Charles Gounod
A man who spent his whole life moving between the glitter of the theater and the stillness of the cathedral
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyVictoire Gounod
His mother, a pianist, who after losing her husband early held the household together by teaching piano and gave her son his first music lessons.
- InfluenceFanny Mendelssohn Hensel
In Rome in 1840 she played him Bach and Beethoven, opening the world of German music to the young Gounod.
- InfluenceFelix Mendelssohn
He received him in Leipzig in 1843, played him Bach's organ music and his own symphony, and praised his Requiem.
- PatronagePauline Viardot
She arranged the staging of his first opera, Sapho, and sang the lead role, but their relationship broke off around the time of Gounod's marriage.
- PupilGeorges Bizet
Though never formally his student, he learned by arranging Gounod's works, and wrote his first symphony on the model of Gounod's.
- FriendshipGeorgina Weldon
During his London years she took him into her home and managed his affairs, but after their break she refused to return his manuscripts and sued him for libel.
I. The painter's son · 1818–1839 (age 0–21)
(Birth) He was born in June 1818 in Paris, France. His father, François-Louis Gounod, was a painter and engraver, and was already sixty when his son was born. His brother Urbain, eleven years older, later became an architect. (Mother) When his father died in 1823, the household was held together by his mother, Victoire. A pianist, she earned their living by giving piano lessons and taught her son his first music. Money was scarce, but she never gave up on her two sons' education. Gounod remained deeply devoted to his mother all his life and stayed by her side until her death in 1858. (Theater) What opened the ears of the boy, then a pupil at the Lycée Saint-Louis, was the Théâtre-Italien. Rossini's Otello and Mozart's Don Giovanni, which he saw there, came to him as a revelation. Mozart above all became his lifelong standard, and late in life he even wrote a book on Don Giovanni. (The test) His mother feared the precarious life of a musician. According to his memoirs, the headmaster, Poirson, hoping to talk him out of it, handed him the text of Méhul's opera Joseph and told him to set it to music. On hearing the song the boy brought back, the headmaster is said to have wept and acknowledged his talent. He went on to study harmony with Anton Reicha, and in 1836 entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Halévy, Le Sueur and Paer. (Prix de Rome) In 1837 he won second prize in the Prix de Rome with a cantata, and in 1839 he at last took first prize with the cantata Fernand. The Prix de Rome, which sent its winner to study in Rome at state expense, was France's highest award for young composers. For a young man raised without a father, it meant both honor and several years of secure livelihood.
II. In the churches of Rome · 1840–1848 (age 22–30)
(Ingres) In January 1840 he arrived at the French Academy in Rome. Its director was the painter Ingres. A keen violinist, Ingres was fond of the young composer, and in 1841 he made a drawing of Gounod seated at the piano. On the music stand lies the score of Don Giovanni. (Palestrina) What captivated him in Rome was not opera but the unaccompanied polyphony of Palestrina that he heard in the Sistine Chapel. At first it seemed foreign to him, but with repeated hearings he sank into the stillness made by unadorned voices layered one upon another. In the same years, under the influence of the Dominican preacher Lacordaire, his faith deepened as well. (Hensel) In 1840 Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, then staying in Rome, played him Bach and Beethoven at the piano. Her diary records a passionate young Frenchman overflowing with sensibility. It was in Italy, of all places, that he learned German music. (Leipzig) Leaving Rome in 1842, he had a Mass and a Requiem performed in Vienna, and in 1843 went to Leipzig to call on Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn played Bach for him on the organ of the Thomaskirche and had the Gewandhaus Orchestra perform his own Scottish Symphony for him. Looking over a passage of Gounod's Requiem, he remarked that Cherubini might have signed it, words Gounod proudly recalled for years afterward. (The priest) Returning to Paris in 1843, he became organist and choirmaster at the church of the Missions Étrangères. Despite the parishioners' complaints, he held fast to Palestrina and Bach. Around 1846 he studied theology at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice and seriously weighed the priesthood, and for a time he was even called 'Abbé (Father) Gounod'. But around 1848 he finally gave up the path to ordination. This temperament, wavering between faith and worldly success, lingered in all of his music thereafter.
