms into his music (particularly in Télémaque), for instance hexameters, in which a crotchet was equivalent to a long syllable and a quaver to a short.

Of Le Sueur’s three operas performed at the Théâtre Feydeau, La caverne is undoubtedly the most original. A modern work for its period, it breaks with the then sacrosanct principle whereby the stylistic features of different genres were kept separate: in the middle of a sombre and violent drama there are several ariettes in the purest opéra comique tradition. The work was extremely successful at the time of the Terror (fig.2), and was subsequently produced in translation in several European countries.

In some ways Paul et Virginie, and above all Télémaque, originally intended for the Opéra on the eve of the Revolution, are more traditional, but they still display several characteristic features of Le Sueur’s musical style: harmonic asperities, and jarring and rather harsh melodies, together with an expressive tremor and constant tension which prove his incontestable dramatic talent. Ossian, ou Les bardes triumphed as much through circumstance (the presence of the Emperor Napoleon at its second performance, the current taste for things ‘Ossianic’, the magnificence of the stage designs; fig.3) as through the musical quality of the work itself, which is somewhat frigid and conventional. La mort d’Adam, however, failed at the Opéra in 1809 and was subsequently ignored. Despite its static dramatic action, the opera contains several great passages of a remarkable religio-dramatic character. Among them is the finale of the third act, entirely of Le Sueur’s invention, conjuring up a grand epic vision of the struggle between Satan and God for Adam’s soul. Alexandre à Babylone was never produced, despite the composer’s efforts and, after his death, those of his wife. Some historians have even described it as lost. In fact Le Sueur’s widow had the score engraved after his death, though only a few copies are still extant. In this last opera the composer’s style broadened out; the orchestral writing is both more brilliant and more refined, and the choruses have a new musical and dramatic importance. Le Sueur was obviously influenced by Spontini’s great French masterpieces, La vestale and in particular Fernand Cortez. Alexandre à Babylone easily bears comparison with Spontini’s later work, Olimpie.

For 25 years Le Sueur was considered one of the masters of French church music. At a time when opera was suffering a period of decline, the Tuileries Chapel, as even foreign writers agreed, shone with exceptional brilliance, owing to the work of Le Sueur and Cherubini. Le Sueur’s sacred music is extremely simple in style. There are few modulations (he claimed that frequent modulations could not be distinctly perceived in cathedral acoustics), few fugues, and a deliberate use of simple, sometimes barren harmonies, with the voices often doubled at the octave. Nevertheless, there is enormous power and skill in his choral writing and much charm in his melodies; it is music which was not designed to be studied, but to be heard in the surroundings for which it was intended. Between 1826 and 1841, 17 volumes of Le Sueur’s church music were published; unfortunately, these scores do not accurately reflect the form in which the works were performed at the Tuileries Chapel. In preparing these volumes, he combined several of his own works, and recomposed by stringing the works together end to end. The manuscripts of his works, in their original form, are extant, however, and reveal that there were 29 major sacred works (masses, oratorios, motets) and 30 shorter pieces, including some sections not in the printed volumes.

Le Sueur’s musical influence on his pupils was less than has sometimes been maintained, certainly by Fouque as far as Berlioz is concerned. That his effect was certainly strong, however, is shown in the fact that between 1822 and 1839, 12 of the 18 winners of the Prix de Rome were, or had been, his pupils; these included Berlioz, Ambroise Thomas and Gounod. His support and encouragement of Berlioz in the early years was received gratefully and always remembered, but once Berlioz had matured and gained command over his talent, he seems to have been vividly conscious of his former teacher’s limitations and the weaknesses of his instruction: Le Sueur, in fact, played only a modest part in forming Berlioz’s musical personality.

Although Le Sueur was not a prolific composer and limited himself virtually to opera and sacred music, he was able to forge a strong personal style. He had been a modernist in his youth, before the years of the Revolution, but subsequently allowed himself to become confined within unduly narrow principles. Persuaded by Berlioz to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, he was on his own admission ‘moved and disturbed’; by the next day he had recovered the balance that he regarded as a fundamental artistic canon and declared that ‘music like that ought not to be written’. He remained essentially untouched by the Romantic movement, except in its early and specifically French aspect, and suspected little of the vast musical revolution that had already been set in motion in Germany.

WORKS

Catalogue: J.-F. Le Sueur: a Thematic Catalogue of his Complete Works, ed. J. Mongrédien (New York, 1980)

stage

all first performed and published in Paris

other works

WRITINGS

Exposé d’une musique une, imitative et particulière à chaque solemnité (Paris, 1787)

Lettre en réponse à Guillard sur l’opéra de La mort d’Adam (Paris, 1801)

‘Observations sur les grandes parties de la musique et de la poésie chantée’, Odes d’Anacréon, trans. J.-B. Gail (Paris, 3/1799)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BerliozM

F. Lamy: Jean-François Le Sueur (1760–1837) (Paris, 1912)

W. Buschkötter: ‘Jean François Le Sueur’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 58–154

M. Herman: The Sacred Music of Jean-François Le Sueur: a Musical and Biographical Source Study (diss., U. of Michigan, 1964)

J. Coutts: Jean-François Le Sueur: a Study of the Composer and Five of his Operas (diss., U. of Cardiff, 1966)

W. Dean: ‘Opera under the French Revolution’, PRMA, xciv (1967–8), 77–96

J. Mongrédien: ‘La musique du sacre de Napoléon’, RdM, liv (1968), 137–74

J. Mongrédien: ‘La musique aux fêtes du sacre de Charles X’, RMFC, x (1970), 87–100

O.F. Saloman: Aspects of ‘Gluckian’ Operatic Thought and Practice in France: the Musico-Dramatic Vision of Le Sueur and La Cépède (1785–1809) in Relation to Aesthetic and Critical Tradition (diss., Columbia U., 1970)

O.F. Saloman: ‘The Orchestra in Le Sueur’s Musical Aesthetics’, MQ, lx (1974), 616–24

O.F. Saloman: ‘La Cépède’s “La poétique de la musique” and Le Sueur’, AcM, xlvii (1975), 144–54

D. Charlton: ‘Ossian, Le Sueur and Opera’, SMA, xi (1977), 37–48

J. Mongrédien: Jean-François Le Sueur: contribution à l’étude d’un demi-siècle de musique française (1780–1830) (Berne, 1980)

C. Keith: The Operas of Jean-François Le Sueur (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1981)

T. Hirsbrunner: ‘Zur Dramaturgie der Oper La caverne von Jean-François Lesueur’, Aufklärungen: Studien zur deutsch-französischen Musikgeschichte: Saarbrücken 1981 [with Fr. summary], 128–30

H. Smither: ‘The Concept of Oratorio in the Music and Writings of Jean-François Le Sueur’, IMSCR XIII: Strasbourg 1982, 602–21

G. Buschmeier: Die Entwicklung von Arie und Szene in der französischen Oper von Gluck bis Spontini (Tutzing, 1991)

D. Charlton: French Opera 1730–1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot, 1999)

JEAN MONGRÉDIEN