who flourished at that time, and by its aid he put into form noble and sublime conceptions.  With the grave Gregorian melody, learnedly elaborated in vigorous counterpoint and reduced to greater clearness and elegance without instrumental aid, Palestrina knew how to awaken among his hearers mysterious, grand, deep, vague sensations, that seemed caused by the objects of an unknown world, or by superior powers in the human imagination.  With the same profound thoughtfulness of the old Catholic music, enriched by the perfection which art has attained in two centuries, and with all the means which a composer nowadays can make use of, Cherubini perfected another conception, and this consisted in utilizing the style adapted to dramatic composition when narrating the church text, by which means he was able to succeed in depicting man in his various vicissitudes, now rising to the praises of Divinity, now gazing on the Supreme Power, now suppliant and prostrate.  So that, while Palestrina’s music places God before man, that of Cherubini places man before God.”  Adolphe Adam puts the comparison more epigrammatically in saying:  “If Palestrina had lived in our own times, he would have been Cherubini.”  The masters of the old Roman school of church music had received it as an emanation of pure sentiment, with no tinge of human warmth and color.  Cherubini, on the contrary, aimed to make his music express the dramatic passion of the words, and in the realization of this he brought to bear all the resources of a musical science unequaled except perhaps by Beethoven.  The noble masses in F and D were also written in 1809 and stamped themselves on public judgment as no less powerful works of genius and knowledge.

Some of Cherubini’s friends in 1809 tried to reconcile the composer with the Emperor, and in furtherance of this an opera was written anonymously, “Pimmalione.”  Napoleon was delighted, and even affected to tears.  Instantly, however, that Cherubini’s name was uttered, he became dumb and cold.  Nevertheless, as if ashamed of his injustice, he sent Cherubini a large sum of money, and a commission to write the music for his marriage ode.  Several fine works followed in the next two years, among them the Mass in D, regarded by some of his admirers as his ecclesiastical masterpiece.  Miel claims that in largeness of design and complication of detail, sublimity of conception and dramatic intensity, two works only of its class approach it, Beethoven’s Mass in D and Niedermeyer’s Mass in D minor.

In 1811 Halevy, the future author of “La Juive,” became Cherubini’s pupil, and a devoted friendship ever continued between the two.  The opera of “Les Abencerages” was also produced, and it was pronounced nowise inferior to “Medee” and “Les Deux Journees.”  Mendelssohn many years afterward, writing to Moscheles in Paris, asked:  “Has Onslow written anything new?  And old Cherubini?  There’s a matchless fellow!  I have got his ‘Abencerages,’ and can not