Étienne Méhul - Symphony no.1 in G minor (1808): Allegro - Andante - Final

Étienne Méhul - Symphony no.1 in G minor (1808): Allegro - Andante - Final. Performed by the Gulbenkian Orchestra, conducted by Michel Swierczewski. Recorded December 1988 in Lisbon, Portugal. Record label: Nimbus. This video of classical music is solely for personal educational purposes. No copyright infringement intended. Videos are always incidental extracts from published works. If you like the music, please consider supporting the artist and the label by buying the music. Discover more lesser known classical gems at ‪‪@gorgeousclassicalunknown‬ . From Wikipedia: Étienne Nicolas Méhul (22 June 1763 – 18 October 1817) was a French composer of the late classical and early romantic periods. He was known as "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution". He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic". He is known particularly for his operas, written in keeping with the reforms introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 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. When he showed promise, he 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. 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. 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." 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. Mehul's First Symphony (1808) is notable for its dissonant and violent mood, and has been compared to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, written in the same year. Taking inspiration from the more anguished works of Haydn and Mozart, such as Haydn's Sturm und Drang and later Paris Symphonies of 1785–86 and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 (K. 550, 1788), it 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. His other symphonies also followed German and Austrian models. Commenting after the premiere of his first symphony, he noted: "I understood all the dangers of my enterprise; I foresaw the cautious welcome that the music-lovers would give my symphonies. I plan to write new ones for next winter and shall try to write them… to accustom the public gradually to think that a Frenchman may follow Haydn and Mozart at a distance."