2. Emergence into prominence.

Having left his post at the Missions Etrangères, and after several years on the periphery of Parisian musical life, Gounod began to expand his social contacts and seek out venues for his music. He was soon introduced to the singer Pauline Viardot and her husband, the critic and impresario Louis Viardot. She proved instrumental in securing for him a libretto from Emile Augier and a commission at the Opéra, something of a coup for a relatively untried composer. The work was Sapho, a return to the ancients at the Opéra after more than two decades, but one updated with techniques of boulevard theatre. Pauline Viardot's own taste for Gluck's operas must have played a role in the selection of a classical subject conceived as a vehicle for her. The Viardots also provided support following the sudden death of Gounod's older brother Louis Urbain in April 1850 by inviting the composer and his mother for a prolonged stay at their country estate in order to enable him to complete Sapho in tranquillity. Turgenev, another intimate of the Viardot household, was also present and he associated closely with Gounod during the period Sapho was composed; indeed, the tone of their correspondence suggests that at the time both men were enthralled, and possibly romantically involved, with the singer. Sapho did not do well at the box office after its première on 16 April 1851. Pauline Viardot's prestige carried the work to a Covent Garden staging in August of the same year, also a failure. Gounod's attempt to rejuvenate contemporary French music by juxtaposing pastiche of 18th-century style with the intimate lyricism of the salon song, Italianate ensemble writing, and numbers exuding studied simplicity fell flat with most critics, but several prominent writers were supportive, including Berlioz and Henry Chorley. They praised qualities that had appealed to the Viardots and Turgenev in the first place, including prosodic accuracy and a willingness to challenge prevailing operatic taste.

On the evening of the Sapho première, Gounod accepted an invitation from François Ponsard to write incidental music for his tragedy Ulysse at the Comédie-Française. Around the same time, he also entertained the prospect of a collaboration with George Sand, another friend of the Viardots, but now on a rustic subject. The latter plans foundered when a rift developed between Gounod and the Viardots over the composer's apparent breach of etiquette attendant upon his marriage to Anna Zimmermann in April 1851: his new family would have nothing to do with the Viardots – probably the result of rumours about a liaison between the singer and composer (the real story remains murky) – and Gounod's loyalties shifted accordingly. The charge of opportunism has once again come easily here from the pens of biographers (as it did from that of Pauline Viardot following the brouhaha) but, while partly true, this should be balanced with consideration of what Gounod's real options were at this time. At any event, Gounod appears hardly to have been driven into marriage by passion; and he rarely acknowledged creative or intellectual stimulation from his wife, as devoted as she was to one who often was not easy to live with. Indeed, Anna Zimmermann is not even mentioned by name in Gounod's incomplete memoirs, in contrast to the many pages given over to his mother. Her father Pierre-Joseph Zimmermann was well established on the Parisian musical scene as a retired Conservatoire piano professor with many accomplished students to his credit. He was thoroughly supportive of Gounod's career: he and his wife helped finance the publication of the Ulysse score as well as of La nonne sanglante. One of Zimmermann's counterpoint students at the time of Gounod's marriage was the young Bizet. Gounod occasionally replaced his father-in-law and in this way became an important mentor to Bizet – as well as an imposing precursor when the teenager struggled to establish his own compositional voice. (Another young composer whom Gounod encouraged in these years was Saint-Saëns, laying the basis for a long friendship based on mutual respect and admiration sustained by two men of different temperament.) It is likely that it was Zimmermann who took the initiative to notate his future son-in-law's salon improvisation on the first prelude of Bach's ‘48’ sometime early in 1852. Gounod soon adapted verses by Lamartine (‘Vers sur un album’) to the descant in an arrangement for violin, piano and homophonic chorus, followed by the more familiar Ave Maria text.

