Gounod: Symphonies Nos. 1 And 2

Description

Charles Gounod (1818-1893) Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2The French composer Charles Gounod stemmed from a formidable cultural family tradition going back to the seventeenth century. His father Fran?ºois-Louis, who died when his son was five, was a painter, a friend of Ingres, and had won the second Prix de Rome in 1783. His mother, to whom he owed his early musical training, was a pianist, a pupil of Louis Adam, father of the composer Adolphe Adam. Born in Paris in 1818, Gounod had his schooling at the Lycee Saint-Louis, taking lessons in harmony and counterpoint from Anton Reicha. In 1836 he entered the Conservatoire, studying counterpoint with Halevy, composition first with Berton and then with Le Sueur and finally with Paer, and taking piano lessons with Zimmermann, whose daughter he later married. His early ability is witnessed by the fact that he won the second Prix de Rome in 1837 with the cantata Marie Stuart et Rizzio. He failed to win a prize in 1838, but the following year took the first Prix de Rome with his cantata Fernand.Ten years earlier Berlioz had taken up the same prize with some reluctance. Gounod, however, made excellent use of his time at the Villa Medici in Rome, where, according to the terms of the prize, he spent two years, followed by travel in Germany. In Rome he found support from Ingres, director of the Villa Medici, impressing him with his own sketches. In the church music he heard, notably that of Palestrina in the Sistine Chapel, he discovered a repertoire that he greatly admired. He was influenced too by Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny Hensel, wife of the painter Wilhelm Hensel and a gifted composer herself, who introduced Gounod to the music of Bach and Beethoven, and to the writings of Goethe. Further influences were found in Pauline Viardot-Garcia, sister of the singer Malibran and wife of Louis Viardot, director of the The?ótre-Italien, herself a pupil of Reicha and a singer of distinction, and in the sermons of the French Dominican Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, a pupil of Lamennais, who saw art as a weapon against the materialism of the day. In Vienna Gounod met Otto Nicolai, and in Germany was able to see the Hensels in Berlin and meet Mendelssohn in Leipzig. He therefore returned to Paris with an unusually wide experience of musical traditions other than the French, to the discomfort of his congregation at the Paris Missions Etrang?¿res, where he became organist. Momentarily drawn towards the church, he finally decided to make a career in music.Gounod's first operas, in which he had the encouragement of Pauline Viardot, were largely unsuccessful, but it was with Faust, first staged at the The?ótre-Lyrique in 1859 and revised and expanded in 1869 to meet the requirements of the Paris Opera, that he won a definitive position for himself, supported by the church music that he had continued to write since his days as a student in Rome. A change came in the course of his life when, in 1870, after the outbreak of war wi