Charles Gounod
-- by Hal Heath


CHARLES FRANÇOIS GOUNOD, who referred to his much beloved “Ave Maria” as an espieglerie or mischievous prank, was born in Paris, July 18, 1818. Seventy-five years later, in 1893, he died at nearby St. Cloud, a much honored, lauded, and courted bon vivant because of his innovative melodies within religious compositions, songs, operas and other works. He was descended from a family of artisans and artists who had lived by royal favor at the Louvre Palace for more than 75 years, beginning in 1730. His father, François Louis Gounod, was a fairly talented but ambitionless painter who preferred collecting antiques, particularly art work, to pursuing a career.

François died suddenly in 1823, leaving his sons, four-year-old Charles and fifteen-year-old Urbain, in the care of their capable, talented mother, Victoire Lemachois Gounod. As a young widow of 43, Gounod’s mother successfully took over her husband’s students of lithography and became widely known and employed as a superb teacher of piano.

At an early age, Charles Gounod displayed talent for both art and music. In later life he declared that he imbibed music with his mother’s milk, for it was her custom to sing as she fed him. He was able to tell the difference between major and minor keys before he could talk, and to sense modulations and intervals. Hearing a beggar singing outside one day and in a minor key, he asked his mother, “Madam, why is he singing in the weepy key of C?” He was five at the time.

At age eleven, Gounod became a boarding student at the Paris Lycée Saint-Louis on scholarship, his mother paying three-quarters of the fee. On prize days it was Charles who usually won for his excellence in Latin prose and verse. In his fourth year he also distinguished himself in Greek. Always happy and popular at school, the gregarious lad was also noted to have occasional moods of flightiness and headstrong behavior. In his adult years these behaviors surfaced in heated verbal arguments with friend or foe and in periods of severe psychosomatic illness. The latter were usually after Gounod had stimulation from either success or stress in his private or public life.

Hearing Rossini and Mozart clinched Gounod’s thoughts of a career in music. He was 13 when his mother rewarded him for a recent school award with a trip to the theatre, Rossini’s Otello. With customary hyperbole Gounod looked back upon the event as an evening that “passed in a delirium of excitement”. He was totally awed, not only with the music, “The auditorium, the chandelier, the grand surroundings, all dazzled me.” Next, he attended a performance of Don Giovanni. Rossini, he said, had charmed and delighted his ear, but Mozart had revealed truth of expression and perfect beauty. After the overture of Don Giovanni, his head fell upon his mother’s shoulder and he murmured ecstatically, “Oh, Maman! What music! This is really music!” The heretofore dutiful student took to scribbling music during classes.

At about age sixteen, he made up his mind. A letter from school to his mother read, in part, “…I can find nothing more impressive nor more moving than a beautiful piece of music. How happy one is to understand that heavenly language! It is a treasure I would not exchange for many others, and it is a delight which will, I hope, fill every moment of my life.” Knowing the economic difficulties of a musical career first hand, Gounod’s mother asked her son’s headmaster, also a musician, not to encourage her son. The headmaster declared that being a musician was not a profession. He then scribbled out the words to a poem and asked the boy to set it to music. In a little more than two hours the headmaster sat, tears running down his cheeks, as Gounod both played and sang the music he’d just composed, complete with piano arrangement. “It’s beautiful, it’s very beautiful, my child.…Be a musician then, since the devil forces you to it! It’s impossible to fight against something like this.”

At seventeen, Gounod left the Lycée of his own accord, easily passing the baccalauréat examination within a year. In 1836 he entered the Paris Conservatoire. At twenty-one — and on his fourth attempt — Gounod won the Grand Prix de Rome. His mother’s pleasure was doubled in that his brother, in another competition, won first place in architecture. The music award meant two years of musical study in Rome. It was during these years that his lifelong attention to the church, religious music, and theology began. It was also about this time that he discovered Goethe’s Faust and was never seen without a copy of it in his pocket.

It was Fanny Hensel, Mendelssohn’s sister, who first noted Gounod’s multiple talents when she met him in Rome. She introduced him to the music of Bach. She also found him passionate and romantic in the extreme. A Beethoven sonata she played for him reduced him to such a condition that he ended up screaming absurdities. At one point, she and her husband ended up caring for him during one of his psychosomatic collapses.

