1818–1893 · France · Romantic
Charles Gounod (1818–1893) was a French Romantic-era composer who wrote twelve operas and a large body of sacred music and songs; his best-known opera is Faust. Players today know him above all for the Ave Maria built on a Bach prelude: the site holds two arrangements of it, for beginners and for intermediate students.
Charles-François Gounod was born on 17 June 1818 in Paris, into the family of the painter François-Louis Gounod and the pianist Victoire, who had given music lessons in her younger years. His father died in 1823, and his mother returned to teaching piano to support the family; she also gave her son his first lessons at the instrument. Charles's elder brother, Louis Urbain, later became an architect.
At eleven the boy was sent to school, finishing his education at the Lycée Saint-Louis. During his school years Charles sang solos in a church choir, composed music and studied music theory; his desire to compose grew stronger after visits to the opera, where he heard, among other works, Rossini's Otello and Mozart's Don Giovanni.
As a schoolboy Gounod took private lessons from Anton Reicha, whom a contemporary described as the finest teacher of the day, before entering the Conservatoire de Paris. His teachers there included Fromental Halévy and Jean-François Lesueur for composition, as well as Ferdinando Paer; he studied piano with Pierre Zimmerman. The Conservatoire's academic conventions held back his gift, yet a few of his early pieces already caught the attention of audiences and critics. During his years at the Conservatoire Gounod came to know Hector Berlioz, whose music he later called one of the strongest influences of his youth.
In 1838, after Lesueur's death, several of his former pupils jointly composed a memorial mass; Gounod was given the Agnus Dei for three voices — and it drew notice.
Gounod took the Prix de Rome in 1839 for his cantata Fernand, which brought him a two-year scholarship in Italy along with further time in Vienna and Germany. Unimpressed by contemporary Italian opera, he turned instead to studying early church music, Palestrina above all. While in Rome he met the singer Pauline Viardot and Fanny Hensel, a pianist and sister of Felix Mendelssohn, through whom he came to know Bach's music. There, while reading Goethe's Faust, he sketched his first ideas for an opera on that subject.
Gounod spent the last year of his scholarship in Austria and Germany. In Vienna, thanks to the art patron Count Ferdinand von Stockhammer, his Requiem Mass was performed — its success led the count to commission a second mass from him. From Vienna Gounod went on to Prussia: in Berlin he renewed his acquaintance with Fanny Hensel, then travelled to Leipzig to meet her brother Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn devoted several days to his guest, arranged a special concert of the Gewandhaus Orchestra for him and played him Bach's music on the organ of the Thomaskirche; in return Gounod performed part of his Vienna Requiem.
After returning to Paris, Gounod served as organist and choirmaster at the Church of the Foreign Missions from 1843 to 1848; during these years he wrote only sacred music. His religious feelings grew stronger, and he began to consider a career in the church, attending sermons given by Dominican friars. In 1847–1848 Gounod took a course in theology at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, lived for a time in a Carmelite monastery and wore an abbot's cassock. After a difficult inner struggle, however, he gave up the idea of taking holy orders and returned to music.
Gounod turned to opera, believing that only the theatre let a composer face the public day after day. Pauline Viardot's support brought him a commission for a full-length work, and together with the librettist Émile Augier he produced Sapho, based on an ancient Greek legend; the premiere came in 1851 at the Paris Opéra. That same April, Gounod married Anna Zimmerman, the daughter of his former piano professor. His following opera, La Nonne sanglante, opened at the same house in 1854; other composers had already tried the libretto without success before he took it up. Neither early opera won over the public, and both were marked by unevenness of style.
From 1852 to 1860 Gounod headed the Paris Orphéon, then the largest association of amateur choral societies, whose members were mainly workers from Paris and residents of its suburbs. He also gave private lessons, standing in for his elderly and often ailing father-in-law Zimmerman; one of his pupils was Georges Bizet, who thought highly of him as a teacher and remained an admirer of his for life.
In 1858 the Théâtre-Lyrique staged the premiere of Le Médecin malgré lui, based on Molière's comedy — it was received more warmly than his earlier operas. New sides of Gounod's gift came fully into their own in his next opera, Faust, staged at the same theatre in 1859: the public did not immediately grasp and embrace the work's novelty. Only in 1869, when Faust moved to the Paris Opéra, were ballet scenes added and the spoken dialogue replaced with sung recitatives. That same year, 1859, based on the first C major prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Gounod wrote the motet Ave Maria, scored for orchestra, organ, piano and soprano voice — it was a huge success and remains one of the most popular pieces bearing that title.
