La mort d'Adam

'The Death of Adam') is a tragédie lyrique on a biblical theme in 3 acts by Jean-François Le Sueur with a French libretto by Nicolas-François Guillard after Klopstock, first performed in 1809, though written a few years earlier.

[1] Musicologist Winton Dean described the work as "the most comprehensive and spectacular opera ever conceived", noting that it "combines a Klopstock play with substantial portions of the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost" and a cast which extends from "the entire human race... the total population of heaven and hell", and with a "Leitmotiv system" of twelve themes, some recalled in combination.

Upset over this decision, Le Sueur published anonymously a pamphlet entitled Projet d'un plan général de l'instruction musicale en France, in which he harshly criticized the methods of instruction followed at the Conservatoire, his rival Catel, and Catel's patron, the director of the Conservatoire.

Le Sueur was subsequently fired from the Conservatoire on 23 September 1802, and the composer lived in a state of poverty for about a year before he became maître de chapelle to the First Consul in Paris in early 1804.

He points to the distinction between a grand overall design and a restrained, classical means of musical utterance, and to the sequence of separate tableaux of dramatic power with connecting narratives omitted or just implicit; in addition, there are symphonies fantastiques and a symphonie funèbre in La mort d'Adam.