Charles Gounod

French composer

• Born: June 17, 1818
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 18, 1893
• Place of death: St. Cloud, France

Because of his great popularity and stylistic influence on the next generation of composers, Gounod is often considered to be the central figure in French music in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Early Life

The father of Charles-François Gounod (gew-noh), Nicolas-François Gounod, was a gifted painter and winner of a Second Prix de Rome in 1783. His mother, Victoire Lemachois, a pianist, gave her son his early musical instruction. After completing his academic studies at the Lycée Saint-Louis, Charles Gounod received private musical training from composer-theorist Antoine Reicha; in 1836, when Gounod entered the Paris Conservatoire, he studied with such professors as Jacques Halévy (counterpoint), Jean-François Le Sueur (composition), and Pierre Zimmermann (piano). The extent of his musical education before entering the Paris Conservatoire, coupled with his exceptional talent, led him to win a Second Prix de Rome in 1837 and the Grand Prix de Rome two years later.

On December 5, 1839, Gounod left Paris for Rome; it was during his years in Rome that he met several women who played a significant role in his musical development. Felix Mendelssohn’s married sister, Fanny Hensel, an accomplished pianist, introduced Gounod to the music of her brother, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, as well as to the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Pauline Garcia was the sister of Maria Felicia Garcia Malibran, a singer who had been much admired by the young French artistic world before her death in 1836 at the age of twenty-eight. Pauline, besides being an excellent singer with a unique mezzo-soprano voice, was also married to Louis Viardot, director of the Théâtre-Italien and a valuable ally for a young composer.

Another important influence in Gounod’s life was the Dominican Friar Père Lacordaire. Lacordaire’s sermons, which caused a great stir in Rome between the years 1838 and 1841, also impressed the young Gounod, whose sensibilities were constantly engaged in a battle between the sacred and the profane.

In the fall of 1842, Gounod left Rome for Vienna, where he received commissions for two masses, which were performed at the Karlskirche on November 2 (a requiem) and on March 25, 1843. During his stay in Vienna, Gounod had an opportunity to hear the Gewandhaus orchestra, probably the best orchestra in Europe at the time. Fortunate among French musicians of his generation, Gounod became acquainted with music, past and present, that was neither operatic nor within the French tradition.

After his return to Paris, Gounod became organist of the Missions Étrangères. However, he soon found himself in conflict with congregations who viewed the music of Bach and Giovanni Palestrina, music that Gounod greatly admired, as strange and unattractive. At this time in his life, Gounod’s inclinations as well as his work led him to frequent ecclesiastical circles. Undoubtedly, this fact, combined with the influence of Lacordaire’s sermons, inspired his decision to study for the priesthood. Although he took courses at St. Sulpice between 1846 and 1848, Gounod later referred to this interest in the priesthood as but a passing fancy.

Life’s Work

The music that Gounod wrote immediately after his ecclesiastical studies was still intended for the Church. When he discontinued his studies at St. Sulpice, however, he soon turned to the field cultivated by most French composers of his day, the opera. In fact, it was Pauline Viardot who persuaded him to write his first opera, Sapho (1851), by promising to sing the title role. Although Hector Berlioz praised the music, and another critic detected in it the influence of Christoph Gluck, the work was generally considered a failure.

Since her performance as Fides in Le Prophète in 1849, Pauline Viardot had been one of the favorite artists of Giacomo Meyerbeer, whose reputation in Paris was at its zenith. It is therefore not surprising that Gounod’s next opera, La Nonne sanglante (1854), based on Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, should have been crafted in the Meyerbeer tradition. However, this opera also proved to be a failure. In the meantime, however, Gounod had written music for the choruses of François Ponsard’s drama Ulysse, performed at the Comédie Française in 1852, and these earned for him an appointment as conductor of the largest male choir in Paris, L’Orphéon de la Ville de Paris. At this time he married Anna, the daughter of Pierre Zimmermann, who from 1820 to 1848 had been chief professor of the piano at the Paris Conservatoire.

During the decade 1855-1865, Gounod was at the height of his musical powers. In the area of church music, in which he had already succeeded, the Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile , first performed on November 22, 1855, was a masterpiece in an ornate style that had come to replace the austere style in which he composed his early masses.

In 1858, Gounod began his association with the Théâtre-Lyrique, a theater founded in 1851 and dedicated to the performance of musico-dramatic works. Of the seven stage works that Gounod wrote between 1855 and 1865, five were first performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique; it is these five operas for which he is remembered more than a century later.

Two of the five Gounod operas are small-scale, lighthearted works in which his refined craftsmanship and unpretentious lyrical abilities were joined to well-known stories: Molière’s play adapted by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré in Le Médecin malgré lui (1858) and the same adapters’ version of the classical myth in Philémon et Baucis (1860). In these, Gounod finally discarded his Meyerbeerian pretensions and cultivated his own unique brand of wit and lyricism. The same librettists wrote for him not only the comic opera La Colombe (1860) but also the far more important Faust (1859), the work by which Gounod first became famous with the general public.

The success of Faust had already opened the doors of the opera to Gounod. However, it was only when he returned to the Théâtre-Lyrique and to the singer Marie Miolhan-Carvalho, who had sung the role of Marguerite in Faust, that Gounod scored two more major successes. The first was Mireille (1864), based on Frédéric Mistral’s Provençal poem Mirèio, which had appeared in 1859. The second was the opera Roméo et Juliette (1867).

