Mehul: L’Irato, Ou L’ Emporté

Opera 21

Mehul: L’Irato, Ou L’Emporté

Soloists 

L’arte del mundo

Werner Ehrhardt

This was a real curiosity. Mehul is a composer that I admire. I listened to Uthal as part of my project last year https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/01/mehul-uthal.html. He was an important figure in the development of French Opera and was notable for the dramatic effects he achieved. This work is very different. It is supposed to have been written as a tongue-in-cheek jest. The story is that Napoleon had a preference for lighter Italian fare and was concerned that French opera composers were writing works that were so serious. So this piece was performed anonymously before the Emperor, who enjoyed it but was then amazed to see Mehul take the stage for a bow at the end of the performance. 

I don’t think that Mehul took the piece at all seriously. It is full of cliched gestures taken from Italian opera but distorted and made quite absurd. But then there are moment where Mehul feels the need to remind us that he was a ‘proper’ composer by writing some quite complex and advanced chromatic harmony which I don’t think is intended to be treated as a joke.  All in all it is a very odd piece and while I was happy to have heard it once I can’t imagine that I will ever want to hear it again. And it is impossible to imagine that the opera could ever be revived on the modern stage.