“A wonderful masterpiece,” wrote Donald Francis Tovey on his copy of the score of Étienne-Nicolas Méhul's opera, Uthal, adding rather acidly, “within the limits of its dry cliches.” What Tovey meant by “dry clichés” were those associated with French opéra comique of the period, notably in the works of Andre Gretry (1741–1813), the most influential and popular French composer of the day: that is, music interspersed with spoken dialogue, the latter often overlong. He was no doubt referring to a limitation of the genre, namely the breaking off of musical development in order to advance the plot with dialogue. But Tovey was enthusiastic about the orchestration and tonal resources that Mehul devised for a one-act opera that lasts less than an hour. Famously, the composer omitted violins from his scoring in order to suggest the darker color of the story's origins in the poems of Ossian. Some critics objected to this as tending to produce monotony: Gretry is notoriously recorded as remarking, “Je donnerais un louis pour entendre une chanterelle!” (I'd give a ducat to hear an E string). Berlioz thought the effect of violas and cellos would be a “monotonie plus fatigante que poetique de la continuite de ce timbre clair-obscur” (a monotony more tiring than poetic with the prolongation of that light-dark coloration). Tovey was right, however, in noting that the brevity of the opera would counteract such criticisms.

Uthal is a work by Méhul (1763–1817), the most important opera composer of the age in France, composed in his later maturity. But this opera has had few performances since it was written. It was first performed at the Opéra-Comique on May 17, 1806, two years after Le Sueur's more famous opera Ossian, ou les Bardes (1804). Le Sueur's work had caused a sensation: Napoleon was enthusiastic, rewarding the composer with the Legion d'honneur (instituted on May 19, 1802), and accounts of it stirred audiences and composers as far as Italy and Russia.