Charles Gounod

Winner of the Prix de Rome in 1839, Charles Gounod spent his Italian years studying Palestrina, and for a time considered ordination instead of a musical career. Born in Paris in 1818 to a painter father and a pianist mother, trained at the Conservatoire under Halévy and Lesueur, he composed Faust, given at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1859 with recitatives introduced in 1860 and a ballet added in 1869, and Roméo et Juliette followed in 1867. Sapho, Mireille and Cinq-Mars belong to the same catalogue. The church music never stopped — masses, motets, the oratorios La rédemption and Mors et vita written for Birmingham — and his meditation over Bach's first prelude was fitted with the Ave Maria. He spent the early 1870s in England, working in London choral life, before returning to France. The Prix de Rome came to him for the cantata Fernand, and after his return he served as organist and conductor at the Church of the Missions étrangères from 1843 to 1848. Sapho and La nonne sanglante failed on the stage, and it was the Molière comedy Le médecin malgré lui, and then Faust, that turned his fortunes. Two symphonies belong to the 1850s, with sketches for a third left unfinished, and the seventeen-year-old Bizet thought enough of the first of them to arrange it for piano four hands.