Biography
Étienne-Nicolas Méhul was born in 1763 in Givet in northern France, the son of a cook, and received his first musical training as an organist at the abbey of Val-Dieu before moving to Paris in 1778. Influenced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and André Grétry, he quickly became one of the leading stage composers of the Revolutionary era with his first opera, Euphrosine (1790). In 1795 he was among the founding members of the Paris Conservatoire and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Across more than 40 stage works he experimented with unusual orchestration, such as omitting violins in Uthal (1806), and his dramatic musical language shaped the turn of opera toward Romanticism, influencing composers including Carl Maria von Weber. Méhul died in Paris in 1817; his best-known work, the biblical opera Joseph (1807), remains in the repertoire today.
On Stagelog
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