Composer of Les Huguenots.
Fifty years ago, so far as Americans were concerned, French opera was practically summed up in “Les Huguenots” and “Faust.” Meyerbeer (my´-er-bare) was not a Frenchman, but the embodiment of merely sensuous tendencies which belonged no more to one people than to another, but which found its fittest expression in the glamour of Parisian life. That Gounod (goo-no´) should have prevailed against these tendencies is to the great credit of the man and the people from whose loins he was sprung.
GOUNOD’S MUSIC
CHARLES FRANCOIS GOUNOD
1818-1893.
Amiability was as marked a characteristic of Gounod’s music as it was of his personality. He was graceful and winning, but not strong. He was an emotionalist and a mystic. When his expression of passion ran out into ecstasy he was at his best, and he could give expression to an emotional state better than he could depict its development. Essentially, therefore, he was a lyrical rather than a dramatic composer. The two most perfect products of his genius both disclose the climax of their beauty in scenes wherein ecstatic utterance asserts its right. The gems in Gounod’s crown are the garden scene of “Faust” and the balcony scene of “Roméo et Juliette.” Critics have placed a high estimate upon the latter opera, and the lovers of sentimental church music are fond of Gounod’s religious ballads (they are nothing else), one or two of his masses, and the oratorio “The Redemption”; but to the historian and the people of the future it is not likely that he will be more than the composer of “Faust,” an opera which has a history that is unique in operatic annals. It had been in the repertory of the Théâtre Lyrique ten years when it was transferred to the Académie Nationale (or Grand Opera, as it is popularly called) in 1869. When the transfer was made it had already been performed four hundred times in Paris, and before Gounod died in 1893 it had been performed nearly seven hundred times more. No opera has had a record comparable with this, and there is yet no evidence of loss of popularity in France, England, or America.
GOUNOD’S RESIDENCE IN PARIS
As a musician Gounod may be described as an eclectic. Though his genius was essentially lyrical, his models were the kings of dramatic music,—Mozart, Weber (vay´-ber) and Wagner. To his love for the first of these he raised a lovely monument in a book on “Don Giovanni” (jo-vahn´-nee), which opera, he said, had influenced his whole life like a revelation, and had remained from the beginning the embodiment of dramatic perfection. He was one of the first of Wagner’s disciples in France; but his lyrical trend did not permit him to follow the German poet-composer to the logical outcome of his theories. Wagner’s influence upon him stopped with “Lohengrin.” Thereafter, as Gounod himself expressed it, he and Wagner traveled in diametrically opposite directions, he seeking to grow more simple in his manner and more desirous to achieve his ends by unaffected means and truthfulness of feeling. At the end he was disposed to consider Wagner an aberration of genius, a visionary haunted by the colossal, unable longer to estimate aright his own intellectual powers, one who had lost the sense of proportion.