Lesueur, Jean François (1760–1837)

French composer. He wrote operas and much church music and introduced some orchestral innovations anticipating Hector Berlioz, who was his pupil.

He was born in Drucat, near Abbeville, and first learnt music as a choirboy at Abbeville. He then held church appointments at Amiens and Paris. After 1781 he became musical director successively at Dijon Cathedral, Le Mans, Tours, and Saints Innocents, Paris, in 1784, and Notre-Dame, Paris, in 1786. He was allowed to use a full orchestra at Mass and to open the proceedings with an overture. This aroused a controversy which led to his resignation, and he spent the years 1788–92 in the country, devoted to the composition of operas. In 1793 he was appointed professor at the school of the National Guard and in 1795 one of the inspectors at the newly opened Conservatory. In 1804 he succeeded Giovanni Paisiello as maître de chapelle to Napoleon, after whose fall he was appointed superintendent and composer to the chapel of Louis XVIII. In 1818 he became professor of composition at the Conservatory, where his pupils included Berlioz and Charles Gounod.

Works Opera La Caverne (1793), Paulin et Virginie (after Saint-Pierre, 1794), Télémaque (1796), Ossian, ou Les Bardes (1804), Le Triomphe de Trajan (with Persuis, 1807), La Mort d'Adam (after Klopstock, 1809), and some others.

Church music Mass and Te Deum for Napoleon's coronation, three Solemn Masses, Stabat Mater, motets, psalms, and other church music.

Choral oratorios Messe de Noël, Debora, Rachel, Ruth et Noémi, Ruth et Boaz; cantatas.