Prompted by the success of Ossian’s poetry during the First Empire, the Opéra-Comique commissioned from Méhul a short and gripping work inspired by James Macpherson’s Celtic reveries. The composer had the brilliant idea of conjuring up the mists of this Scottish fantasy world in his music by using the ‘grisaille’ sonority of an orchestra without violins. The Gothic coloration of wind instruments with divided violas, the melancholy poetry of the harp and solo horn that frequently emerge from the tutti, contrast with the choruses of warriors and the belligerent strains of Larmor and Uthal. The Hymn to Sleep, an eminently Romantic bardic song, came to be seen as one of Méhul’s finest pieces, and was sung over his grave by the Conservatoire students at his funeral in 1817.

Raymond Leppard, CBE (born 11 August 1927, London, England - died 22 October 2019, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA) was an English-American conductor, harpsichordist, composer & editor. In the 1960s, he played a prime role in the rebirth of interest in Baroque music. he was appointed Music Director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1987 (a position which he held for fourteen years).

Mehul was the most famous French composer in the time of the Revolution, Consulate and Empire, praised by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber and Berlioz, and lauded to the skies by Cherubini, who called Stratonice (the fifth of his 35 operas) “a work of genius, Mehul’s masterpiece”. Nor was he alone in this opinion, since in Paris alone it was performed over 200 times during the next quarter of a century, though withdrawn during the Reign of Terror because of the finale praising royal compassion. The opera – comique only in the sense of including spoken dialogue – is serious in tone (as the grave and dramatic overture presages): based on a classical subject, it tells how Seleucus, King of Syria, engages a doctor (Erasistrate) to cure his son Antiochus’s suicidal depression, which is in fact caused by his love for his father’s fiancee, the Princess Stratonice.