Charles Gounod (1818 – 1893): St Cecilia Mass
In late nineteenth century France it was generally agreed that Charles Gounod was the living embodiment of French music. After that he divided opinion to a surprising degree. One half of the country thought him an operatic genius on a par with Verdi and Wagner. The other half considered him a conservative reactionary whose music was built upon bland classical models. Neither side was quite correct, but there again fixing Gounod’s place in French classical music has never been an entirely straightforward task.
No-one at least disputed that Charles Gounod was a very likeable man. An instinctive people-pleaser, he would make a sunny impression on almost everyone who crossed his path. When an early biographer, Anne Marie de Bovet, visited him at his fashionable home in northwest Paris, she noted that Gounod “greets you with juvenile vivacity, lifts the small velvet cap that he invariably wears, grasps your hands with the utmost cordiality and [in no time] you feel as if you had known the Maestro for years, and are perfectly at your ease.”
“It was my nature to… live on excellent terms with those about me”, Gounod once explained. He also claimed that love, in all its guises, formed the basis to everything he did: “If I were a painter, I know that I should make a thoroughly true portrait of Love, because I have the interior vision, the intuition of it, and that I am in constant, direct contact with Love.” De Bovet would even call him “the musician of Love.”
But for all of Gounod’s gushing bonhomie, a serious artist always lurked behind the cosy beard and twinkling eyes, as well as an insightful and perceptive man. “He knows himself as well as any man knows himself,” the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev once said of him.
Although born into an artistic family then living in Paris’ Latin Quarter, Gounod’s upbringing was more bourgeoisie than Bohemian. His father François had started a family relatively late in life, having forged a successful career working as inhouse artist to the Duc de Berry (a member of the royal family) as well as restoring valuable old paintings. In his youth he had even attained second place at the 1783 Prix de Rome. But if Charles appeared to inherit much of his father’s congenial temperament, he probably owed his innate musicality to his piano-teaching mother Victoire.
So naturally did music come to Charles that by the age of two, while wandering through a public garden, he would say, “that dog barks in sol!” He would note the unusual rhythm of someone’s walk or even try to imitate the melodious cries of street-vendors (one of them sounding a recurring C-E Flat). Neighbours quickly dubbed him “le petit musician.”
But his love of music was only set in stone after two unforgettable trips to the city’s Théâtre-Italien aged around thirteen. Firstly he saw Rossini’s Shakespearean tragedy Otello and then, a year later, Mozart’s masterly Don Giovanni. “You seem very fond of that music,” Gounod’s mother said to him after the latter. “Oh mother”, Gounod answered. “It is not that music – it is Music!”
Not wishing to dampen her son’s enthusiasm, Victoire duly organized some private composition lessons with Paris Conservatoire professor, Anton Reicha. The ever-sagacious Reicha told her soon after, “this child knows everything – I have only got to teach it to him!”
Madame Gounod however hoped that Charles could keep his great love as a hobby while pursuing a more solid and stable career. Having sent him to a prestigious school, the Lycée Saint-Louis, she would have been reassured when one of his teachers informed her, “do not be alarmed, Madame your son’s career is quite mapped out – he will become a professor; he has the bump of Greek and Latin!”
But even as Charles excelled at his studies, there was no question over where his heart lay. “If they had attempted to prevent me from learning music,” he later said, “I would have run away to America and hidden in some corner where I could have studied undisturbed.” Finally, and after a long struggle, he persuaded his mother to send him to the Paris Conservatoire, enrolling there at the age of 18.
He would quickly repay her faith, building on the rapid progress he had made under Reicha, and immediately challenging for the institution’s prestigious Prix de Rome. Having gained a runners-up prize in 1837 and 1838, Gounod finally went one better than his father, claiming top prize in 1839 with his cantata Fernand.
The Prix afforded him three years study in Rome, followed by another in Austria and Germany, and Gounod seized the opportunity with both hands. Along the way, he was soon displaying his lifelong gift for making friends. One of the most interesting people he met in the old Italian capital was Fanny Hensel (the sister of Felix Mendelssohn), then taking a year’s sabbatical with her husband and son. This was one of the first times Fanny had ventured outside her own city of Berlin, and Gounod would provide much affirmation and emotional support to the older woman.
