3. Career apogee.

Faust would soon have its share of success in Paris as well: it was the opera chosen by Carvalho for the inauguration of the Théâtre-Lyrique's new hall on the Place du Châtelet in 1862 (later reincarnated as the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt and the Théâtre de la Ville) and, when the Théâtre-Lyrique went bankrupt, it was immediately claimed by the Opéra in 1869. Encouraged by the favourable response to this opera as well as to Le médecin, Gounod composed five more operatic works in the eight years following the Faustpremière, all with Barbier and/or Carré: Philémon et Baucis (1860), La colombe (1860), La reine de Saba (1862), Mireille (1864) and Roméo et Juliette (1867).

The first two were opéras comiques based on fables by La Fontaine, and followed closely upon Gounod's popular Orphéon choral settings of that poet's work. Philémon et Baucis was initially conceived in two acts for the 1860 summer theatre season at Baden-Baden managed by Edouard Bénazet. Carvalho persuaded Gounod to direct the work to the Théâtre-Lyrique and to expand it artificially with a new act of colourful choruses reminiscent of those in the incidental music for Ulysse. As a mythological comedy underlining the virtues of stable marriage, it posited an alternative of bourgeois morality to the ribald allegories of Offenbach that were so popular with Parisians in the same period. In place of Philémon, Bénazet received La colombe, a work of smaller dimensions with no chorus. The grand opera La reine de Saba was based on one the longest narrative sequences in Gérard de Nerval's Le voyage en orient, a book which rapidly became a classic in French literary encounters with the Near East. A turn to this milieu seems to have been part of a more generalized tendency to broaden the scope of the genre. Gounod, however, responded minimally to the couleur locale of his source. His score was subject to the usual production modifications and cuts. The latter even included the entire second act, which showed both the artist-hero Adoniram tumble from great heights to the lowest ebb of his fortunes, and also included the opera's most brilliant spectacular scenic effect. For all of Gounod's official favour at this period – he was even invited to visit the court at Compiègne where the Empress Eugénie had fancifully proposed that they collaborate on a ballet – La reine de Saba was a dismal failure in 1862. Gounod took the many attacks in the press very much to heart and sought respite in a long trip to Rome with his family. The city had lost none of its appeal. Indeed, the significant point about Gounod's artistic mettle is that renewed exposure to Rome's close entwining of Christianity and classical culture energized him for the travails of his career back in Paris.

His new opera was Mireille, based on a recent epic poem in the Provençal language by Frédéric Mistral that just then was attracting much attention among Parisian literati. Now Gounod was more responsive to couleur locale, even visiting the site of each tableau of his work. As a five-act tragedy in a peasant setting Mireille did in some sense pave the way for veristic works of the fin-de-siècle, but such a contextualization must be tempered by recognition of a Gounodian aesthetic that gave elegance precedence over stark brutality and unbridled passion. A failure during its first run in 1864, the opera was much tampered with over the years: it was condensed to three acts for an Opéra-Comique production in 1889 and eventually settled to the original size in an edition overseen by Henri Busser (though important differences from Gounod's conception still remained). Mireille gained a strong following in France, where its regional flavour has always been appreciated more than elsewhere (fig.4). Roméo et Juliette had more widespread appeal as a subject. It proved to be Gounod's most rapid-fire international success following its première at Carvalho's Théâtre-Lyrique during the International Exposition of 1867. The steady stream of mélodiesand smaller devotional works he had written since Faust reaped benefit in the light of this triumph. It was the high point of his career, a time when, according to Saint-Saëns, ‘all women sang his songs, all young composers [in France] imitated his style’. Gounod's name could be credibly mentioned in the same breath as Verdi and Wagner by Auguste Mariette as he set about to find a composer to write the first work for the Cairo opera house two years later (a commission that led famously to Aida).

Shortly before the Roméo première Gounod befriended the sculptor Marcello (the pseudonym of the Duchesse Castiglione Colonna). The extent to which the composer's infatuation was reciprocated remains unclear in available correspondence, but the two certainly did have a close and warm relationship based on a lively exchange of ideas. That they shared thoughts on Dante undoubtedly led to Gounod's serious ruminations about an operatic project on Francesca da Rimini which, however, he soon abandoned. Indeed, for much of 1868 Gounod developed a general lassitude about professional matters that may well have been partly connected to the Marcello episode. He complained to Opéra director Emile Perrin about ‘mental fatigue’ that impeded his composition of the Faust ballet for that house, a task that he had taken on with little enthusiasm. He was ministered to at the clinic of his friend Dr Blanche, one of several periods of withdrawal that occurred at various times of his life and that give evidence of a fragile temperament often ill-suited to business and career pressures. Once again, Gounod turned to Rome for relief and new inspiration: on a trip at the end of 1868, the creative seeds were sown for two of the principal works of his later career: the opera Polyeucte, on the subject of early Christian martyrs, and the oratorio La rédemption. The Opéra was most eager to acquire the first of these following the success of its new production of Faust in 1869.

Gounod, Charles-François