7. Church music.

A striking characteristic of Gounod's career is that the composer of such successful depictions of the classical world should also have written 21 masses, three oratorios and a great many cantatas, motets and smaller scale religious works. His approach to sacred choral music was in itself varied, as evinced by the two unpublished masses he wrote in Rome and Vienna at the beginning of his career. The Roman mass (1841) is set with an orchestral accompaniment containing divided string parts and virtuoso passages for solo violin. The Vienna mass (1843), to the contrary, is in a severe a cappella style that Gounod would often return to throughout his career. A prominent instance late in life is the white-note double chorus ‘A custodià matutinà’ from Mors et vita. Although Gounod comes very close to replicating the style of Palestrina here, certain details betray an eclectic approach characteristic of many of his ‘white-note’ works. For example, the dramatic succession of third-related block chords before the final chord progression in ‘A custodià matutinà’ brings to mind 17th-century composers such as Schütz or Carissimi in their own stile antico writing more than Palestrina. The Missa angeli custodes is also in austere white-note style (now with organ) but despite a generally limited harmonic language of tonal, diatonic progressions on the local level, Gounod does make sudden plunges to large areas in the flattened mediant and flattened supertonic that are more characteristic of a 19th-century composer. Nor is all of Gounod's a cappella mass music as restricted in chromatic part-writing as these examples. On several occasions in his Deuxième messe pour les sociétés chorales(1862), for example, he works in his favourite technique of rosalia – a complete melodic phrase that rises up degrees of the scale – and brings the Kyrie to a close with chromatic part-writing over a pedal. Some chromatic writing as well as dialogue between grand orgue and choir are incorporated into the Messe solennelle sur l'intonation de la liturgie catholique (1888), although in a generally very sombre context, lent an especially archaic flavour by frequent 4–3 suspensions and textures that merge seamlessly between homophony and points of imitation. Gounod weaves a chant incipit throughout this mass with the ingenuity of a Renaissance master: in cantus firmus style, as the bass of the texture, at the beginnings and ends of homophonic choral passages, or in a bed of organ chromatic part-writing.

On the other side of the coin from Gounod's austere sacred style is the Messe solennelle de Saint, Cécile (1855) with orchestral accompaniment, his most famous essay in the genre. The work is not without its moments of introspection. The Benedictus provides another illustration of the moving effect that Gounod often achieves with very simple means: the entire B setting is hushed and set with primary diatonic triads until the ‘Hosanna in excelsis’, sung fortissimo and only once, and triggered by an A harmony (as a dominant of IV) that sounds especially imposing in this tonal context. Elsewhere in the mass Gounod employs the full chromatic palette of the mid-19th century. The ‘Cum sancto spiritu’ of the Gloria is driven by a twofold chromatic ascent of the soprano from tonic D to dominant pitch A which is harmonized differently the second time around through enharmonic respellings of the melody notes. The bulk of the Credo is grandiosely conceived with a motoric rhythm in the bass to accompany a wide-arching melody in choral unison; the affect imparted by this music is suggested by Gounod's re-use of substantially the same melodic cut and accompaniment 30 years later as the grand ‘Rex tremendae’ in Mors et vita. At the reprise of this motif in the Credo, the orchestration does not escape a certain heavy-handedness in repeated trumpet chords and cymbal crashes, engendered, perhaps, by Gounod's eternally youthful religious enthusiasm. The mass ends with a blaze of patriotic fervour in the form of a threefold prayer to the Emperor Napoleon (changed to Queen Victoria in English editions) invoking church, army and nation. Brass chords emulating bells in the last prayer bring the mass to a boisterous close and confirm the impression of a work that sits astride liturgy and functional music for the state.

Also of undeniably populist cut are the two large oratorios, La rédemptionand Mors et vita. Gounod paints with broad brush strokes in melody, texture and orchestration, sometimes very broad strokes indeed, so that, especially in Mors et vita, long choral declamatory passages and almost reflexive reliance upon chromatic scales for suffering will wear thin for many listeners. The recurring melody to represent the promise of redemption in the first work is a simple threefold rise (ex.4). The critic is caught between, on the one hand, the almost tiresome ubiquity of such sequences in Gounod's output (especially when deployed on a somewhat larger timescale) and, on the other, the sincerely touching legibility of such music as an emblem of Christian hope. Gounod uses this melody in narrative/dialogue sections of the passion story in La rédemption, one of several techniques to bridge the traditional gap in musical styles between exposition and reflection in the passion music tradition. Mors et vita is tied together by a number of recurring musical elements as well, including a whole-tone descent through the interval of a tritone meant to represent the implacability of divine justice and the sufferings of the condemned. Gounod employs the motif in a variety of ingenious ways, including as a link between choral phrases and as a way to prolong the arrival upon a final tonic with chromatic colour. It never, however, threatens the clarity of tonal direction. In Gounod's way of thinking about the music of his time, the tritone motif had larger significance in which issues of syntax and faith were entwined. For the tritone – a sign of tonal dissolution, and, by extension, confusion at an abysmal post-Wagnerian moment of music history – stands in contrast to the purity of the perfect 5th, the progenitor (for Gounod) of tonal stability and, in turn, a metaphor for faith. That the soprano begins the Agnus Dei in Mors et vita with a melody containing no fewer than five perfect 5th leaps in six bars (ex.5) was a promise of redemption not only in the context of the work but also in contemporary musical culture.

Gounod, Charles-François