Mehul's music is marked by grandeur, simplicity, lofty sentiment,
and consistent severity of manner. The composer's predilection for
ecclesiastical music, created, no doubt, by the blind organist who
taught him in his childhood and nourished by his studies and labors
at the monastery under the gifted Hauser, found opportunity for
expression in the religious sentiments of the drama, and his
knowledge of plain chant is exhibited in the score "the simplicity,
grandeur, and dramatic truth of which will always command the
admiration of impartial musicians," remarks Gustave Choquet. The
enthusiasm of M. Tiersot goes further still, for he says that the
music of "Joseph" is more conspicuous for the qualities of dignity
and sonority than that of Handel's oratorio. The German Hanslick,
to whom the absence from the action of the "salt of the earth,
women" seemed disastrous, nevertheless does not hesitate to
institute a comparison between "Joseph" and one of Mozart's latest
operas. "In its mild, passionless benevolence the entire role of
Joseph in Mehul's opera," he says, "reminds one strikingly of
Mozart's 'Titus,' and not to the advantage of the latter. The opera
'Titus' is the work of an incomparably greater genius, but it
belongs to a partly untruthful, wholly modish, tendency (that of
the old opera seria), while the genre of 'Joseph' is thoroughly
noble, true, and eminently dramatic. 'Joseph' has outlived
'Titus.'" [Footnote: "Die Moderne Opera," p. 92.] Carl Maria von
Weber admired Mehul's opera greatly, and within recent years Felix
Weingartner has edited a German edition for which he composed
recitatives to take the place of the spoken dialogue of the
original book.

There is no story of passion in "Joseph." The love portrayed there
is domestic and filial; its objects are the hero's father,