ed to a few musicians like
himself. Once, indeed, his having learned the violin as a child was the
means of saving his life. Independently venturing out at night, he was
arrested by a roving band of drunken _Sansculottes_, who were seeking
musicians to conduct their street chants. Somebody recognized Cherubini
as a favorite of court circles, and, when he refused to lead their
obscene music, the fatal cry, "The Royalist, the Royalist!" buzzed
through the crowd. At this critical moment another kidnapped player
thrust a violin in Cherubini's hands and persuaded him to yield. So
the two musicians marched all day amid the hoarse yells of the drunken
revolutionists. He was also enrolled in the National Guard, and obliged
to accompany daily the march of the unfortunate throngs who shed their
blood under the axe of the guillotine. Cherubini would have fled from
these horrible surroundings, but it was difficult to evade the vigilance
of the French officials; he had no money; and he would not leave the
beautiful Cecile Tourette, to whom he was affianced.

One of the theatres opened during the revolutionary epoch was the
Theatre Feydeau. The second opera performed was Cherubini's "Lodoiska"
(1791), at which he had been laboring for a long time, and which was
received throughout Europe with the greatest enthusiasm and delight, not
less in Germany than in France and Italy. The stirring times aroused a
new taste in music, as well as in politics and literature. The dramas of
Racine and the operas of Lulli were akin. No less did the stormy
genius of Schiller find its counterpart in Beethoven and Cherubini. The
production of "Lodoiska" was the point of departure from which the great
French school of serious opera, which has given us "Robert le Diable,"
"Les Huguenots," and "Faust," got its primal value and significance. Two
men of genius, Gluck and Gretry, had formed the taste of the public in
being faithful to the accents of nature. The idea of reconciling this
taste, founded on strict truth, with the seductive charm of the Italian
forms, to which the French were beginning to be sensible, suggested to
Cherubini a system of lyric drama capable of satisfying both. Wagner
himself even says, in his "Tendencies and Theories," speaking of
Cherubini and his great co-laborers Mehul and Spontini: "It would be
difficult to answer them, if they now perchance came among us and asked
in what respect we had improved on their mode of musical procedure