5. Later career.

Reinstalled on French soil, Gounod returned to operatic composition. He finished Polyeucte and negotiations ensued about a production at the Opéra. Because Carvalho's Théâtre-Lyrique had gone bankrupt before the war, many of Gounod's past operas, including Roméo et Juliette, were taken up by the Opéra-Comique under Camille Du Locle. When Carvalho succeeded Du Locle as director of that theatre in 1876, he quickly commissioned Gounod once again with the obvious hope of replicating past successes. That work would be Cinq mars to a book by Paul Poirson and Louis Gallet, a writer who soon became a mainstay on the French operatic scene. Secular and sacred continued to be closely entwined in Gounod's creative life: in the last six months of 1876 he was not only able to complete Cinq mars, a four-act historical fresco set in the time of Cardinal Richelieu, but also the large Messe du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus with orchestra. Despite a lavish production in 1877, Cinq mars fared poorly with public and press alike. Polyeucte did scarcely better at the Opéra the next year, a particularly bitter pill for Gounod. His disappointment was due to the feeble popular appeal of a Christian subject close to his heart. (Donizetti had gone over the same ground at the Opéra three decades earlier in Les martyrs, with no greater success.) Despite these setbacks, Gounod embarked on a new work for the Opéra entitled Le tribut de Zamora. Even before the 1881 première Gounod expressed pessimism, candidly confessing to Léonce Détroyat at another low ebb in his disposition that the world of the stage was one where ‘I no longer see clearly and which I no longer understand’ and that Le tribut would soon be entombed along with so many of his other operas. His prediction was correct, but that did not prevent him from undertaking a substantial revision, and expansion into four acts, of his first opera, Sapho. He was encouraged in this endeavour by the opportunity to rework the role of Glycère, the deceitful antagonist of the piece whom he now equated directly with Mrs Weldon: ‘Just think,’ he wrote to one correspondent in 1883, ‘last night I dreamt of the model … who was terrifying in satanic ugliness.’

Catholic faith manifestly provided Gounod a stable anchor through the violent emotional swings that beset him throughout his whole life. He recommended Bible reading for 15 minutes a day to one correspondent in 1880 as a way of categorically addressing fundamental questions about human nature. Papers left behind at his death show that in his last ten years he gave himself over increasingly to private theological reflections. Publicly, he defended church choir schools in the face of republican policy in the early 1880s to secularize the French school system. According to Gounod, the chant repertory offered the best training possible for singers – even opera singers – not only because of its intrinsic musical quality but also because, studied in context, it would cure any young performer from the pernicious influence of that ‘daughter of vanity’, the quest for effect. The sincerity of such defences of probity cannot be doubted, despite the blurred edges between, on the one hand, Christian altruism, and, on the other, Gounod's very secular desire to assert control over realization of his artistic vision (an aim frequently foiled in practice, as witnessed by many successive changes introduced to the score of Mireille or his bitter complaints about some aspects of the way was Faustwas rendered when it was translated to the Opéra). It is fitting that Gounod's greatest public successes in his later career were religious works, the two large oratorios La rédemption and Mors et vita.

Because choral festivals played a more important role in Victorian musical culture than in French, England offered good possibilities for his ambitions. Gounod had carried a torso of La rédemption in his portfolio since 1869. Organizers of the Birmingham Festival had inquired about the work as early as 1873 and when the matter came up again in 1879 Gounod proposed it for as large a fee as he would then have received for publication of an opera, 100,000F. That was far beyond what the organizers could afford, but with the financial involvement of the publisher Novello Gounod finally completed the project and travelled to Birmingham to conduct the 270-strong choir himself at the première on 30 August 1882. Queen Victoria received the dedication of what Gounod styled a ‘sacred trilogy’, with its telescopic prologue describing the Creation and fall of man and main parts entitled Calvary, the Resurrection and Pentecost. La rédemptiondid well at several other English centres as well as abroad, so the Birmingham Festival followed with the commission for Mors et vita. With the text of the requiem mass embedded in its first part, that work was no less massive than La rédemption. Gounod was prevented from conducting the première in 1885 by a libel case won against him in the English courts by Mrs Weldon, which he did not contest. Unable to collect in France nor to have the royalties of Mors et vita seized, Mrs Weldon did nevertheless have the option of having Gounod arrested if he stepped on English soil; there seems to have been little doubt that she would have exercised this right. Gounod was compensated for these tribulations by Queen Victoria's request for a performance of the work at the Albert Hall in February 1886 and her personal congratulations. Saint-Saëns once noted the irony in the success of a Catholic and Latin work in England. He fondly remembered one occasion during a dark and rainy day (‘a London speciality’) when 8000 attentive and silent listeners sat enthralled by a rendition of Mors et vita by over 1000 performers. For many Victorian listeners, Gounod was a worthy successor to Handel and Mendelssohn.

Gounod continued to compose industriously late in life. He took an interest in the new pedal piano, writing several works for an enthusiastic proponent of the instrument named Lucie Palicot. The Petite symphonie for nine wind instruments, one of the gems of the 19th-century wind ensemble literature, dates from this period, as does a string quartet in A minor written for the Nadaud Quartet (one of Gounod's several attempts in the genre, but the only one he allowed to be published). A set of preparatory preludes and fugues for Das wohltemperirte Clavier bespeaks Gounod's continuing reverence for Bach. His last major work was a setting of Les drames sacrés (1893), a stage piece by Armand Silvestre that featured a succession of tableaux vivants of well-known Renaissance paintings depicting New Testament scenes. Ill and weakened by a variety of afflictions in his final year, Gounod breathed his last on 18 October 1893 in what he had once very characteristically anticipated as ‘the last modulation resolving to the tonic of the eternal concert’. He was a natural beneficiary of a state funeral at the Madeleine church; the only music was chant, at his own request.

Gounod, Charles-François