After he returned to Paris, Gounod’s first position was as director of music of the Chapel of Foreign Missions. He first annoyed, but eventually captivated, the congregants with his insistent presentation of Bach, Palestrina and other early composers during services of worship. Having been exposed to several evangelical and passionate priests while in Rome, he took to wearing semiclerical dress, signed himself as the “Abbé Gounod”, and he also attended a course of theology for two years. All the while Gounod’s mother was praying that he not become a priest with artistic interests, but remain an artist with a religious bent. Knowing her son’s love of excitement, theatre and people, not to mention his hours spent composing, she feared the power of church authority would stifle his creative drive and make for resulting conflicts and sorrows. After an intense period of five months spent in instruction and prayer, he suddenly knew holy orders were not for him. He later wrote:

The theatre is a place where every day you have the means and the opportunity of communicating with the public. It is available to the musician as a permanent, daily show-window.…The theatre tempted me.…I was impatient to try my strength in this new battlefield.

It is not unusual that a sensual, passionate, æsthetic man be drawn to the depth, drama, historical scope, and mysteries of faith Gounod wrote for the church through the years, with a vitality, clarity, and sentiment often more striking than his other music. Of course, this handsome, articulate, æsthetic composer had a predilection for beautiful, charming women as well. So much so, that in his early years of absorption with the Church, he was called “the philandering monk”. Research has shown, however, that there was more gossip than substance to his supposed assignations. Beginning with his mother he always seemed to be dependent upon some strong-minded, worldly woman to wait upon him, to applaud his music, and to care for him and his appearance. His wife, Anna Zimmerman, a somber, efficient lady, was more than a match for those women who sought to usurp her place as his primary caretaker. Opera stars like Pauline Viardot, and women like the famous English advocate of women’s rights, Georgina Weldon, helped his career and health considerably, but only for relatively short periods. Madame Gounod always won out.

Gounod’s consternation was great when his father-in-law’s arrangement of a meditation Gounod had written on a Bach prelude, soon entitled “Ave Maria”, drove the crowds wild for him. Money and fame were now Gounod’s. At thirty-five he was a star in the Paris firmament for a piece he had described as a prank! People were now more than willing to listen to his choral compositions and his masses for men’s voices. His youthful fervor was accompanied by full control of his novel style. His attention to the voice resulted in clear and warm presentation, though it contained a remoteness appropriate to the text’s mystery.

Determined to be success in the world of opera, Gounod wrote 13 operas, in all. Sapho was his first serious effort. It was novel, fresh, lovely and, for all its fine orchestration, essentially boring. His 1858 opera, Le médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself), an opéra comique, was well received. It was the finest libretto Gounod ever worked with, as it stayed quite close to the Molière original. Berlioz pointed out how well the music matched the words. Gounod’s mother saw early in his youth her son’s flair for comedy, and she had encouraged his five-month labor. Sadly, she died the day of its successful opening, not knowing that her son now had the recognition that would secure his future.

Faust was presented at the same Théâtre Lyrique as, and not long after, the 100th consecutive performance of Le médecin malgré lui. It was not the immediate success that many suppose. As many as 10 years later, Gounod was still making some revisions. Critics were undecided at its first and subsequent hearings. The public was reluctant. Gradually it won a good reputation. Audiences in the French provinces, in Belgium, and Germany waxed enthusiastic; by 1864 its devil, Méphistophélès, was singing with a New York accent. There had been a dearth of good French music and opera since the 1840s. Between 1852 and 1870, only five new French operas appeared in the repertory of the Paris Opera House. Yet, this light dramatic treatment of the ponderous Goethe work with its succession of vibrant melodies in a novel style, captivated the world as the best French opera between Auber and Bizet. Between the Verdi successes of the early 1850s and the Wagner craze after 1876, Faust alone took Europe by storm. In fact, it opened the first season of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. For the first time Gounod’s talents were completely revealed. At his best when showing simplicity of feeling, he connotes the necessary sense of foreboding at the same time. He is credited with bringing French music back to its former tradition with both proper proportion and subtle nuances. His attempts at the showy and grandiose always faltered; they were weak in this opera and in subsequent efforts.

Aside from Faust, only his Roméo et Juliette (1867) and Mireille (1864) are in the international repertory today. Roméo et Juliette was the only immediate opening night success Gounod ever enjoyed. It alone of all his operas gave him an uncontested triumph. Gounod’s harmonies, nuances, and modulations were never better. From this time on, Gounod’s work and the man himself were welcomed everywhere. By the 1880s he stood alone as the patriarch of French music. In a very real sense he was the bridge between Neoclassicism and the innovative French composers who followed. He reveled in his success, spending his last ten years holding court at his St. Cloud home. There he entertained a constant stream of visitors with his music and his opinions on art, theology, culture, and history.