A disruption in Gounod’s career as well as his private life came during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. On September 13, 1870, he and his family took refuge with English friends outside London. Although he was offered the directorship of the Conservatoire in June, 1871, it was not until June, 1874, that he returned to Paris.

Although Gounod never stopped writing occasional motets and cantatas for church use, he had written no mass since 1855; his major energies had been devoted to the opera. Even now it was an opera in which he eventually decided to incorporate for the first time his new musical ideals, which included writing music of tranquillity and feeling, music that transported the listener outside the realm of everyday life. While completing his opera Polyeucte (1878) in England, Gounod recognized the popularity of choral music in that country and was anxious to exploit both his own status as the composer of Faust and his experience as a choral conductor.

When the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society was formed in 1871, Gounod became its first conductor. During this period in his life, Gounod was high in the royal favor (Faust was Queen Victoria’s favorite opera) and was glad to indulge the demand for sentimental ballads popular in mid-Victorian England. He had already written the notorious Bethléem and Jésus de Nazareth during the mid-1850’s; the Méditation sur le prélude de S. Bach (1852), from which come the endless arrangements of Ave Maria, was composed in 1852.

Gounod gave up all the advantages of his position in England, however, when, in February, 1871, he met Georgina Weldon, an amateur singer separated from her husband and well connected socially. Weldon sang the solo part in Gounod’s patriotic cantata Gallia (1871) at the reopening of the Conservatoire and again at the Opéra-Comique that summer. When she returned to London in 1871, she took Gounod with her. He was installed in Tavistock House, Bloomsbury, which Weldon had taken for her projected National Training School of Music. Gounod was quite seriously ill at the time and responded with growing hysteria to the hectic life in which he found himself at the school.

In spite of these conditions, Gounod managed to write most of Polyeucte, the incidental music to Jules Barbier’s Jeanne d’Arc (1873), a requiem, ten psalms and anthems, twelve choruses, and three songs and short pieces. However, his social position was rapidly deteriorating. He was soon to enrage not only his own son, Jean, but also the English court as well when Weldon attempted to blackmail Queen Victoria into giving Gounod royal support for the Tavistock Academy and reinstatement in the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society after his falling out with the director.

For many reasons, then, Gounod’s years in England seem to mark the end of his fruitfulness as a composer. As his ideals became loftier and his ideas more profound, his art became increasingly repetitive and platitudinous. The simplicity at which Gounod aimed in Polyeucte and La Rédemption (1882) disintegrated more and more into banality. Between 1882 and 1885, La Rédemption was performed all over Europe, including Vienna and Rome. However, while it was immensely popular, it was sharply attacked by the critics. Polyeucte fared little better.

It was not until June, 1874, that Gounod finally returned to France after a frightening cerebral attack during which he lay unconscious for long periods of time. With failing eyes but much determination, he struggled to complete his last piece of music, a requiem for his grandson Maurice, who had died prematurely. While reading through the manuscript, Gounod lapsed into a coma and died two days later, on October 18, 1893.

Significance

In England, Charles Gounod had a strong and long-lasting influence on choral music, especially in the ecclesiastical and oratorio spheres, where La Rédemption occupied a prominent position during the 1880’s. Like Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss a generation later, both Gounod and Mendelssohn expressed with skill and dignity the hopes and dreams of the contemporary bourgeoisie. The combination in Faust of tender sentiment and power of musical characterization with clean and imaginative craftsmanship made a deep impression on Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, who owed almost as much to Gounod as to Georges Bizet and Léo Delibes.

Only a generation after Gounod’s death, François Poulenc and Georges Auric were proclaiming as characteristically French the virtues of Le Médecin malgré lui, La Colombe, and Philémon et Baucis in their reaction against the music of Richard Wagner. All three works were revived by Sergei Diagilev in January, 1924. At the same time, a number of Gounod’s songs were also revived; they have remained in the French repertory ever since. It was Gounod’s belief that France was the country of “precision, neatness, and taste,” and it is as a master of these qualities that he is best remembered.

Bibliography

Abraham, Gerald, ed. Romanticism, 1830-1890. Vol. 9 in The New Oxford History of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. This standard music reference includes an essay on Gounod’s life and work.

Cooper, Martin. French Music: From the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. Provides a historical perspective on French music and includes a brief section on Gounod. Offers a succinct overview of the composer’s life. Contains a bibliography and a table of events listing the major composers and other artists (and their principal works) during the years 1870-1925.

Gounod, Charles-François. Memoirs of an Artist. Translated by Annette E. Crocker. New York: Rand McNally, 1895. Gounod’s intriguing but sentimental autobiography, spanning the years from his childhood to the writing of Faust.

Harding, James. Gounod. New York: Stein & Day, 1973. This informative biography discusses Gounod as a man of contradictions and extremes, demonstrating how the elements at war within his personality were reflected in his music. Assesses the impact of Gounod’s music on later composers. Bibliography and appendix.

Hervey, Arthur. Masters of French Music. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894. This work contains a lengthy chapter devoted to Gounod. The author also focuses his discussion on Gounod’s Faust, especially on the themes of love and religion in the work.

Johnson, Graham, and Richard Stokes, eds. A French Song Companion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Includes an essay on Gounod as well as English translations of the lyrics of more than 700 French songs composed by Gounod and others, dating from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Tiersot, Julien. “Charles Gounod: A Centennial Tribute.” Musical Quarterly 6 (July, 1918): 409-439. Tiersot examines the work and career of Gounod, as well as the man. Attempts to assess more objectively Gounod’s contribution to French music.