Citizens, Subjects, and Survivors
Program Notes

The study of history is a timeless recreation. Living through it is something entirely different. A companion piece to our 2024 program Émigré: French Refugees in the Early United States & the Music They Brought with Them, today’s concert puts the spotlight on an international cast of musicians who rode out the French Revolution and consequent wars in Europe.

The social unraveling that began in 1789 created a complicated and dangerous situation for professional musicians. Until then, a musician’s success was determined almost exclusively by their proximity to the governing nobility. Whether working for a civic, military, or ecclesiastical body, nearly all musicians of 18th-century Europe were bonded by their closeness to aristocratic power. 

When the Bastille fell on July 14, 1789, the question of sovereignty was forced. The revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) brazenly proclaimed that:

“... to remain free one must be constantly on guard against those who govern… it is the sacrilegious
ambition of the government that leads it to attack public liberty, but it is the cowardice of the people that
emboldens the government to forge chains to subjugate them.”

–L'Ami du peuple, September 12, 1789

A line was drawn in the sand; you were either with the people, or against them, and decisions around loyalty had to be made. 

One week after the fall of the Bastille, another institution of royal authority imploded in Paris. The Gardes françaises, the king’s personal regiment, hung up their royal jackets. The soldiers reestablished themselves as a civil militia, the Garde Nationale de Paris, and were led by none other than the hero of two worlds, the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834). 

Among those turncoats were a number of military musicians who formed the corps de musique, or band, of the Garde Nationale de Paris. Serving as the musical director of this new band was the prominent opera composer, conductor, and pedagogue François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829). Having led a career entirely in theatrical and civil spheres, Gossec would not have been the normal choice for such a position. Then again, there was seemingly nothing normal about what was unfolding.

As Paris divorced itself from the Ancien régime, Gossec leaned on his experience as a dramatic composer to write ultrapatriotic pieces and civic hymns that supported the largely secular and anti-Catholic coalitions steering politics early in the Revolution. L’offrande à la liberté (c. 1792) is an example of Gossec’s political work.

Gossec’s second in command was the clarinetist Jean-Xavier Lefèvre (1763–1829). Lefèvre had served in the band of the Gardes françaises since 1778, and was a student of Michel Yost (who loomed large in our 2024 Émigré program). German clarinetist Georg-Friedrich Fuchs (1752–1821), who previously led the band of the Royal Deux-Ponts regiment and may have been present at Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781, also severed his royal affiliation to serve in the band of the Garde Nationale. Luigi Cherubini (1743–1805), already a celebrated theater composer, joined the band in 1794. Down on his luck, Cherubini enlisted not as a turncoat, but apparently simply as a musician looking for a steady paycheck. 

To my knowledge, no musician serving with the Garde Nationale ever faced the “national razor.” Their survival is a testament to how these citoyens made their skills valued to the revolutionary cause. Before Lafayette attempted his escape from France in 1792, the Chronique de Paris reported that he “often repeated that he owed even more to the music of the national guard than to their bayonets.” Blurring the lines between military and civic duty and musical ambition, this cohort would go on in 1795 to found the institution we know today as the Paris Conservatoire. 

The bloodletting of the early 1790s saw the French yearning for domestic stability. At the same time, victories on the frontier and abroad emboldened the young republic’s imperial ambitions. By 1798, a young Corsican upstart began to replace the project of liberté, égalité, fraternité with a series of diplomatic missions and wars asserting French hegemony globally.  

Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805) was already a celebrity by the time Spain became a French client state. His works were so celebrated in Paris that he was even invited to join the faculty of the Paris Conservatoire. Though he declined the job, Boccherini became a favorite of Lucien Bonaparte (1775–1840) who awarded the cello virtuoso an annual pension until his death. 

Despite early resistance to Revolutionary France, Bavaria established an alliance with the ascending Napoleonic regime in the late 1790s. As a reward for their loyalty, Bavaria absorbed several bishoprics that were defeated by the newly self-appointed French emperor. Joseph Küffner (1777–1858) was a guitarist and clarinetist from Würzburg whose early professional life was disrupted by Germany’s changing maps. Following his city’s annexation into Bavaria, Küffner would be or feel compelled to join Bavaria’s army as a bandleader. 

—Dominic Giardino, September 2025