In the early 1860s Gounod wrote two comic operas drawn from La Fontaine's tales, Philémon et Baucis and La Colombe, along with La Reine de Saba (1862) and Mireille (1864). The lavish staging of La Reine de Saba brought no success, and, discouraged by the failure, Gounod went with his family to Rome for a while. For Mireille he travelled to Provence to soak up the atmosphere of its settings and met Frédéric Mistral, the author of the original story; the opera was received coolly at first, but after revision it became popular.
Gounod became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1866. His last major artistic achievement was the opera Roméo et Juliette, its libretto following Shakespeare's play closely; the 1867 premiere was a great success, with ninety performances given over the next two years, and within a year major houses across continental Europe, in Britain and in the US had staged it too. Along with Faust, it is the only Gounod opera still regularly performed around the world today.
After writing a series of unsuccessful operas — Cinq-Mars (1877) ran for 56 performances, and Polyeucte (1878) was received even worse — Gounod turned away from the musical theatre toward sacred music, also taking up literary and critical work in this period. Among his major late works are two oratorios, La Rédemption and Mors et vita, written in the 1880s.
When the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870, Gounod took his family away from their house in Saint-Cloud, near Paris — heading first for the countryside close to Dieppe and then across the Channel to England; the advancing Prussian army went on to wreck the house at Saint-Cloud. Needing money while he was in London, Gounod supplied songs to an English music publisher, since Victorian audiences were eager for religious and quasi-religious drawing-room ballads.
In February 1871 the singer and music teacher Georgina Weldon was introduced to Gounod by Julius Benedict, who directed the Philharmonic Society; she rapidly became the dominant figure in both his career and his private life. Once peace returned to France later that year, Gounod's wife Anna went home with the children, while he remained behind in London, staying at the Weldons' house; she pushed him into publisher negotiations that ended in a lawsuit he lost.
For almost three years Gounod stayed under the Weldons' roof, while newspapers in France speculated about why he remained in London. Strain in England together with talk about him back in France pushed him into a state of nervous collapse, until in May 1874 his friend Gaston de Beaucourt travelled to London and brought him home to Paris and his family.
Gounod's final years were spent at Saint-Cloud outside Paris, where he wrote sacred music, worked on his memoirs and gave lessons to the young composer Henri Büsser. He had gone to play the organ during Mass at his parish church and returned home on 15 October 1893 when, while writing a Requiem for his grandson Maurice, who had died as an infant, he was struck by a stroke; three days later, on 18 October 1893, he died in a coma at the age of 75. His funeral took place on 27 October at the Madeleine in Paris, with music that was, at his own request, entirely vocal and unaccompanied by organ or orchestra, conducted by Gabriel Fauré. He was buried at the Auteuil cemetery near Saint-Cloud.
Gounod entered music history above all as a composer of operas — he wrote twelve, and the most popular of them, Faust, remains in the international repertoire alongside Roméo et Juliette. Besides operas he left a large body of sacred music and many songs, as well as a few short pieces that became known in their own right — among them the Ave Maria set to Bach's music and the Funeral March of a Marionette. In Gounod's lifetime his sacred music was very popular, but it went out of fashion in the 20th century, and today it is rarely performed.
Even though little of Gounod's output is still regularly performed worldwide, later French composers owed him a considerable debt: the lyrical, romantic vein in his music carried through into the operas of Jules Massenet, while its classical restraint and elegance shaped the style of Gabriel Fauré. Claude Debussy considered Gounod representative of the French musical sensibility of his era. Gounod's songs, too, left a mark on later French composers, though only a handful remain widely known today.
Michael Kennedy noted the melodic charm and skilful orchestration in Gounod's music but felt that large-scale, monumental forms suited him less, comparing him in this respect to the British composer Sullivan.
Among Gounod's instrumental works are two symphonies for full orchestra, written in the 1850s, and the Messe solennelle en l'honneur de Sainte-Cécile; in Flynn's view, in it Gounod combined the operatic style with church music.
The site holds two editions of the same Gounod piece — the Ave Maria based on the first C major prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: one at an elementary level, the other an arrangement for violin and piano at an upper-intermediate level. Both are included in the site's starter selection: the simpler edition suits a first acquaintance with Gounod's music on the site, and the violin-and-piano arrangement is the next step for those who have mastered it. There are no other Gounod pieces on the site yet — these two editions are currently the only way to get to know his music through the site's sheet-music library.