III. Stage and home · 1849–1858 (age 31–40)
(Viardot) The one who led him to the theater was Pauline Viardot, the foremost mezzo-soprano of the day. Through her efforts his first opera, Sapho, reached the stage of the Paris Opéra in 1851, with Viardot herself singing the lead. The production did not last long, but Berlioz singled out the final act for praise in his newspaper review. (Marriage) In 1852 he married Anna, daughter of Pierre Zimmerman, professor of piano at the Conservatoire. Around the time of the marriage, misunderstanding and resentment built up between the two families, and his ties with Viardot were severed. In their place, his in-laws gave him a secure footing. That same year he became conductor of the Orphéon, the Paris municipal choral union, leading choirs of workers and schoolchildren until 1860 and earning a steady income. (Méditation) In 1853 a piece was published that his father-in-law Zimmerman had taken down from his son-in-law's improvisation. It was the Méditation, a new melody laid over the first prelude of Book 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier; in 1859 a Latin prayer was set to it, and it became the Ave Maria. The faith forged in Rome and the reverence for Bach gained in Leipzig melted together in a single piece. (Cecilia) In November 1855, on the feast of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music, the Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile was premiered at the church of Saint-Eustache. Of this work, which sang of faith not with Palestrina's piety but with the brilliant orchestra of the theater, Saint-Saëns later recalled that the audience passed from astonishment to enchantment. The Symphony No. 1 he wrote that same year became a model for the seventeen-year-old Bizet. Bizet, who was learning by arranging Gounod's music for piano, wrote his own Symphony in C that year. (Breakdown) In 1856 his son Jean was born. But the disappointment after his opera La nonne sanglante closed early in 1854, compounded by overwork, brought on a severe nervous breakdown in 1857, and he was treated at Dr. Blanche's sanatorium. After recovering, in 1858 he staged Le médecin malgré lui, a comic opera (opéra comique) after Molière. That year his mother died.
In the years when he discovered Bach in Leipzig and made a new home through marriage, the piece began as a son-in-law's improvisation taken down by his father-in-law.
- The accompaniment that the piano (or harp) plays from beginning to end is Bach's prelude, unaltered. Listen with the structure in mind, a new melody resting on broken chords (arpeggios) that let each harmony flow out one note at a time, and you will hear the two composers overlap.
- Bach's original has no melody of its own. Gounod fitted a melody to each change of harmony, and in the latter half, where the original's harmonies are most tense, the song also climbs highest.
- The climax of the piece is the passage where the melody soars on 'Sancta Maria' (holy Mary). Singers differ in how long and how softly they sustain this high note, which makes for rewarding side-by-side listening.
- Because it first appeared as a méditation for an instrument such as the violin, there are many cello·violin performances as well. Alternate between wordless versions and sung ones, and you can feel the strength of the melody itself.
Having left the seminary for the theater, he came back to the church and sang of faith with the brilliant orchestra he had learned in the theater.
- The Gloria (Great Doxology) opens with a solo soprano quietly singing 'Glory to God in the highest', then the chorus takes it up and it gradually swells.
- The best-loved passage is the Sanctus (Holy). A solo tenor gently unfolds the melody, the chorus follows, and at 'Hosanna' the music billows out grandly. The tenor's long-breathed legato (notes joined without a break) is the measure of a great performance.
- Several harps join the orchestra, adding a glittering sound. Whenever their broken chords ring out, it is as if the light of an opera house were shining into the church.
- The Credo (profession of faith) cries out 'I believe' again and again in a forceful rhythm, so dramatic it sounds almost like a march. It is the very opposite of Palestrina-style stillness as an expression of faith.
