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Updated: May 17, 2025
The circumstances of his London residence seem to have cast a cloud over Gounod's life and to have strangely unsettled his mind. Patriotic grief probably had something to do with this at the outset.
Architects of cathedrals and engineers of bridges were wont, if we believe popular tales, to barter their souls in order to realize their great conceptions. How do such notions get into the minds of the people? I attempted not an answer but an explanation in a preface to Gounod's opera published by Schirmer some years ago, which is serving me a good turn now.
Tears were running down Sheila's face. Mrs. Lorraine put her hand on the girl's shoulder, and sheltered her from observation, and said aloud, "You have it in a different key, have you not? Pray don't sing it. Sing something else. Do you know any of Gounod's sacred songs? Let me see if we can find anything for you in this volume." They were a long time finding anything in that volume.
He looked at the lithographed title-page and read the title: Romeo and Julia. "This is Gounod's most beautiful composition," he said, "and I don't believe that it will be too difficult for us." As usual his wife undertook to play the treble and they began. D major, common time, allegro giusto. "It is beautiful, isn't it?" asked the husband, when they had finished the overture.
Gounod's genius fills too large a space in contemporary music to be passed over without a brief special study.
The Conservatoire, which was formerly more hospitable, rather reluctantly performed a portion of L'Enfance du Christ; but it gave young composers no encouragement. There he had performed Mendelssohn's Symphonie Italienne, the overtures to Tannhäuser and Manfred, Berlioz's Fuite en Égypte, and Gounod's and Bizet's early, works. But lack of money cut short his efforts. Pasdeloup took up the work.
There are some noble pages in the work, but as a whole it is distressingly dull, and 'Le Tribut de Zamora' was also an emphatic failure. Gounod's later works, as has already been pointed out, show a distinct falling off from the standard attained in 'Faust, as regards form as well as in ideas. As he grew older he showed a stronger inclination to return to obsolete models.
The thing had happened in M. Debienne and M. Poligny's time, also in Box Five and also during a performance of FAUST. Mme. Giry coughed, cleared her throat it sounded as though she were preparing to sing the whole of Gounod's score and began: "It was like this, sir.
"The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies." Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the masters?
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