4. England.

The Franco-Prussian War indirectly affected the future of both of these projects as well as the course of Gounod's life. After the declaration of hostilities on 19 July 1870 Gounod moved his family to the countryside near Dieppe while he assumed a patriotic stance with A la frontière!. In September the family joined a wave of French emigration to England to wait out the fall of Paris and a restoration of order. Gounod's letters from the period reveal profound distress about the fate of his country. The war reinforced his long-standing aesthetic predispositions. To his brother-in-law Edouard Pigny he opined that Germany's superior technology had led to the hollowest of victories: ‘For five months humanity has contemplated the dreadful spectacle of relentless destruction in a century that has pompously draped itself in the mantle of the word progress … But what is progress, if not the advance of human understanding towards the light of love?’. According to Gounod, progress did not reside in scientific complexity but in recognizing the ‘simplicity of truth, and the truth of simplicity’ unencumbered by a preoccupation with the self. He readily transposed such interpretations of putatively ‘eternal’ Christian precepts to musical style and criticized the mere self-absorption of those whom he thought pursued syntactical complication as end in itself under the guise of progress.

Gounod's own house in Saint-Cloud was destroyed in the final Prussian assault on Paris and as the Commune unfolded it soon became clear that his stay in England would stretch out several more months. Gounod compared himself to Noah waiting for a rainbow of peace over France. He also sprung to action with English publishers, undertaking this initiative out of sheer necessity to support his family. He sold several compositions to the publisher Littleton and accepted an offer from the organizing committee of the London International Exposition to write a choral piece for the grand opening of the Royal Albert Hall on 1 May 1871. This became the Latin motet Gallia, to a text that Gounod pieced together from the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah about the invasion and destruction of Jerusalem. Like the biblical passage, the motet proceeds from general description to a personal plea in direct discourse – a mirror of the composer's own nationalistic-spiritual anguish – and ends with a characteristically Gounodian entreaty for the city to return to God for salvation. Later Gounod would remember that Gallia ‘exploded in my head like an artillery shell’ rather than being merely composed, almost as if it were a spontaneous patriotic reflex. Its success caused Gounod to be sought out as director of a large choral society created at the Albert Hall, reflecting his experience with Orphéon.

In February 1871, Julius Benedict, then director of the Royal Philharmonic Society, introduced Gounod to an amateur singer and teacher named Georgina Weldon and to her estranged husband William Henry Weldon. Mrs Weldon had set her sights on disseminating her own approach to vocal tuition, appearing increasingly in public herself and, above all, founding an orphanage given over to musical instruction. She soon ingratiated herself with Gounod, whose good name could offer patronage to her school and support for her career. Though Mrs Weldon's accounts are almost certainly embellished, Gounod thought favourably enough of her voice to shepherd her to the French première of Gallia at the Conservatoire in October 1871, and to promise her the role of Pauline in Polyeucte. Admittedly, however, he was not the most objective judge of her talent because of a close friendship that soon developed. According to Mrs Weldon, Anna Gounod returned to France in May 1871 in a jealous rage. Soon afterward, Gounod took up residence with the Weldons at Tavistock House in London, which they had recently acquired for her orphanage. Yet Mrs Weldon always maintained that Anna Gounod's suspicions were unjustified, implicitly supporting her case in her memoirs with a description of how physically unattractive Gounod first seemed to her: ‘muddy complexion … clothes scrubby and too short … short neck, round stomach’. This, then, was ostensibly the platonic attraction of a woman who claimed to have long esteemed Gounod as the leading light among contemporary composers. Now she presented herself to him as his guide to business complexities brought on by his fame and talent. Throughout his career Gounod had had a generally accommodating temperament in his dealings with impresarios and publishers; it was entirely in character for him to lean upon the advice of others in the management of his affairs.

