What is Charles Gounod best known for?
We’ve probably heard a few arias from Gounod's opera Faust; we’ll certainly know his ‘Ave Maria’, based on Bach’s C major prelude, and maybe a few of his songs; and if we’re wind players, we may have enjoyed contributing to his delightful 1888 Petite symphonie for wind octet.
But beyond that? Gounod is a composer whose currency has devalued steeply from those late Victorian days when he sold his oratorio Mors et Vita to the music publisher Novello for 100,000 francs.
But already, even then, the critics were sharpening their pens. In 1893, the year of Gounod’s death, George Bernard Shaw complained that most probably his eyesight had been ‘damaged by protracted contemplation of the scarlet red coat and red limelight of Mephistopheles’, while a few years later Ernest Newman wrote Faust off as ‘a blend of the pantomime, the novelette and the Christmas card’.
Why the vitriol? One reason undoubtedly was that, being born in 1818, Gounod was not only of the generation of Wagner, but chose in his own compositions to ignore that composer almost entirely, a position that came increasingly under fire as Wagnerism took over hearts and minds throughout Europe.
Although his personal relations with Wagner were friendly, for him Wagner was ‘a passing storm: don’t get carried away !’ and ‘not a sun without spots’; and when an English critic warned him against being influenced by the German composer, he retorted (and here we need to remember that the French ‘w’ is pronounced ‘v’) that in that case he would consult a doctor ‘pour me Wag-ciner’ (‘to vaccinate me’).
When was Gounod born?
Born in Paris on 17 June 1818, Charles lost his elderly father at the age of four, and his childhood was marked by his mother’s considerable energy and enterprise in making a living by teaching the piano and drawing – Charles’s father had been a considerable artist.
Where did he study?
The boy did well at school, but music was his chief love and in 1836 he entered the Paris Conservatoire where he was taught by Halévy and Lesueur, and in 1839 won the Prix de Rome with his cantata Fernand. Although Rome itself was a disappointment to the young man who had arrived there expecting to find ‘the grand, austere beauties of nature and art’, he was lucky in having, as director of the Villa Medici where the prizewinners were housed, the painter Ingres who had known his father. Ingres was also a keen music lover and on at least one occasion Madame Ingres had to separate them at midnight when they were still deep in the piano duet score of Don Giovanni.
It was in Rome that Gounod came into contact with the Dominican friar Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, just then recruiting members for his Brotherhood of Saint John the Evangelist, and the tension between the religious and the artistic life was to remain a force within Gounod until his death – though whether it played a part in the psychosomatic illnesses he would suffer, who can say ?
On leaving Rome, he spent some time in Germany and some particularly happy days with Mendelssohn, who discouraged his interest in Faust and recommended instead that he try his hand at symphonies: his Second Symphony was a direct response to this encouragement.
Back in Paris in 1843, he was appointed organist and musical director of a church near his flat and stayed in the post until the revolution of 1848. By this time he’d composed two songs by the revolutionary poet Lamartine, five masses and a piano quintet, but nothing that hinted at success.
When did Gounod start composing opera?
Then he met the famous contralto Pauline Viardot, and his life changed. For her, he composed the opera Sapho, premiered at the Opéra in 1851. The last act was particularly successful and Gounod, meeting Berlioz after the performance in floods of tears, begged him to ‘come and show your tears to my mother – they’re the best possible review she could have!’
But much greater success came with his St Cecilia Mass, given in St Eustache in 1855, in which the music’s ‘simplicity, grandeur and serene light rose above the musical world like the dawn’, in Saint-Saëns’s ecstatic response. In the 1856 honours list, Gounod was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was on his way.
But, for the time being, this way was to be operatic, not religious. In 1858 he was commissioned to set Molière’s comedy Le médecin malgré lui, and the result was a flop. The young Bizet wrote home to his mother, ‘If you can’t make a hit with music like that, then to hell and damnation with everything!’ It is indeed a vivacious, enchanting score, whose continuing absence from the operatic stage is a mystery – do listen on YouTube to the astonishing 1929 recording by the 81-year-old Lucien Fugère of ‘Qu’ils sont doux’, the alcoholic woodcutter Sganarelle’s hymn to the bottle.
Gounod's Faust
But just a few months after the work’s premiere, Gounod was already at work on Faust. Although he called the work an ‘opéra’ rather than an ‘opéra-comique’, it contained features from both styles.