Within a few months of his marriage, Gounod's career advanced in two important respects. First, he became director of the Paris Orphéon and also director of vocal instruction in the public schools of the capital. The Orphéon, a network of choral societies with membership drawn from the working class and lower bourgeoisie, became an instrument of Second Empire egalitarian social policy. The view of Gounod as something of an official musician for the eight years he occupied the post could only have been stimulated by the patriotic choruses he wrote for the Orphéon, such as the ubiquitous ‘Vive l'Empereur’, as well as large festivals where he organized and conducted several thousand choristers. This period saw him compose some of his best a cappella choral music, including a fair amount of fine part-music for children. The second spark to Gounod's career came from another Opéra commission, La nonne sanglante, to a five-act libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne. Berlioz had already set a few scenes from the work before dropping it; La nonne passed through the hands of several other composers before Gounod signed his contract in 1852. With its atmosphere informed by the gothic novel, it is difficult to imagine a scenario with greater contrast to Sapho and Ulysse. After its première on 18 October 1854, La nonne received little support from a new Opéra directorship intent upon turning a page in the destiny of that institution. The failure earned Gounod a personal rebuke from Scribe (even though most of the press fell more harshly upon the libretto than the score). But Gounod remained undaunted and as prolific as ever. He consoled himself for his problems in the opera house with two symphonies written in rapid succession, the important Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile, and the publication of his first collection of six mélodies. All of these works proved popular: for example, within a little more than a year after its première by the conductor Jules Pasdeloup on 4 February 1855, his First Symphony achieved eight performances in the capital. There can be no doubt about Gounod's ambitious nature at this stage of his career, as he plied his talents for state, church, salon, concert hall and theatre. Such was his assessment of his own reputation and professional contacts that he ran for the Institut chair vacated by the death of Adolphe Adam in 1856. Quite understandably, Berlioz out-polled him on this occasion; Gounod's time would come ten years later.

By the beginning of 1856 Gounod had a new Opéra commission on his plate as well, a historical opera called Ivan le terrible that he would eventually drop (it was picked up, in much modified form, by Bizet). That year also saw the inception of Faust with Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, to whom Gounod had probably been introduced the year before. Léon Carvalho, director of the upstart Théâtre-Lyrique, took an early interest in the project, doubtless in part because he saw in it an opportunity to raise the artistic status of his theatre. Goethe's Faust had already been adapted several times before on Parisian stages, including by Carré himself in a three-act drame fantastique entitled Faust et Marguerite. The styling of Carré's drame as ‘fantastique’ and the pairing of the protagonists in its title gives a good indication of the orientation and tone of the libretto. Although Carré's play did furnish the scaffolding for the opera, elements from Goethe that he had omitted were restored. Gounod began to compose Faust sometime in 1856, but dropped it in February 1857 (having drafted three acts) when Carvalho maintained that he could not proceed with a production due to a rival Faustat the Théâtre de la Porte-St-Martin. Instead, Gounod and he settled on another subject with Barbier and Carré, Molière's Le médecin malgré lui. That project, however, was also nearly scuttled. Now the problem was a bureaucratic verdict that the text of the opéra comique violated the privilege of the Comédie-Française because it adhered so closely to the Molière original. Only the intervention on Gounod's behalf of the first Napoléon's niece, Princess Mathilde, saved the day – more evidence of official favour. Although Le médecin certainly did not take Paris by storm following its première on 15 January 1858, Gounod thought of the work as his first operatic success and was able to interest a publisher in it.

Later in 1858 Carvalho agreed to return to Faust and Gounod finished the opera. Rehearsals began in the autumn; by the time of the première on 19 March 1859 about one quarter of the music he had written had been cut (including a dramatic air for Marguerite in the prison scene) and Hector Gruyer, the tenor who first learned the role of Faust, had been replaced at the eleventh hour by Joseph Barbot. Many of the more progressive critics, Berlioz and the young Ernest Reyer among them, painted over their aesthetic differences with Gounod and strongly supported Faust by making common cause with Gounod for a style of French opera responsive to the poetry of its subjects. Other quarters of the press were hostile and by the end of 1859 Parisian enthusiasm for the opera had not built to the point where it could survive casting problems and the temporary departure of Carvalho from the directorship of the Théâtre-Lyrique. Soon afterwards, Gounod set the spoken dialogue of the original work to music with a view toward performances in the provinces and abroad (fig.3). These plans were greatly abetted by Gounod's business relationship with the publisher Antoine de Choudens, who bought the rights to Faust for a modest fee and during the next decade proved to be an aggressive agent for the composer. Faust soon swept over houses in Germany and elsewhere, much to the chagrin of Richard Wagner who in Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik (1867) would lambast it as a feeble French travesty of a German literary monument. Gounod's opinions about Wagner, positive enough during the latter's stay in Paris from 1859 to 1861, cooled noticeably after this.

Gounod, Charles-François