IV. The age of Faust · 1859–1869 (age 41–51)
(Faust) The idea of making an opera of Goethe's Faust had been with him since his days in Rome. With a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, it premiered in March 1859 at the Théâtre Lyrique, with Caroline Miolan-Carvalho, wife of the theater's director Léon Carvalho, singing Marguerite. The first reactions were mixed, but its popularity grew with each performance. The originally spoken passages were replaced in 1860 by recitative, a kind of sung speech, and when the work moved to the Paris Opéra in 1869 a ballet was added. It would later become the most performed opera in that house's history. (Rights) The big money did not go to the composer. The publisher Antoine de Choudens bought the rights for a reported 10,000 francs and built up his firm on the proceeds. Meanwhile, in 1861 Liszt turned the opera's waltz into a dazzling piano solo and carried it through the concert halls of Europe. (Tannhäuser) When Wagner's Tannhäuser foundered amid uproar in Paris in 1861, Gounod is said to have remarked that he wished God would grant him such a failure. It was a rare defense amid the cynicism of the French musical world. (Provence) Philémon et Baucis (1860) and La reine de Saba (1862) fell short of expectations. In 1863 his daughter Jeanne was born. That year, to make an opera of the poet Mistral's epic, he stayed at Saint-Rémy in Provence, steeping himself in the light and landscape of that country, and in 1864 Mireille premiered. (Juliet) In 1865, staying at Saint-Raphaël on the Mediterranean coast, he wrote Roméo et Juliette. Premiered in April 1867, when Paris was thronged for the Universal Exposition, it was his greatest success since Faust. In 1866 he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in 1869 he wrote the Marche pontificale for the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Pius IX's ordination to the priesthood. It was a time when his fame on the stage and his faith reached their height side by side.
A subject he had carried since his Roman days, completed after he overcame his breakdown, it made his name known to the world, but most of the profits from the rights went to the publisher.
- Marguerite's 'Jewel Song' (Ah! je ris de me voir si belle) paints the giddy joy of a country girl decking herself in jewels before the mirror. The trills (ornaments that rapidly alternate two notes) and quick embellishments test the soprano's skill.
- Mephistopheles' 'Song of the Golden Calf' (Le veau d'or) is the devil's song mocking a crowd that worships money. Within its jaunty rhythm, sounds like the bass's coarse laughter leave a chill behind.
- Valentin's aria 'Avant de quitter ces lieux' (Before leaving this place) was added for the baritone Charles Santley for the 1864 London performances. A song absent from the premiere has now become one of the opera's signature numbers.
- The 'Soldiers' Chorus' (Gloire immortelle), the march of soldiers home from the war, was widely sung outside the opera as well.
- In the final trio, 'Pure angels' (Anges purs, anges radieux), Marguerite's same melody returns, rising one step higher each time. You can hear the ascent toward salvation in sound.
Written on the Mediterranean coast, the work became Gounod's greatest success since Faust and marked the final peak of his career in the theater.
- In the prologue, before the curtain rises, the chorus briefly foretells the tragic story. It is Shakespeare's own prologue, carried over into music.
- Juliette's waltz aria 'Je veux vivre' (I want to live) is the song of a girl at a ball, reveling in her youth before she knows anything of love. Listen for the dance rhythm in triple time, swaying in groups of three, and for the ornaments high in the voice.
- Roméo's 'Ah! lève-toi, soleil!' (Ah, rise, O sun!) is the tenor aria he sings beneath the balcony, likening Juliette to the sun. How naturally the singer handles the final high note is what sets a great performance apart.
- This opera has no fewer than four duets for the two lovers. Hearing them in turn, at the ball, on the balcony, on the wedding night and in the tomb, you can trace how love deepens from a first flutter all the way to death.
V. The London exile · 1870–1874 (age 52–56)
(Flight) When war with Prussia broke out in 1870, he crossed to England with his family. The area around Saint-Cloud, the Paris suburb where he lived, suffered heavy damage during the war. On foreign soil he immersed himself in England's choral culture, and in 1871 he became the first conductor of the choir of the newly opened Royal Albert Hall. That choir lives on today as the Royal Choral Society. (Gallia) Gallia, premiered at the Albert Hall in May 1871, borrowed the Old Testament Lamentations of Jeremiah, which grieve over fallen Jerusalem, to mourn his defeated homeland. The loss felt by a man far from his own country found its voice in the language of Scripture. (Weldon) In London he stayed at Tavistock House, home of the singer Georgina Weldon and her husband. His family returned to France in 1871, but Gounod stayed behind. Weldon took charge of his contracts and publications and led the fight with English publishers over royalties. The relationship set tongues wagging at the time; Gounod himself insisted it was a pure friendship. (Livelihood) While quarreling with publishers, he wrote a great many English songs and piano pieces for income. The 1872 piano piece Funeral March of a Marionette was one of them. A comic miniature depicting the funeral procession of a marionette broken in a duel, it was orchestrated in 1879. It is a paradox that a piece from a time of war and exile should be so light, but he was always a man who carried weighty faith and lighthearted humor side by side. (Homecoming) In 1874, when his nervous exhaustion deepened again, his friend Gaston de Beaucourt came to London and brought him back to France. Weldon refused to return the manuscripts he left behind, above all the score of the opera Polyeucte, then in progress, and Gounod is said to have had to rewrite a good part of it.
