ÉTIENNE-NICOLAS MEHUL was acknowledged as “the most important opera composer of France during the Revolution”. Active in the organisation of grand popular celebrations and in the creation of the Institut National de Musique (the future Paris Conservatoire, which he would later head), he also wrote a number of popular mass songs that gained popularity on a par with La Marseillaise. He was the author of 45 operas, among which the one-act comic STRATONICE to a libretto by François Benoît Hoffmann, staged at the Paris Opera comique on May 3^rd,  1792, is particularly famous.