Born in Florence in 1760 and trained in Italy, Luigi Cherubini spent most of his career in France on either side of the Revolution, cutting his cloth to suit the prevailing regime and composing primarily operas and sacred music, whose posthumous influence on the 19th century is only latterly being appreciated. Following early successes in Italy and London, in the 1780s he found himself in the French capital, where he ingratiated himself with Marie Antoinette and Parisian intellectual society—an association from which he was careful to distance himself after the Revolution. During the 1790s he composed a number of successful operas, but when fashion began to favor his younger contemporaries, he switched to the composition of sacred music, including coronation music for the restored monarchy and two Requiems, one of them for the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution. The emotional complexity of his French operas influenced Beethoven, Weber, Rossini, Bizet, and even Wagner, making him a central figure in the development of 19th-century grand opera beyond the borders of France, although the importance of his own dramatic music has tended to be downplayed by posterity. His reputation has fluctuated since his death in Paris in 1842, yet some of Cherubini’s finest music, including the Requiems and the operas Médée (1797) and Lodoïska (1791), has never completely vanished from the repertoire.