Fanny was in turn immediately struck by Gounod’s tall and lithe physique, his energetic nature and almost manic high spirits “Few people know more sincerely and more foolishly to have as much fun as he has”, Fanny wrote to a friend. “During moonlight, we go out in the woods or to the Forum and the Colosseum. Gounod climbed on an acacia tree, and threw flowering branches at us, we sing a Bach concerto in chorus, and we walk rhythmically through Rome.” It is perhaps for this reason that when Gounod met Fanny’s more famous brother a year or so later in Leipzig, the latter jokingly greeted him with, “so you’re the madman my sister’s been telling me about!”
Despite his later reputation as a composer of opera, it is notable that Gounod’s youthful efforts were firmly centered around sacred music. While in Rome he was introduced to the still unfashionable figure of JS Bach by Fanny Hensel – “the whole of music is in that man”, Gounod would later say of him. Even more off the beaten track was his discovery of the late Renaissance master, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, a composer still known to relatively few. Having heard some of Palestrina’s music sung in the Sistine Chapel, Gounod would go on to study his intricate and exquisitely layered polyphony in greater detail. Two of his first important compositions were essentially tribute acts to Palestrina – firstly a Mass, played at the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi in 1841, and then a Requiem, performed the following year in Vienna. One critic would even say of the latter work “this young man possesses a power of imagination and a personal intensity which are extremely rare in this day.”
Bach and Palestrina duly became Gounod’s musical gods, alongside Mozart and Beethoven. Thereafter classical beauty, emotional balance and “living upon counterpoint” (as he put it) would characterise his own music, even if such values would be regarded as increasingly old-fashioned over the course of his career.
Returning to Paris in 1843, Gounod was appointed chapel master to the church of the Missions Étrangères. But the job would prove to be a major disappointment. Both the organ and choir (consisting of two basses, a tenor and a choirboy) were in a state of some disrepair, while Gounod felt he was worth more than his meagre salary. Above all, he thought the church’s musical repertoire was terrible. “It is high time the flag of the liturgical art took the place occupied hitherto in our churches by that of profane melody”, he declared. “Let us banish all the romantic lollipops and saccharine porosities which have been ruining our taste for so long. Palestrina and Bach are the musical Fathers of the Church: our business is to prove ourselves loyal sons of theirs.”
Despite his initial difficulties, Gounod persevered with his reforms and after a few years was able to programme more of the music he wanted. He would take a similar approach when appointed director of a prominent choral society, the Orphéon de la Ville de Paris, in the 1850s. He continued to write sacred music and, feeling his own religious faith intensifying, began to contemplate a more permanent career in the church.
The high water mark of Gounod’s first great period of sacred music was surely his Messe Solennelle en l’honneur de Sainte-Cécile, or as it’s often known, St Cecilia Mass, first performed in November 1855 (on St Cecilia’s Day) in Paris’ majestic Saint-Eustache church. Despite containing musical influences ranging from Palestrina to Berlioz, the work has an entirely individual character. Like any good French composer, Gounod wears his erudition lightly, often making the writing appear completely effortless in the process.
It is also scored effectively for a grand church setting. Aside from its three soloists, four-part choir and organ, Gounod employs a large, Berlioz-sized orchestra, utilising it as skilfully as any composer of his day while retaining clear, translucent textures throughout.
Although the music comprises a wide array of moods, the overall emotion seems to be one of serenity and even joy. The seven movement structure proceeds with a Kyrie (featuring a rising figuration in the strings faintly reminiscent of Handel’s Zadok the Priest), a grandiose Gloria and Credo (with much of the latter written in an oddly modal sounding C Major), a lush, orchestra-only Offertory, a Sanctus in a pastorale-sounding 9/8, led by a beautiful tenor solo, a hymn-like Benedictus and an ethereal Agnus Dei. The work ends with a short ceremonial coda, consisting of three prayers addressed to France’s reigning monarch, Emperor Napoleon III – Prière de l’Eglise (Prayer of the Church), Prière de l’Armée (Prayer of the Army) and Prière de la Nation.
When a young Camille Saint-Saëns heard the work he declared that it “caused a kind of shock. This simplicity, this grandeur, this serene light which rose before the musical world like a breaking dawn, troubled people enormously… at first one was dazzled, then charmed, then conquered.” Saint-Saëns never forget this stunning first impression and in later life even thought the mass would outlive almost all of Gounod’s other work.
