The place which Saint-Beuve gave him in French letters is that of the greatest writer of classic verse after Racine and Boileau.

The operatic story is all fiction, more so, indeed, than that of "Madame Sans-Gene." As a matter of fact, the veritable Chenier was thrown into prison on the accusation of having sheltered a political criminal, and was beheaded together with twenty-three others on a charge of having engaged in a conspiracy while in prison.

In the opera he does not die for political reasons, though they are alleged as a pretext, but because he has crossed the love-path of a leader of the revolution.
When Giordano composed "Siberia," he followed the example of Mascagni and Puccini (if he did not set the example for them) by seeking local color and melodic material in the folk-songs of the country in which his scene was laid.

Puccini went to Japan for musical ideas and devices to trick out his "Madama Butterfly" as Mascagni had done in "Iris." Giordano, illustrating a story of political oppression in "Siberia," called in the aid of Russian melodies.

His exiles sing the heavy-hearted measures of the bargemen of the Volga, "Ay ouchnem," the forceful charm of which few Russian composers have been able to resist.
He introduced also strains of Easter music from the Greek church, the popular song known among the Germans as "Schone Minka" and the "Glory" song (Slava) which Moussorgsky had forged into a choral thunderbolt in his "Boris Godounoff." It is a stranger coincidence that the "Slava" melody should have cropped up in the operas of Giordano and Moussorgsky than that the same revolutionary airs should pepper the pages of "Madame Sans-Gene" and "Andrea Chenier." These operas are allied in subject and period and the same style of composition is followed in both.
Chenier goes to his death in the opera to the tune of the "Marseillaise" and the men march past the windows of Caterina Huebscher's laundry singing the refrain of Roget de Lisle's hymn.