And lean heavily upon Mrs Weldon he did. Possessed of a headstrong temperament and litigious inclination that Gounod himself would come to regret, she demonstrated to him how he had been taken advantage of in the past. Irregularities in recent arrangements concerning Littleton's lump-sum payments for compositions figured prominently at first and Weldon quickly urged Gounod to insist upon sales royalties in his subsequent dealings with him. A method of payment already put into effect by some other British publishers, publication royalties were generally not distributed to composers in France. In July 1871 Gounod began to pressure Choudens to adopt the practice in a pugnacious cross-Channel epistolary exchange, the tone of which betrays the strong influence of Weldon on Gounod. The composer also now laid the blame squarely at Choudens's feet for not having ensured back in 1859 that the Faust score had been properly registered at Stationers' Hall to allow him to draw performance royalties for this work in Britain; Gounod estimated that his lifetime loss from this putative negligence was 250,000F. Choudens was unrepentant and his continuing refusal to pay publication royalties led to a break with Gounod in 1872 (a temporary one, as it turned out) and the composer's transferral of his French interests to the more accommodating house of Henry Lemoine. But, according to Gounod-Weldon, even the royalty system was not without its flaws, which included the practice of assigning additional sales royalties to performers who allowed their names to be used in association with individual works, usually songs and arias. Gounod saw this as a method of publicity that benefited the publisher at the expense of the composer. He also railed against the latitude publishers enjoyed to disseminate unauthorized arrangements. In 1873 he ended up in court with a suit against Littleton, who initiated a counter-suit. During the proceedings it emerged that Weldon had sent a libellous letter to the press in Gounod's name. This did not prevent the composer from being fined, and when he refused to pay, it looked for a while that he might be briefly imprisoned. Despite the comical side of this and other misadventures with Mrs Weldon, flattering to neither party, they should not obscure the many valid points that they expressed about artistic property nor Gounod's contribution to improving the financial lot of composers in France. In his Autobiographie, published privately by Weldon in 1875, Gounod advocated an international congress to debate and coordinate legislation and conventions concerning the music publishing industry. One of his more revolutionary ideas was the abolition of the category ‘public domain’ entirely, to be replaced by nationally administered organizations that would collect royalties and distribute them to poor artists.

Gounod lived in Mrs Weldon's household for nearly three years. The French press was rife with rumour and before long unfriendly critics wondered whether he had renounced his homeland. Public gossip was exacerbated by the fact that when the Conservatoire directorship became vacant in June 1871, Gounod rebuffed the high-level presidential overtures made to him as the preferred successor to Auber. With rather dubious altruism, Mrs Weldon later claimed to have dissuaded him from undertaking this responsibility. It is difficult to deny that Gounod's productivity served her well in England: he continued to work on Polyeucte (allowing her to give performances of parts of the role of Pauline), to write assorted English songs for Weldon and to compose music for a choral society she founded under his patronage. Other compositions from this period include the Italian song cycle Biondina and, perhaps to demonstrate that the heart of a Frenchman still beat in his breast, the incidental music for Barbier’s Jeanne de’Arc. Gounod also drafted parts of an opéra comique based on Molière’s play George Dandin. That this project came to naught over a disagreement with Camille Du Locle, director of the Opéra-Comique, is to be much regretted, not only because of the high quality of Gounod’s previous Molière setting Le médicin malgré lui, but also because he set the playwright’s original prose instead of a customary verse arrangement. His published explanatory preface about this novelty became an important point d’appui for French composers and librettists later in the century as they justified their own prose librettos. During the London years Gounod also completed the incidental music to Ernest Legouvé’s play Les deux reines (begun in 1864 but abandoned when the play was disallowed by censors), the Messe brève pour les morts and the Missa angeli custodes, as well as over 60 additional songs, duets, partsongs and piano pieces. This, then, was a period of enormous productivity; considering that it was also a time when Gounod was often incapacitated by insomnia and depression (Mrs Weldon was ever present to minister to his needs), the bursts of creativity must have been particularly intense. A less sympathetic view would hold, however, that the rapidity with which Gounod was able to work sometimes led him in these years (and at other times as well) to formulaic repetition.

Gounod's disposition was tested by prolonged estrangement from his family, by the gentle disapproval of his reliance upon the Weldons expressed by friends such as Jules Barbier, and by the continuing caustic innuendo in some quarters of the Paris press. A severe relapse into illness in May 1874 caused Gounod to send a distress signal to his friend Gaston de Beaucourt, who made the trip to England to be at his side. On 8 June they effected a hasty departure from Tavistock House while the Weldons were out. Within a few months Gounod was reconciled with his wife, but also involved through his attorney and the French embassy in London in extended negotiations to recover various personal effects and manuscripts that he had left behind at Tavistock House. Mrs Weldon adamantly refused to return Gounod's belongings unless he came to get them himself. The issues that would rankle her for many years accumulated like a dark cloud in her mind. These included calumnious rumours that Gounod and his wife supposedly circulated about her, as well as his alleged reneging upon commitments to write music for the orphanage and donate English royalties to it. Among the articles Gounod had left were the score and draft of Polyeucte. Because bargaining with Mrs Weldon was attached to unacceptable conditions and seemed as if it might drag on indefinitely, Gounod began to set the score on paper again, partly so as not to forget what he had written. He had nearly finished this task when Mrs Weldon sent the original music back to him in September 1875 through the intermediary of his friend, the critic Oscar Comettant, an event widely reported in the Paris press. Having scrawled her name across each page of the Polyeucte draft, she did not let Gounod forget about her easily.

Gounod, Charles-François