Étienne Nicolas Méhul was born on 22 June 1763 at Givet in the Ardennes, the son of a wine merchant, and had his first lessons from a blind local organist. Showing promise, he was sent to the German organist Wilhelm Hanser at the monastery of Lavaldieu a few miles away, where he also acquired the love of flowers he kept all his life. In 1778 or 1779 he went to Paris and studied with Jean-Frédéric Edelmann, a harpsichordist and friend of Gluck, whom Méhul idolised; his first published work was a book of piano pieces in 1783, and he made arrangements of airs from popular operas before turning to the stage himself in the late 1780s. He was on friendly terms with Napoleon, and his standing survived the Bourbon Restoration intact, though by then he was seriously ill. He died on 18 October 1817.

He was the leading opera composer in France during the Revolution, and the first composer to be described as Romantic; his stage works follow the reforms of Gluck and Mozart. Euphrosine, on a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman, was an immediate success at its 1790 premiere and began his long association with the theatre that became the Opéra-Comique; Stratonice and Mélidore et Phrosine consolidated the reputation, despite the failure of Cora in 1791 and the banning of Adrien on political grounds the next year. His patriotic pieces of the Revolutionary years include the Chant du départ. In 1795 he became the first composer named to the new Institut de France, served as one of the five inspectors of the Paris Conservatoire, and was among the first Frenchmen to receive the Legion of Honour. Joseph (1807) became famous abroad, particularly in Germany, but the failure of Les amazones in 1811 effectively ended his theatrical career.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_M%C3%A9hul
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q364020