Background
Gounod's father was a painter; his mother was a fine pianist, and gave her son his early musical encouragement.
composer of opera and church music
Gounod's father was a painter; his mother was a fine pianist, and gave her son his early musical encouragement.
After finishing his course at the LycéeLycee Saint-Louis, Gounod entered the Paris Conservatory, and studied counterpoint under HalévyHalevy and composition under Ferdinando Paer and Jean FrançoisFrancois Lesueur.
In 1851, the success in London of his Mass in G brought him musical prominence, and the Paris OpéraOpera agreed to perform his first opera Sapho (1851). Despite the fact that it was a failure, Gounod was henceforth irresistibly drawn to opera.
Gounod had been writing church music as well as operas, but none of it made any lasting impression. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, he fled to England, where he soon became persona grata.
In spite of his many operatic failures, Gounod played an influential role in the formation of pure French opera which, at the time, can be said to have hardly existed outside of opéra-comiqueopera-comique and the scarcely known operas of Berlioz. Faust immediately directed attention away from the grand opera popularized by Giacomo Meyerbeer, and helped create a more intimate and lyrical opera.
Gounod's weaknesses are obvious. His heroes and heroines all make love to virtually the same tune and his melodies are often oversentimental. He rarely wrote expressive harmony and he hardly ever used chords or chordal progressions to underline and emphasize a word or situation. Gounod, however, was unique for his knowledge and love of Palestrina and Bach, at a time when Paris cared only for opera and opéra-comique.opera-comique. Perhaps his best-known religious work, Ave Maria, was adapted from Bach's Prelude in C Major.
On a smaller scale, Gounod wrote some charming songs, while two short symphonies make it clear that had he not been so obsessed with opera and religion, he could have been one of the first French symphonists.