The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2000 Gounod, Charles-François

(b Paris, 17 June 1818; d Saint-Cloud, 18 Oct 1893). French composer. Best known today as the composer of the opera Faust and an Ave Mariadescant to the first prelude of J.S. Bach's Das wohltemperirte Clavier, Gounod wrote in most of the major genres of his day, sacred and secular. That his reputation began to wane even during his lifetime does not detract from his place among the most respected and prolific composers in France during the second half of the 19th century.

1. Youth, early career, ambitions in the church.

2. Emergence into prominence.

3. Career apogee.

4. England.

5. Later career.

6. Songs and choruses.

7. Church music.

8. Operas.

9. Position in French music.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

STEVEN HUEBNER

Gounod, Charles-François

1. Youth, early career, ambitions in the church.

Gounod's father, François-Louis Gounod, was a painter and engraver of considerable talent and, like two generations of ancestors, worked for royalty. According to the composer, his father was prevented from achieving greater fame only by modest ambition. Gounod's mother, née Victoire Lemachois, studied piano with Louis Adam and was gifted in the visual arts. When her husband died prematurely in 1823 she supported her two sons by establishing a piano teaching studio. The young Charles Gounod demonstrated enormous precocity not only in music but also in drawing; extant sketches and paintings bear witness to the remark Dominique Ingres later made at the French Academy in Rome that Gounod might have competed successfully for a Prix de Rome in fine arts.

From a young age Gounod was sent to board at various Parisian schools. At first reluctant to encourage his musical gifts, his mother arranged for him to leave school one day each week for private lessons in harmony and counterpoint with Antoine Reicha. Gounod poured his energies into composition rather than performance, although by all accounts he developed a fine tenor voice and acquired some ability at the keyboard. Following the death of Reicha, he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire to study counterpoint and fugue with Halévy and composition with, in turn, Henri Berton, Le Sueur and Ferdinando Paër. The group represented an eclectic mix of compositional styles in 1830s Paris and each instructor passed away before Gounod had studied with him for 18 months. None proved to have a lasting influence on Gounod's style and aesthetics, although he undoubtedly derived some of his admiration for Gluck from Le Sueur. Gounod competed for the Prix de Rome for the first time in 1837 at the tender age of 19 and won second prize. After a failed attempt the next year, he finally earned the Grand Prix in 1839 with the cantata Fernand.

Gounod arrived at the French Academy in Rome at the end of January 1840. Little there sustained his musical interest. He excoriated performances of operas by Donizetti, Bellini and Mercadante, composers he later characterized as mere ‘vines twisted around the great Rossinian trunk, without its vitality and majesty’ and unable to match that composer's spontaneous melodic gifts. Gounod was, however, genuinely moved by performances of Palestrina at the Cappella Sistina and more generally by the cultural legacy of Rome in the other arts, a legacy he felt that musicians could ill afford to ignore. His Roman experience laid the foundation for the stark comparison he drew in his aesthetics between, on the one hand, a universally appealing combination of beauty, truth and Christianity and, on the other, egoism, artifice and insularity. He described stile antico counterpoint as a selfless analogue to Michelangelo's frescoes issuing from pure Faith. During his stay in Rome Gounod was drawn to the circle around the charismatic Dominican Père Lacordaire; his mother became concerned that he might enter the priesthood. At the same time, Gounod read the Romantic poetry of Lamartine as well as Goethe's Faust: he set the former's Le vallon and Le soir and dreamed of the day when he might adapt Goethe's play. None of this was inconsistent with his attraction to Lacordaire, a liberal theologian given to fiery rhetoric about social progress that appealed to many in the Romantic generation. Fanny Mendelssohn, whose path crossed with Gounod's for a few months in Rome, depicted a character beset by rapid mood changes ranging from excitable, effusive and eminently charming to contemplative, aloof and mystical (see fig.1). Gounod pursued his religious inclinations by writing a mass with orchestra as well as an a cappella Te Deumwith ten independent parts that he presented as one of his obligatory offerings to the authorities of the Institut.

Like other Prix de Rome winners, Gounod spent part of his third-year government stipend in Austria and Germany. Letters from Vienna record his ecstatic impressions of living in the city of Mozart and Beethoven. In Rome he had mused about writing a choral symphony on the life of Christ and now he confessed to Ingres that it became particularly difficult to escape the ‘imperious influence of the idea of Beethoven’. That influence would later be strongly felt in his Second Symphony. Gounod obtained a Viennese performance of his Roman mass as well as of a new requiem and a Lenten a cappella mass. Although he set his sights upon rekindling sacred music in France, he was also keenly interested in new German work. On his journey home he stopped in Leipzig to visit Felix Mendelssohn, who regaled him with a private performance of the Scottish Symphony by the Gewandhaus orchestra and praised the compositions in Gounod's portfolio. The imprint of Mendelssohn's style would emerge often in Gounod's later career, for example in the second movement of his First Symphony, the instrumental offertory in the Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile and the evocation of the supernatural in the third act of Mireille

Gounod returned to Paris in 1843 to take up a position that his mother had negotiated on his behalf as maître de chapelle at the Séminaire des Missions Etrangères church. Here he was free to put his artistic programme for sacred music into effect: he sung at mass and office frequently and trained the small choir to perform his a cappella music in the style he wished. He intended the Missions Etrangères to become nothing less than the centre of a sacred music revival to which believers would flock from all corners of Paris. His few publications in this period were given over to simple service music. Despite his own earlier disparagements of the low artistic standard of the French romance, he did not even publish songs during these years. 15 months after his return Gounod told acquaintances that he intended to begin studies for ordination into the priesthood. He delayed this until autumn 1847, at which time he formally enrolled as a day student at St Sulpice seminary. His resolve, however, was short-lived, for by the February Revolution of 1848 he had abandoned theological studies. The worldly influences that came into play in this decision remain unclear, but it should not be assumed (as it sometimes has) that Gounod was driven entirely by opportunism or whim: serious personal reflections about vocation must surely also have been a factor in this change of course. His Christian beliefs would remain deeply felt, and his decision to forsake the cloth should at least partly be seen in this light. The biographer's vision is clouded by the opinion of many contemporaries who held that Gounod's faith must have been only skin deep because he plied social circuits with grace, charm and eloquence (qualities which emerge strongly in a voluminous correspondence of considerable literary merit). Moreover, there would be persistent rumours of a wandering extra-marital eye. Whatever the inconsistencies, real or imagined, they do not necessarily negate the existence of a spiritual dimension in a complex personality.

Gounod, Charles-François