year of composition: 1799, 1817

Edited by Markus Stachon & Luisa Naumann

For the appendix of his trilingual edition of the Carmina Anacreontea, published in 1799, the Greek scholar Jean-Baptiste Gail commissioned four Parisian composers from the Conservatoire National de Musique, J.-F. Le Sueur, L. Cherubini, É.-N. Méhul and F.-J. Gossec, to set selected pieces from the ancient poetry book as examples of the musical revival of ancient Greek poetry in the style of the French salon romance. A few years later, a second booklet was published with five new songs for voice with harp or piano accompaniment. With the present edition, for which all accessible sources have been compared and setting errors carefully corrected, the pieces are made accessible again to scholars and practitioners alike after two centuries. Two of the pieces appear for the first time with their original Greek lyrics.