60 Facts About Charles Gounod

Charles-Francois Gounod, usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer.

Charles Gounod wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been Faust ; his Romeo et Juliette remains in the international repertory.

Charles Gounod's studies took him to Italy, Austria and then Prussia, where he met Felix Mendelssohn, whose advocacy of the music of Bach was an early influence on him.

Charles Gounod was deeply religious, and after his return to Paris, he briefly considered becoming a priest.

Charles Gounod composed prolifically, writing church music, songs, orchestral music and operas.

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Charles Gounod moved to England with his family for refuge from the Prussian advance on Paris in 1870.

Charles Gounod died at his house in Saint-Cloud, near Paris at the age of 75.

Claude Debussy wrote that Charles Gounod represented the essential French sensibility of his time.

Charles Gounod was born on 17 June 1818 in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the second son of Francois Louis Charles Gounod and his wife Victoire, nee Lemachois .

The young Charles Gounod attended a succession of schools in Paris, ending with the Lycee Saint-Louis.

Charles Gounod was a capable scholar, excelling in Latin and Greek.

Charles Gounod's mother, the daughter of a magistrate, hoped Gounod would pursue a secure career as a lawyer, but his interests were in the arts: he was a talented painter and outstandingly musical.

Charles Gounod later said that Berlioz and his music were among the greatest emotional influences of his youth.

In 1839, at his third attempt, Charles Gounod won France's most prestigious musical prize, the Prix de Rome for composition, for his cantata Fernand.

Charles Gounod was fortunate that the director of the institute was the painter Dominique Ingres, who had known Francois Gounod well and took his old friend's son under his wing.

Charles Gounod was introduced to "various masterpieces of German music which I had never heard before".

In Rome, Charles Gounod found his strong religious impulses increased under the influence of the Dominican preacher Henri-Dominique Lacordaire and he was inspired by paintings in the city's churches.

Charles Gounod came to know and revere the sacred music of Palestrina, which he described as a musical translation of Michelangelo's art.

Charles Gounod severely criticised operas by Donizetti, Bellini and Mercadante, composers he described as merely "vines twisted around the great Rossinian trunk, without its vitality and majesty" and lacking Rossini's spontaneous melodic genius.

Charles Gounod arranged a special concert of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra so that his guest might hear the Scottish Symphony, and played him some of the works of Bach on the organ of the Thomaskirche.

Reciprocating, Charles Gounod played the Dies Irae from his Viennese Requiem, and was gratified when Mendelssohn said of one passage that it was worthy to be signed by Luigi Cherubini.

Charles Gounod commented, "Words like this from such a master are a true honour and one wears them with more pride than many a ribbon".

Charles Gounod took up a post, which his mother had helped to secure, as chapel master of the church of the Missions etrangeres.

Charles Gounod was reunited with a childhood friend, now a priest, Charles Gay, and for a time he himself felt drawn to holy orders.

Charles Gounod was appointed superintendent of instruction in singing to the communal schools in the city of Paris, and from 1852 to 1860 he was director of a prominent choral society, the Orpheon de la Ville de Paris.

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Charles Gounod frequently stood in for his elderly and often ill father-in-law, giving music lessons to private pupils.

One of them, Georges Bizet, found Charles Gounod's teaching inspiring, praised "his warm and paternal interest" and remained a lifelong admirer.

Charles Gounod travelled to Provence to absorb the local atmosphere of the various settings of the work and to meet the author of the original story, Frederic Mistral.

The opera was not a great success at first; there were strong objections from some quarters that Charles Gounod had given full tragic status to a mere farmer's daughter.

In 1866 Charles Gounod was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts and was promoted within the Legion of Honour.

Charles Gounod accepted an invitation from the organising committee of the Annual International Exhibition to write a choral piece for its grand opening at the Royal Albert Hall on 1 May 1871.

Charles Gounod conducted orchestral concerts for the Philharmonic Society and at the Crystal Palace, St James's Hall and other venues.

Proponents of English music complained that Charles Gounod neglected native composers in his concerts, but his own music was popular and widely praised.