The chromatic introduction, depicting Faust’s unhappiness and even the disasters it sets in train, and justly described by composer Paul Dukas as a ‘page magistrale’ (‘masterful page’), lay way beyond the confines of opéra-comique (French opera with spoken dialogue).
On the other hand, Marguerite’s anxious questioning in Act III as to Faust’s identity, set to 26 quiet, repeated E naturals, as if she daren’t commit herself to anything as forthright as a phrase, let alone a tune, places the work firmly in the domestic opéra-comique tradition and would be taken up by Ambroise Thomas in Mignon and by Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande.
Altogether, the predominant lyricism of the score separates it sharply from the grandes machines such as Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Halévy’s La Juive, which were still making good money at the Opéra. Testimony to the work’s success were its spawning of parodies, like Hervé’s Le petit Faust, and the fact that the 14-year-old Fauré bunked off boarding school to see it. He was forgiven.
What other operas did Gounod write?
Of the five operas Gounod wrote in the 1860s, only the one he wrote for the Opéra, La Reine de Saba, failed to make its mark, partly due to a complex, overlong libretto which meant that savage cuts had to be made late in the rehearsal period. The less imposing Philémon et Baucis, written like its two predecessors for the Théâtre-Lyrique, and La Colombe, written for Baden-Baden, are still heard from time to time today, and show Gounod at his most charming and, in Philémon, his most witty in showing up Vulcan and Jupiter as rather less than perfect.
But the two gems of this decade were Mireille and Roméo et Juliette, even if both of them had to suffer from what musicologist Hugh Macdonald has recently called the Théâtre-Lyrique director Léon Carvalho’s ‘wild optimism and artistic butchery’, not to mention the shrill commands of Carvalho’s soprano wife that Mireille’s part should be ‘brillant, brillant’ (‘bright, bright’).
Gounod did add the brilliant ‘O légère hirondelle’ for her, but was disappointed that she didn’t have the stamina for the last scene, in which Mireille dies of sunstroke after crossing the plain of the Crau in southern France (Gounod himself had crossed it, in search of local colour). The work perhaps suffers in that the tenor, Vincent, doesn’t have an aria until Act V, but the bull-tamer Ourrias has some powerful music and in general Gounod is persuasive in depicting rural Provence.
Premiered in 1867, Roméo et Juliette has been dubbed ‘the opera of four duets’, which is true, as far as it goes. Here, for the last time, he tapped into the lyrical vein that had served him so well, but he also benefited from his experience – witness his satisfaction at ending each act in a different mood: I, ‘brilliant’; II, ‘tender, dream-like’; III, ‘animated, grand’; IV, ‘dramatic; V, ‘tragic’. True, he still had to write a coloratura number, ‘Je veux vivre’, for Mme Carvalho, but there his accommodations ended. As well as the magnificent ‘Ah ! Lève-toi, soleil !’ for Romeo, taking its cue from Shakespeare’s ‘Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon’, the four duets are meltingly beautiful and, in the words of a recent music historian, ‘as close to greatness as Gounod comes as a composer’.
Beyond this point, Gounod’s operatic skills deserted him, not least because he felt bound for some reason to attempt the grandes machines that don’t really seem to have suited him. But if opera no longer loved him, surprisingly he finally found his voice in oratorio, and in Birmingham, whose Festival Committee in 1882 offered him £4,000 to conduct his Rédemption, and followed up with the premiere of his Mors et Vita in 1884, conducted by Hans Richter, no less, at which receipts came to £25,000. In this last oratorio, Gounod goes beyond his previous harmonic boundaries, with surprisingly powerful results.
When did Gounod die?
Gounod died of a stroke in 1893 aged 75 in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, shortly after completing a requiem for his grandson. Fauré conducts at his funeral at the Madeleine, with Saint-Saëns at the organ.
How is Gounod remembered?
If one word sums up both Gounod and his music, it’s ‘charm’. As a man, he exerted it widely, especially on the fair sex: the whiskered sex often interpreted it as wheedling, and a rift with Bizet did raise doubts about his trustworthiness. But he made good jokes – a soprano who performed with an unduly open mouth was dubbed ‘the Aeolian carp’ – and, when Lalo had a brain seizure before finishing his ballet Namouna, Gounod stepped in and met the deadline. Like him, his music is not all good. But his best is very good indeed.
We named him one of the greatest French composers ever
Illustration © Risko