Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod, usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been Faust ; his Roméo et Juliette also remains in the international repertoire. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his "Ave Maria" and "Funeral March of a Marionette".
Born in Paris into an artistic and musical family, Gounod was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris and won France's most prestigious musical prize, the Prix de Rome. His studies took him to Italy, Austria and then Prussia, where he met Felix Mendelssohn, whose advocacy of the music of Bach was an early influence on him. He was deeply religious, and after his return to Paris, he briefly considered becoming a priest. He composed prolifically, writing church music, songs, orchestral music and operas.
Gounod's career was disrupted by the Franco-Prussian War. He moved to England with his family for refuge from the Prussian advance on Paris in 1870. After peace was restored in 1871 his family returned to Paris but he remained in London, living in the house of an amateur singer, Georgina Weldon, who became the controlling figure in his life. After nearly three years he broke away from her and returned to his family in France. His absence, and the appearance of younger French composers, meant that he was no longer at the forefront of French musical life; although he remained a respected figure he was regarded as old-fashioned during his later years, and operatic success eluded him. He died at his house in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, at the age of 75.
Few of Gounod's works remain in the regular international repertoire, but his influence on later French composers was considerable. In his music there is a strand of romantic sentiment that is continued in the operas of Jules Massenet and others; there is also a strand of classical restraint and elegance that influenced Gabriel Fauré. Claude Debussy wrote that Gounod represented the essential French sensibility of his time.
Life and career
Early years
Gounod was born on 17 June 1818 in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the second son of François-Louis Gounod and his wife Victoire, née Lemachois. François was a painter and art teacher; Victoire was a talented pianist, who had given lessons in her early years. The elder son, Louis Urbain, became a successful architect. Shortly after Charles's birth François was appointed official artist to the Duc de Berry, a member of the royal family, and the Gounods' home in Charles's early years was at the Palace of Versailles, where they were allotted an apartment.After François's death in 1823, Victoire supported the family by returning to her old occupation as a piano teacher. The young Gounod attended a succession of schools in Paris, ending with the Lycée Saint-Louis. He was a capable scholar, excelling in Latin and Greek. His mother, the daughter of a magistrate, hoped Gounod would pursue a secure career as a lawyer, but his interests were in the arts: he was a talented painter and outstandingly musical. Early influences on him, in addition to his mother's musical instruction, were operas, seen at the Théâtre-Italien: Rossini's Otello and Mozart's Don Giovanni. Of a performance of the latter in 1835 he later recalled, "I sat in one long rapture from the beginning of the opera to its close". Later in the same year he heard performances of Beethoven's Pastoral and Choral symphonies, which added "fresh impulse to my musical ardour".
While still at school Gounod studied music privately with Anton Reicha – who had been a friend of Beethoven and was described by a contemporary as "the greatest teacher then living" – and in 1836 he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris. There he studied composition with Fromental Halévy, Henri Berton, Jean Lesueur and Ferdinando Paer and piano with Pierre Zimmerman. His various teachers made only a moderate impression on Gounod's musical development, but during his time at the Conservatoire he encountered Hector Berlioz. He later said that Berlioz and his music were among the greatest emotional influences of his youth. In 1838, after Lesueur's death, some of his former students collaborated to compose a commemorative mass; the Agnus Dei was allocated to Gounod. Berlioz said of it, "The Agnus, for three solo voices with chorus, by M. Gounod, the youngest of Lesueur's pupils, is beautiful – very beautiful. Everything in it is novel and distinguished – melody, modulation, harmony. In this piece M. Gounod has given proof that we may expect everything of him".
Prix de Rome
In 1839, at his third attempt, Gounod won France's most prestigious musical prize, the Prix de Rome for composition, for his cantata Fernand. In doing so he was surpassing his father: François had taken the second prize in the Prix de Rome for painting in 1783. The Prix brought the winner two years' subsidised study at the French Institute in Rome and a further year in Austria and Germany. For Gounod this not only launched his musical career, but made impressions on him both spiritually and musically that stayed with him for the rest of his life. In the view of the musicologist Timothy Flynn, the Prix, with its time in Italy, Austria and Germany, was "arguably the most significant event in career". He was fortunate that the director of the institute was the painter Dominique Ingres, who had known François Gounod well and took his old friend's son under his wing.Among the artistic notables the composer met in Rome were the singer Pauline Viardot and the pianist Fanny Hensel, sister of Felix Mendelssohn. Viardot became of great help to Gounod in his later career, and through Hensel he got to know the music not only of her brother but also of J.S.Bach, whose music, long neglected, Mendelssohn was enthusiastically reviving. Gounod was also introduced to "various masterpieces of German music which I had never heard before". While in Italy, Gounod read Goethe's Faust, and began sketching music for an operatic setting, which came to fruition over the next twenty years. Other music he composed during his three years' scholarship included some of his best-known songs, such as "Où voulez-vous aller?", "Le Soir" and "Venise", and a setting of the Mass ordinary, which was performed at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.
In Rome, Gounod found his strong religious impulses increased under the influence of the Dominican preacher Henri-Dominique Lacordaire and he was inspired by paintings in the city's churches. Unlike Berlioz, who had been unimpressed by the visual arts of Rome when he was at the Institute ten years earlier, Gounod was awed by the work of Michelangelo. He also came to know and revere the sacred music of Palestrina, which he described as a musical translation of Michelangelo's art. The music of some of his own Italian contemporaries did not appeal to him. He severely criticised operas by Donizetti, Bellini and Mercadante, composers he described as merely "vines twisted around the great Rossinian trunk, without its vitality and majesty" and lacking Rossini's spontaneous melodic genius.
