Louis Niedermeyer

His first opera, Il reo per amore (Guilty for Love), premiered at the Teatro del Fondo in Naples in 1820 and encountered some success.

Adapting a poem that was considered one of the jewels of French Romantic poetry was a difficult task and Niedermeyer earned praise from Lamartine himself: A thousand attempts have been made to add a plaintive melody to the pain expressed in these stanzas.

[10]In the last decades of his life, Niedermeyer gradually abandoned his operatic career and devoted himself primarily to sacred and secular vocal music.

As early as 1840, Niedermeyer and his friend, Prince de la Moskowa, had supported a revival of Baroque and Renaissance music and the rediscovery of composers such as Palestrina, Lassus or Victoria.

Despite these unfavourable circumstances, Louis Niedermeyer founded a Society of Vocal and Religious Music in 1840, with the help of his 'pupil' Prince de la Moskowa.

The details of these performance did not, understandably, conform all that closely to modern musicological practice, containing as they did tempo indications (generally slow), dynamic markings and so-called 'corrections' of the harmony.

Even so we must acknowledge Niedermeyer as a pioneer of polyphonic music in France, fifty years before the famous performances of the Chanteurs de St-Gervais, conducted by Charles Bordes and so much admired by Debussy.

[12]In 1857, Niedermeyer published a treatise on plainchant (1857) and founded La Maitrise, a journal that presented writings about and examples of early church music.

[13] Shortly before his death, he published a manual for the use of organs in church music, Accompagnement pour Orgues des Offices de l'Église.