Emperor Bokassa might have been a cannibal but his coronation music is worth a listen

If being asked to write music for the coronation of a king is an honour, then doing it for an emperor is even more so, you might think. That was certainly the view of Jean-François Le Sueur (1760-1837), an opera composer who was made director of music at Notre-Dame by Napoleon. At the self-coronation of the ‘Emperor of the French’ in 1804, two choirs and orchestras performed pieces by Le Sueur, who dined out on it for the rest of his life.

Fortunately for him, the French authorities, perhaps keen to forget the vulgar spectacle, never got round to clarifying who wrote what. So, years later, Le Sueur gilded the lily: he lumped together all the coronation music, including a Mass and Te Deum by the safely dead Paisiello, into an ‘oratorio’ under his own name, implying that he’d written everything. The truth didn’t emerge until the early 20th century.