Étienne Méhul

Étienne Nicolas Méhul (22 June 1763 – 18 October 1817) was a French composer, "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution". He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic".

Méhul's most important contribution to music was his operas. He led the generation of composers who emerged in France in the 1790s, which included his friend and rival Luigi Cherubini and his outright enemy Jean-François Le Sueur. Méhul followed the example of the operas which Christoph Willibald Gluck had written for Paris in the 1770s and applied Gluck's "reforms" to opéra comique (a genre which mixed music with spoken dialogue and was not necessarily at all "comic" in mood). But he pushed music in a more Romantic direction, showing an increased use of dissonance and an interest in psychological states such as anger and jealousy, thus foreshadowing later Romantic composers such as Weber and Berlioz. Indeed, Méhul was the very first composer to be styled a Romantic; a critic used the term in La chronique de Paris on 1 April 1793 when reviewing Méhul's Le jeune sage et le vieux fou.

Besides operas, Méhul composed a number of songs for the festivals of the Republic (often commissioned by Emperor Napoleon), cantatas, and five symphonies in the years 1797 and 1808 to 1810.