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Updated: June 17, 2025
He was the organizer and conductor of the Church Choral Society, which gave various important religious works their first production in New York, and, in some cases, their first hearing in America, notably, Dvôrák's Requiem Mass, Gounod's "Mors et Vita," Liszt's Thirteenth Psalm, Saint-Saëns' "The Heavens Declare," Villiers Stanford's "God is Our Hope and Strength," and Mackenzie's "Veni, Creator Spiritus."
More free, flexible, and melodious than Spontini and Halévy, measuring his work by a conception of art more lofty and ideal than that of Meyerbeer, and in creative power and originality by far their superior, Gounod's genius, as shown in the one opera of "Faust," suffices to stamp his great mastership. But he had many years of struggle yet before this end was to be achieved.
The young vocalist who sang it from the top of a Passy-Bourse omnibus on that fateful day of Woerth, claimed to be a tenor, but was more correctly a tenorino, his voice possessing far more sweetness than power. He was already well-known and popular, for he had taken the part of Romeo in Gounod's well-known opera based on the Shakespearean play.
It lasts too long. Wagner is not the only guilty composer. Gounod's "Faust," Weber's "Euryanthe," and most of Meyerbeer's operas, if given without cuts, would last over four hours.
The Jewess did not refuse the invitation and began Gounod's "Medje" in a voice which Von Sendlingen had room to admit had improved in tone and volumn, and would make her as worthy of the grand opera house as it had, five years before, of the Harmonista and its class.
Then, after a whispered word to the accompanist she began singing Gounod's memorable song, "There is a Green Hill Far Away." It was not what the audience expected; it was in strangest contrast to all that had gone before; it brought a hush like a benediction upon the great chamber. Her voice seemed to ache with the plaintive depth of the song, and the soft night filled its soul with melody.
An eminent French critic claims that this great work, of which we shall speak further on, contains that which Gounod's "Faust" lacks insight into the spiritual significance of Goethe's drama. Berlioz exhausted all his resources in producing it at the Opéra Comique in 1846, but again he was disappointed by its falling stillborn on the public interest.
Now and then she paused in her work, to look down at the golden lashes sweeping the slumber-flushed cheeks, and pondering the mystery of the waif's future, she chanted in a rich contralto voice, the solemn "Reproaches" of Gounod's "Redemption." "Oh, my vineyard, come tell me why thy grapes are bitter? What have I done, my People? Wherein hast thou been wronged?"
Gounod's love of romantic themes, and the interest in France which Lamartine's glowing eulogies had excited about "Mireio," the beautiful national poem of the Provençal, M. Frederic Mistral, led the former to compose an opera on a libretto from this work, which was given at the Théâtre Lyrique, March 19, 1864, under the name of "Mireille."
This morning, in Gounod's "Ave Maria," as Miss Darcey approached her B natural: Out went the hand, with the sure airy gesture, though it was little above A she got with her voice, whatever she touched with her finger. Often Bowers let such things pass with the right people but this morning he snapped his jaws together and muttered, "God!"
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