Charles Gounod

Charles Gounod was born in Paris on 17 June 1818. His father, François-Louis Gounod, was a renowned painter and his mother, Victoire Lemachois, an excellent pianist. His father died when he was only five, and it was his mother who brought him up and gave him his first music lessons. He received a solid education at the Lycée Saint-Louis while taking composition lessons from Anton Reicha. As a child he was dazzled by a performance of Rossini’s Otello and by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which remained his absolute model.

In 1836 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Fromental Halévy and Jean-François Lesueur. In 1839 he won the Grand Prix de Rome with the cantata Fernand. He spent three years at the Villa Medici, where he passionately discovered Palestrina’s music in the Sistine Chapel. He became friends with the composer Fanny Mendelssohn, then visiting Rome, who introduced him to Bach and Beethoven. Returning via Vienna and Germany, he met Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig.

Back in Paris in 1843, he became organist and choirmaster of the church of the Missions Étrangères. Deeply religious, he went through a mystical crisis: he attended theology classes at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, wore clerical dress for a time and signed his letters “Abbé Gounod”. In the end he gave up the priesthood and returned to music. In 1851 his first opera, Sapho, written for the singer Pauline Viardot, was politely received. In 1852 he married Anna Zimmerman, daughter of a piano professor at the Conservatoire.

In 1853 he improvised a melody over the First Prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. His father-in-law had it published; later, with the Latin words of the Ave Maria, it became one of the most famous religious pieces in the world. In 1855 his Messe solennelle de sainte Cécile was a great success. He also wrote two symphonies and directed the Orphéon de la Ville de Paris, a network of popular choirs.

On 19 March 1859 he premiered Faust at the Théâtre-Lyrique, after Goethe: the story of the old scholar who sells his soul to the devil, Méphistophélès, to regain his youth and seduce Marguerite. At first received with reserve, the opera became one of the most performed of all time, with famous numbers such as the “Jewel Song” and the Soldiers’ Chorus. In 1864 he premiered Mireille, after Frédéric Mistral’s Provençal poem, then in 1867 Roméo et Juliette, after Shakespeare, with Juliette’s waltz “Je veux vivre”.

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 Gounod took refuge in London with his family. He stayed four years, founded a choir and composed many songs and choral pieces. He lived with the singer Georgina Weldon, whose influence and the lawsuits that followed caused a scandal. It was also in London that he composed the Funeral March of a Marionette (1872), a humorous little piece that decades later became the theme of Alfred Hitchcock’s television series.

Back in France in 1874, he devoted himself increasingly to sacred music: the oratorios La Rédemption (1882) and Mors et Vita (1885), masses and motets. In 1885 he also composed a Petite symphonie for nine wind instruments, still widely played. A Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, he was the most famous French composer of his time. He died at Saint-Cloud on 18 October 1893 while working on a Requiem for his grandson. He influenced many composers, including Bizet, Massenet and Fauré.