For the last year of his Prix de Rome scholarship, Gounod moved to Austria and Germany. At the Court Opera in Vienna he heard The Magic Flute for the first time, and his letters record his joy at living in the city where Mozart and Beethoven had worked. Count Ferdinand von Stockhammer, a leading patron of the arts in Vienna, arranged for Gounod's setting of the Requiem Mass to be performed. It was warmly received, and its success led Stockhammer to commission a second Mass from the composer.
From Vienna, Gounod moved on to Prussia. He renewed his acquaintance with Fanny Hensel in Berlin and then went on to Leipzig to meet her brother. At their first encounter Mendelssohn greeted him, "So you're the madman my sister has told me about", but he devoted four days to entertaining the young man and gave him much encouragement. He arranged a special concert of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra so that his guest might hear the Scottish Symphony, and played him some of the works of Bach on the organ of the Thomaskirche. Reciprocating, Gounod played the Dies Irae from his Viennese Requiem, and was gratified when Mendelssohn said of one passage that it was worthy to be signed by Luigi Cherubini. Gounod commented, "Words like this from such a master are a true honour and one wears them with more pride than many a ribbon".
Rising reputation
Gounod arrived home in Paris in May 1843. He took up a post, which his mother had helped to secure, as chapel master of the church of the Missions étrangères. For a winner of the Prix de Rome it was not a distinguished position. The organ of the church was poor, and the choir consisted of two basses, a tenor and a choirboy. To compound Gounod's difficulties, the regular congregation was hostile to his attempts to improve the music of the church. He expressed his views to a colleague:Despite his generally affable and compliant nature Gounod remained adamant; he gradually won his parishioners over, and served for most of the five-year term he had agreed to. During this period Gounod's religious feelings became increasingly strong. He was reunited with a childhood friend, now a priest, Charles Gay, and for a time he himself felt drawn to holy orders. In 1847 he began to study theology and philosophy at the seminary of St Sulpice, but before long his secular side asserted itself. Doubting his capacity for celibacy, he decided not to seek ordination and continued with his career as a musician. He later recalled:
The outset of Gounod's theatrical career was greatly helped by his reacquaintance with Pauline Viardot in Paris in 1849. Viardot, then at the peak of her fame, was able to secure for him a commission for a full-length opera. In this Gounod was exceptionally fortunate: a novice composer in the 1840s would usually, at the most, be asked to write a one-act curtain raiser. Gounod and his librettist, Émile Augier, created Sapho, drawing on Ancient Greek legend. It was intended as a departure from the three genres of opera then prevalent in Paris – Italian opera, grand opera and opéra comique. It later came to be regarded as the first of a new type, opéra lyrique, but at the time it was thought by some to be a throwback to the operas of Gluck, written sixty or seventy years earlier. After difficulties with the censor, who found the text politically suspect and too erotic, Sapho was given at the Paris Opéra at the Salle Le Peletier on 16 April 1851. It was reviewed by Berlioz in his capacity as a music critic; he found some parts "extremely beautiful … the highest poetic level of drama", and others "hideous, unbearable, horrible". It did not draw the public and closed after nine performances. The opera received a single performance at the Royal Opera House in London later in the same year, with Viardot again in the title role. The music received more praise than the libretto, and the performers received more than either, but The Morning Post recorded, "The opera, we regret to say, was received very coldly".
In April 1851 Gounod married Anna Zimmerman, daughter of his former piano professor at the Conservatoire. The marriage led to a breach with Viardot; the Zimmermans refused to have anything to do with her, for reasons that are not clear. Gounod's biographer Steven Huebner refers to rumours about a liaison between the singer and composer, but adds that "the real story remains murky". Gounod was appointed superintendent of instruction in singing to the communal schools in the city of Paris, and from 1852 to 1860 he was director of a prominent choral society, the Orphéon de la Ville de Paris. He also frequently stood in for his elderly and often ill father-in-law, giving music lessons to private pupils. One of them, Georges Bizet, found Gounod's teaching inspiring, praised "his warm and paternal interest" and remained a lifelong admirer.
Despite the brevity of Saphos run, the piece advanced Gounod's reputation, and the Comédie-Française commissioned him to write incidental music for François Ponsard's five-act verse tragedy Ulysse, based on the Odyssey. The score included twelve choruses as well as orchestral interludes. It was not a successful production: Ponsard's play was not well received, and the audience at the Comédie-Française had little interest in music. During the 1850s Gounod composed his two symphonies for full orchestra and one of his best-known religious works, the Messe solennelle en l'honneur de Sainte-Cécile. It was written for the St Cecilia's day celebrations of 1855 at Saint-Eustache, and in Flynn's view demonstrates Gounod's success in "blending the operatic style with church music – a task at which many of his colleagues tried and failed".
As well as church and concert music, Gounod was composing operas, beginning with La Nonne sanglante, a melodramatic ghost story with a libretto that Berlioz had tried and failed to set, and that Auber, Meyerbeer, Verdi and others had rejected. The librettists, Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne, reworked the text for Gounod and the piece opened at the Opéra on 18 October 1854. The critics derided the libretto but praised the music and production; the work was doing well at the box-office until it fell victim to musical politics. The director of the Opéra, Nestor Roqueplan, was supplanted by his enemy, François-Louis Crosnier, who described La Nonne sanglante as "filth" and shut the production down after its eleventh performance.