Cherubini: Messe Solennelle No. 2 in D minor

Soon after Cherubini´s death it became clear to his contemporaries that he had been a composer who had proceeded from Gluck´s reform opera but had expanded on it in matters of melody, harmony, counterpoint, and instrumentation. Here the extraordinarily intense studies of his youth and his experience as a teacher paid off. The great Belgian music scholar François-Joseph Fétis, a pupil of Cherubini´s noted, “The idea of reconciling taste founded on the strictest truth with the seductive charm of the Italian form was fashioned by Cherubini into a system of the lyric drama capable of doing justice to the twofold task.