Written in London, where he had fled the war and was writing small pieces to make a living, it is the lightest music of a heavy time.
- According to the note Gounod attached, the short chords at the opening depict the moment the marionette is broken in a duel. The minor-key 'thump, thump' tread that follows mimics the funeral procession.
- The bright major-key middle section, the program explains, is the scene in which the mourners pause for refreshments. The humor lies in a procession that only pretended to solemnity quickly coming undone.
- In the orchestral version, woodwinds such as bassoons and clarinets supply the comic colors. Many know it by ear as the theme of the 1950s American television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
- It was originally a piano piece. Comparing the piano version with the 1879 orchestral version shows how differently the same joke can land depending on the instruments.
VI. Return to the altar · 1875–1893 (age 57–75)
(Bizet) In June 1875 Bizet died suddenly at the age of thirty-six. Gounod, who delivered the eulogy at the funeral, is said to have been so overcome that he could not finish. Bizet was a younger colleague who, in his own youth, had taken Gounod's symphony as his model. (Decline) Cinq-Mars (1877), the rewritten Polyeucte (1878) and Le tribut de Zamora (1881) met one cool reception after another. While the younger generation raved about Wagner, his theatrical idiom came to be seen as old-fashioned. (Oratorios) He turned back to sacred music. The oratorios The Redemption (1882) and Mors et vita (1885), written for the Birmingham Festival, were great successes in England. But in 1885 a libel suit brought by Weldon ended in a heavy award of damages against him, which barred him from entering England, and he could not even attend the premiere of Mors et vita. (Winds) That same year, 1885, he wrote the Petite symphonie for the wind chamber-music society led by the flutist Paul Taffanel. It was a limpid piece that poured the ease of old age into nine wind instruments. In 1887 he premiered a Mass in honor of Joan of Arc at Reims Cathedral, and in 1890 he published a book on Don Giovanni by Mozart, the composer he had revered all his life. (Requiem) His last work was a Requiem for his grandson Maurice, who had died in early childhood. In October 1893, while going over the score at his home in Saint-Cloud, he was struck down by a stroke, and he died three days later, on the 18th. At the state funeral at the Madeleine, Fauré conducted the music and Saint-Saëns played the organ. He was buried in the Auteuil Cemetery in Paris. (Legacy) On the opera stage his name gradually narrowed to two works, Faust and Roméo et Juliette, but his successors remembered another side of him. Ravel called Gounod the true founder of the French mélodie, and Debussy, too, defended him in his criticism as one of the wellsprings of French sensibility.
Though written in a year when he had been pushed off the opera stage and was beset by an English lawsuit, the piece holds nothing but the clear, unhurried craft of long experience.
- It is scored for nine players: 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 horns and 2 bassoons. There is only one flute because the piece was written for the ensemble of the flutist Taffanel.
- The first movement opens with a slow introduction, followed by a lively section. It sounds as transparent as a Mozart wind serenade (a light piece once played outdoors in the evening).
- In the second movement, Andante cantabile (slowly, as if singing), the flute leads the melody like an operatic aria. It is practically a solo showcase for Taffanel.
- In the third movement, a scherzo (a fast, playful movement), there is a passage where the horns seem to ring out like hunting horns. Follow how the instruments hand short motifs back and forth, as if in conversation.
Lesser-known stories
The official anthem of Vatican City is by Gounod. The Pontifical March, written in 1869 for the 50th anniversary of Pope Pius IX's ordination to the priesthood, was adopted as the Holy See's official anthem in 1949 and is still played at papal events. Because it was originally a march without words, the composer's name is rarely mentioned with it, and many of the countless people who hear it every year never realize it is Gounod's. In the portrait drawing of Gounod that Ingres made in Rome in 1841, the score of Don Giovanni lies on the piano. Gounod the opera composer is mostly remembered alongside Faust, but the standard he held himself to all his life was Mozart. In 1890 he wrote a guide devoted to this one opera, but it is scarcely read outside the French-speaking world, so his reverence for Mozart often survives only as a footnote in biographies. The memoir that shaped today's picture of Gounod, Mémoires d'un artiste, appeared in 1896, after his death, and centers on his youth. His London years and his relationship with Weldon barely figure in it. What happened in that period comes down to us instead through Weldon's own published writings, English court records and the newspapers of the day, sources studied mainly in English-language scholarship and often given short shrift in French biographies.