Perhaps Saint-Saëns had simply recognized where the composer’s artistic soul ultimately lay. A few years earlier, in 1847, Gounod had enrolled at a theological seminary for two years, with the intention of becoming a priest. But when the time came for him to take holy orders he faltered and abandoned the whole project: “It would be impossible for me to live without my art,” he explained, “and leaving the habit for which I was not made, I returned to the world.” He also recognized that he could never be too regimented with his faith: “If a good Catholic were to dissect me, he would be much surprised at what he found inside.”
One further overriding factor was Gounod’s difficulty in contemplating celibacy. In old age, he would say of this: “as for the other love, the one of which Cupid is the god, why do austere minds look upon it as sin and perdition? Is it not the spring of life, the generator of humanity, the essential condition of being and the continuation of races?”
Instead of celibacy, Gounod embraced matrimony, even as he demonstrated a surprising carelessness over his choice of bride. His marriage to Anna Zimmerman in 1851, the daughter of one of his old Conservatoire professors, only came about after Gounod’s flirtatious attentions had been mistaken for a more serious intent, and he had felt obliged to propose to her in order to avoid a minor scandal.
Gounod’s eventual rejection of the church also seemed to set his career on a decisive new track. Although he had “learned a lot” from his work at the Missions Étrangères, it had ultimately left him “vegetating without any prospects.” In his mind there was now “only one place where a composer can make a name for himself: the theatre.” The break he needed duly arrived in the form of Pauline Viardot, a well-connected and wealthy mezzo-soprano whom Gounod had first met in Rome. Viardot now asked if he would be interested in writing her a full-length opera. The result was the three-act Sapho, based on an ancient Greek legend, which Gounod completed in 1851. Although it only ran for nine performances at the Paris Opera, and Gounod himself later criticised the work’s lack of “theatrical instinct” and “want of knowledge of stage effect”, it still attracted enough encouraging notices for Gounod to be invited back to write more. He would remain forever grateful to Viardot for having made the whole thing possible, later describing her as the “godmother of my career.”
Gounod’s next effort for the Paris Opera, his 1854 La Nonne Sanglante (The Bloody Nun), was less successful, and not least with ownership of the Salle Le Peletier theatre abruptly changing hands halfway through its run: the new manager branded the work “filth” (it did in fairness contain themes of incest, rape and general Gothic horror) and had it immediately shut down.
A little more successful was Gounod’s comic opera Le Médecin Malgré Lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself), given at the Théâtre Lyrique four years later. For many, it showed the best side of the emerging opera composer, and not least his flair for writing light, tuneful and inventive music. After hearing the work, Hector Berlioz praised Gounod as “an elegant musician, with a charming lyrical gift, a genuine instinct for what may be called ‘chamber’ drama, and a discreet and well-balanced sense of the orchestra.”
Finally in 1859 came the best of them all: Gounod’s five-act Faust, loosely based on Goethe’s dramatic legend. Although its initial performances at the Théâtre Lyrique were underwhelming (Gounod later commented that the opera “did not strike the public very much at first), some revision plus a vigorous publicity campaign by Gounod’s publisher quickly saw the work spreading all across Europe and becoming a runaway success. It was eventually performed almost a thousand times in Gounod’s lifetime alone, and it has remained his most popular work.
With all that said, Faust’s strengths have generally been adjudged to lie in its lyrical charm rather than dramatic power. The American musicologist Wallace Brockway perhaps summed it up best when he wrote: “with few exceptions… the familiar numbers in Faust (and there are many) have the crushing sweetness of salon music… Much of the popularity of Faust has always depended upon the ease with which many of its tunes touch emotions that are universal.”
It is also notable that none of the remaining nine operas Gounod wrote in his life ever got close to equalling the success of Faust. Several were even rank failures. The only other still regularly performed today is his Roméo et Juliette from 1867. Even then, a contemporary English critic was astute in noticing its appeal – and relative weaknesses – that the work, “always pleasing, though seldom impressive, might be described as the powerful drama of Romeo and Juliet reduced to the proportions of an eclogue for Juliet and Romeo. One remembers the work as a series of very pretty duets, varied by a sparkling waltz air for Juliet…”
In all, the 1860s probably represented the peak of Gounod’s career. His momentum was then interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and with German soldiers marching on Paris (and wrecking Gounod’s country residence en route) the composer decided to take himself and his family off to England for the next four years. There he found himself welcomed and cosseted everywhere he went, while his music was treated with kindness, allowing him to maintain a lucrative existence from writing small-scale religious works and song-ballades.