Charles Gounod's quickly became a dominant influence in Gounod's professional and personal life.

Once peace was restored in France during 1871, Anna Charles Gounod returned home with her mother and children, but Charles Gounod stayed on in London, living in the Weldons' house.

Charles Gounod lived in the Weldons' household for nearly three years.

Weldon was furious when she discovered that Charles Gounod had left, and she made many difficulties for him later, including holding on to manuscripts he had left at her house and publishing a tendentious and self-justifying account of their association.

Charles Gounod's later brought a lawsuit against him which effectively prevented him from coming back to Britain after May 1885.

Charles Gounod returned to a France in which, though still well respected, he was no longer in the vanguard of French music.

Charles Gounod was not embittered, and was well disposed to younger composers, even when he did not enjoy their works.

Charles Gounod reworked the role of Glycere, the deceitful villainess of the piece, with the image of Weldon in his mind: "I dreamt of the model … who was terrifying in satanic ugliness" Throughout these disappointments Faust continued to attract the public, and in November 1888 Gounod conducted the 500th performance at the Opera.

Away from opera Charles Gounod wrote the large-scale Messe du Sacre-Coeur de Jesus in 1876 and ten other masses between then and 1893.

Faure conducted the music, which at Charles Gounod's wish was entirely vocal, with no organ or orchestral accompaniment.

Charles Gounod is best known for his operas – in particular Faust.

Michael Kennedy writes that Charles Gounod's music has "considerable melodic charm and felicity, with admirable orchestration".

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Charles Gounod adds that Gounod was "not really a master of the large and imposing forms, in this way perhaps being a French parallel to Sullivan".

Cooper writes that as Charles Gounod grew older he began to suffer from "what might be described as the same cher grand maitre complex as infected Hugo and Tennyson".

Huebner observes that the fact that Charles Gounod's reputation began to wane even during his lifetime does not detract from his place among the most respected and prolific composers in France during the second half of the 19th century.

Charles Gounod wrote twelve operas, in a variety of the genres then prevailing in France.

Charles Gounod revised the work in 1858 and again, more radically, in 1884, but it was never a success.

Charles Gounod observes that in the traditions of grand opera it features processions, ballets, large ensemble numbers, and "a plot where the love interest is set against a more or less clearly drawn historical backdrop".

In Stravinsky's words, "[Diaghilev's] dream of a Charles Gounod 'revival' failed in the face of an indifferent and snobbish public who did not dare applaud the music of a composer not accepted by the avant-garde".

Charles Gounod revised the work, even giving it a happy ending, but in the 1930s Reynaldo Hahn and Henri Busser prepared a new edition for the Opera-Comique, restoring the work to its original tragic five acts.

Charles Gounod said that it had never been popular in England except as a vehicle for Adelina Patti and then Nellie Melba, and that in New York it had only featured regularly at the Metropolitan Opera when it was under the control of Maurice Grau in the late 19th-century.

Saint-Saens wrote, "When, in the far-distant future, the operas of Charles Gounod shall have been received into the dusty sanctuary of the libraries, the Mass of St Cecilia, the Redemption, and Mors et Vita, will still endure".

Charles Gounod's songs are by far the most numerous of his compositions: he wrote more than a hundred French secular songs and thirty more in English or Italian for the British market.

The pianist and musical scholar Graham Johnson, quoting this, adds that although Berlioz might be thought to have a claim to that title, it was Charles Gounod who brought the melodie widespread popularity in France:.

Charles Gounod's gift for singable melody enabled him to smuggle the art song – a high-born and demanding infant – into the homes and hearts of the French middle class where operatic airs, operetta, romance, and chansonnette had previously held sway.

Johnson adds that Charles Gounod brought to the melodie "those qualities of elegance, ingenuity, sensibilite, and a concern for literature which together constitute the classic qualities of French song" in melodies that display the composer's "melodic genius, his talent for creating long flowing lines, and his instinct for the harmonic juste".

From his earliest period, during and just after his time as a Prix de Rome student, Charles Gounod's songs include some of his best, in the view of both Huebner and Johnson.