Glossary 📚🔎
Mass
(Etymology) The name comes from missa in 'Ite, missa est' (Go, you are sent forth), the Latin words the priest speaks at the close of the Catholic liturgy. (In music) Music set to the fixed prayers used at every Catholic Mass — Kyrie (Lord, have mercy), Gloria (Glory to God), Credo (the profession of faith), Sanctus (Holy, holy, holy), Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) — and so on. The words have stayed the same for centuries, yet each composer sets them to entirely different music. Just as the words of 'Happy Birthday' never change while every household sings it in its own mood, the same prayers sound serene in Palestrina and theatrically splendid in Gounod.
Polyphony
(Etymology) The Korean term daseong (多聲) means 'many (多) voices (聲)'. Its Western name, polyphony, likewise comes from the Greek for 'many (poly) sounds (phonia)'. (In music) Rather than a single melody with accompaniment, it is music in which several independent melodies flow at once and intertwine. No single voice is the protagonist; every voice is. When several people sing a round, entering with the same tune at staggered times, different parts are heard overlapping at once, and polyphony is exactly that: music in which many melodies live and move at the same time. Palestrina was a master of such music, written for voices alone, without instruments.
Cantata
(Etymology) From the Italian cantare (to sing), meaning 'a piece that is sung'. It is the counterpart of sonata, a piece that 'sounds' on instruments. (In music) A vocal work for soloists, chorus and orchestra, shorter than an opera and performed without staging or acting. Some are sacred, some secular. The Prix de Rome required candidates to write a cantata on a set poem, much like a school writing contest in which everyone competes on the same theme.
Recitative
(Etymology) From the Italian recitare (to recite). In Korean it is rendered seochang (敍唱), literally 'singing (唱) as if narrating (敍)'. Recital, meaning a solo performance, shares the same root. (In music) The part of an opera in which the dialogue that drives the plot is sung in rhythms close to speech. Its melody is simple, and it alternates with the aria, which unfolds emotion at length. Think of telling a friend quickly about something that happened, and then, at the truly upsetting part, your voice stretching out and rising. The quick telling is the recitative; the part where the feeling bursts out is the aria. Faust originally had plain spoken dialogue in these places, replaced with recitative in 1860.
Aria
(Etymology) The Italian aria originally meant 'air' or 'atmosphere', and from that came the sense of 'a song's melody'. (In music) A solo song in an opera or oratorio in which a single character sings out their feelings at length. The plot pauses, and the joy or sorrow of that moment is magnified. It is like the scene in a drama where the protagonist, left alone, pours out their heart. Marguerite's 'Jewel Song' and Juliette's waltz are classic arias. (Elsewhere) In Italy, aria is still used in everyday speech to mean 'air'.
Broken chord (arpeggio)
(Etymology) Arpeggio is Italian for playing as if on a harp (arpa), because the harp plucks its strings one by one rather than sounding a chord all at once. (In music) A way of playing a chord, whose notes would otherwise be pressed together, by spreading them out one at a time, from bottom to top or from top to bottom. When you accompany on guitar by picking the strings one by one instead of strumming them all together, that is a broken chord. The Bach accompaniment that flows from start to finish beneath Gounod's Ave Maria is a classic example.
Oratorio
(Etymology) The Italian oratorio means 'prayer hall'. The name comes from a prayer hall in 16th-century Rome where the faithful gathered to sing Bible stories. (In music) A large-scale work that unfolds a biblical story or religious subject through soloists, chorus and orchestra. Like an opera it has a story and characters, but it is conveyed through singing alone, in a concert hall or church, without staging, costumes or acting. It resembles a staged reading in which, rather than mounting a play, the actors sit and read the script aloud. Gounod's The Redemption and Mors et vita are oratorios. (Elsewhere) In the Catholic Church, oratorio still refers to a small chapel or to the religious community of the same name.