Less propitious for Gounod was his entanglement with a wealthy amateur singer named Georgina Weldon. At first he may have seen her as another Pauline Viardot figure: the similarly well-connected Weldon would become his unofficial agent, negotiating him advantageous deals with publishers while letting him live rent-free in her sumptuous house. Gounod initially enjoyed the arrangement and would remain with Weldon, even after his own wife and children had returned to England. Although the exact nature their of relationship may never be known, Weldon’s obsessive feelings towards Gounod would gradually see her own behaviour around the composer become increasingly erratic and controlling.
When Gounod finally broke free from her and fled back to Paris in 1874, Weldon reacted like a deranged lover and made difficulties for him in every way she could. Firstly she refused to return any of the important manuscripts he had left in her care. Then she published a self-justifying (and no doubt embarrassing for him) account of their association together. Finally, she brought a damaging lawsuit against him, one that effectively barred him from ever setting foot again in Britain. The whole episode would remain one of the few black spots of Gounod’s life, even if a certain lack of judgement on his part was also partly to blame.
By now safely back in Paris, Gounod found the city’s musical landscape had altered during his four years away. A new, more expressionist sensibility was taking over on the operatic stage, one at odds with his own classically restrained style. Ivan Turgenev, who had got to know Gounod through Pauline Viardot, was perhaps closest to the mark when he suggested it was Gounod’s very strengths as a musician that made him ill-fitted to be a genuinely popular opera composer. “What Gounod lacks somewhat,” Turgenev told Viardot, “is a brilliant and popular side. His music is like a temple: it is not open to all… fickle popularity, of the sort that stirs and leaps like a Bacchante, will never throw its arms around his neck. I even think that he will always hold it in disdain. His melancholy, so original in its simplicity and to which in the end one becomes so attached, does not have striking features that leave a mark upon the listener; he does not prick or arouse the listener – he does not titillate him. He possesses a wide range of colours on his palette but everything he writes – even a drinking song such as Trinquons [from Gounod’s Sapho] – bears a lofty stamp.”
But Gounod may have been past the point where he felt he had much else to prove. With his later operas (such as Polyeucte from 1873 or Cinq-Mars from 1877) making only a moderate impression, he eventually came full circle as an artist and returned to writing sacred music, producing eleven more masses over the last seventeen years of his life. Honours also came his way in a steady flood: he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and later appointed Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur before being raised to Grand Officier, the highest possible dignity.
Despite his slightly uneven career, he was content with what he had achieved, and to the outer world he continued to exude a kind of ebullient serenity. Even when he was past seventy years old, one contemporary commended Gounod’s complete lack of “stiffness, conceit or condescension” while another noted his “boyish laughter, his spontaneous and communicative merriment.” He received all-comers to his house with grace and kindness.
He might have wondered at how far the musical world had travelled in his lifetime. At the time of Gonoud’s birth, Beethoven had still to write all his late, great works including his Ninth Symphony (a work Gounod described as the “musical gospel of Socialism”). By the end of his life, the Wagnerian revolution had come and gone, Richard Strauss was writing his early tone poems and Debussy was launching his own revolution with the impressionistic masterpiece Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune.
Gounod remained tirelessly active up to the day of his death, his end coming suddenly from a major stroke one October afternoon in 1893, while sitting at the piano composing a new requiem. Two of his more celebrated colleagues organised the music for his funeral service, with Camille Saint-Saëns conducting while Gabriel Fauré played the organ.
Although Gounod’s reputation certainly suffered a little during the final years of his life, his music was sufficiently admired by the next generation of French composers so as not to fall into complete obscurity. Both Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel would find much to admire in Gounod’s classical poise and delicate orchestration. And while Ravel would go on to praise Gounod’s extraordinary lyrical gift and call him the “real founder of the mélodie in France”, Debussy would call his music “essential… the art of Gounod represents a moment in French sensibility. Whether one wants to or not, that kind of thing is not forgotten.”