Charles Gounod |

Charles Gounod

Gounod. Faust. “Le veau dor” (F. Chaliapin)

Art is a heart capable of thinking. Sh. Gono

C. Gounod, the author of the world-famous opera Faust, occupies one of the most honorable places among composers of the XNUMXth century. He entered the history of music as one of the founders of a new direction in the opera genre, which later received the name “lyric opera”. In whatever genre the composer worked, he always preferred melodic development. He believed that melody would always be the purest expression of human thought. The influence of Gounod affected the work of composers J. Bizet and J. Massenet.

In music, Gounod invariably conquers lyricism; in opera, the musician acts as a master of musical portraits and a sensitive artist, conveying the veracity of life situations. In his style of presentation, sincerity and simplicity always coexist with the highest composing skill. It was for these qualities that P. Tchaikovsky appreciated the music of the French composer, who even conducted the opera Faust at the Pryanishnikov Theater in 1892. According to him, Gounod is “one of the few who in our time write not from preconceived theories, but from the instillation of feelings.”

Gounod is better known as an opera composer, he owns 12 operas, in addition he created choral works (oratorios, masses, cantatas), 2 symphonies, instrumental ensembles, piano pieces, more than 140 romances and songs, duets, music for the theater.

Gounod was born into an artist’s family. Already in childhood, his abilities for drawing and music manifested themselves. After the death of his father, his mother took care of his son’s education (including music). Gounod studied music theory with A. Reicha. The first impression of the opera house, which hosted G. Rossini’s opera Otello, determined the choice of a future career. However, the mother, having learned about the decision of her son and realizing the difficulties in the way of the artist, tried to resist.

The director of the lyceum where Gounod studied promised to help her to warn her son against this reckless step. During a break between classes, he called Gounod and gave him a piece of paper with a Latin text. It was the text of a romance from E. Megul’s opera. Of course, Gounod did not yet know this work. “By the next change, the romance was written …” the musician recalled. “I had scarcely sung half of the first stanza when my judge’s face brightened. When I finished, the director said: “Well, now let’s go to the piano.” I triumphed! Now I will be fully equipped. I again lost my composition, and defeated Mr. Poirson, in tears, grabbing my head, kissed me and said: “My child, be a musician!” Gounod’s teachers at the Paris Conservatory were the great musicians F. Halévy, J. Lesueur and F .Paer. Only after the third attempt in 1839 did Gounod become the owner of the Great Roman Prize for the cantata Fernand.

The early period of creativity is marked by the predominance of spiritual works. In 1843-48. Gounod was organist and choir director of the Church of Foreign Missions in Paris. He even intended to take holy orders, but in the late 40s. after long hesitation returns to art. Since that time, the operatic genre has become the leading genre in Gounod’s work.

The first opera Sappho (libre by E. Ogier) was staged in Paris at the Grand Opera on August 16, 1851. The main part was written especially for Pauline Viardot. However, the opera did not stay in the theatrical repertoire and was withdrawn after the seventh performance. G. Berlioz gave a devastating review of this work in the press.

In subsequent years, Gounod wrote the operas The Bloody Nun (1854), The Reluctant Doctor (1858), Faust (1859). In “Faust” by I. V. Goethe, Gounod’s attention was attracted by the plot from the first part of the drama.

In the first edition, the opera, intended for staging at the Theater Lyrique in Paris, had colloquial recitatives and dialogues. It was not until 1869 that they were set to music for a production at the Grand Opera, and the ballet Walpurgis Night was also inserted. Despite the grandiose success of the opera in subsequent years, critics have repeatedly reproached the composer for narrowing the scope of the literary and poetic source, focusing on a lyrical episode from the life of Faust and Margarita.

After Faust, Philemon and Baucis (1860) appeared, the plot of which was borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; “The Queen of Sheba” (1862) based on the Arabic fairy tale by J. de Nerval; Mireil (1864) and the comic opera The Dove (1860), which did not bring success to the composer. Interestingly, Gounod was skeptical about his creations.

The second pinnacle of Gounod’s operatic work was the opera Romeo and Juliet (1867) (based on W. Shakespeare). The composer worked on it with great enthusiasm. “I clearly see both of them before me: I hear them; but did I see well enough? Is it true, did I hear both lovers correctly? the composer wrote to his wife. Romeo and Juliet was staged in 1867 in the year of the World Exhibition in Paris on the stage of the Theater Lyrique. It is noteworthy that in Russia (in Moscow) it was performed 3 years later by the artists of the Italian troupe, the part of Juliet was sung by Desiree Artaud.

The operas The Fifth of March, Polievkt, and Zamora’s Tribute (1881) written after Romeo and Juliet were not very successful. The last years of the composer’s life were again marked by clerical sentiments. He turned to the genres of choral music – he created the grandiose canvas “Atonement” (1882) and the oratorio “Death and Life” (1886), the composition of which, as an integral part, included the Requiem.

In the legacy of Gounod there are 2 works that, as it were, expand our understanding of the composer’s talent and testify to his outstanding literary abilities. One of them is dedicated to W. A. ​​Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni”, the other is a memoir “Memoirs of an Artist”, in which new facets of Gounod’s character and personality were revealed.

L. Kozhevnikova

A significant period of French music is associated with the name of Gounod. Without leaving direct students – Gounod was not engaged in pedagogy – he had a great influence on his younger contemporaries. It affected, first of all, the development of musical theater.

By the 50s, when the “grand opera” entered a period of crisis and began to outlive itself, new trends emerged in the musical theater. The romantic image of the exaggerated, exaggerated feelings of an exceptional personality was replaced by an interest in the life of an ordinary, ordinary person, in the life around him, in the sphere of intimate intimate feelings. In the field of musical language, this was marked by the search for life’s simplicity, sincerity, warmth of expression, lyricism. Hence the wider than before appeal to the democratic genres of song, romance, dance, march, to the modern system of everyday intonations. Such was the impact of the strengthened realistic tendencies in contemporary French art.

The search for new principles of musical dramaturgy and new means of expression was outlined in some lyric-comedy operas by Boildieu, Herold and Halévy. But these trends were fully manifested only by the end of the 50s and in the 60s. Here is a list of the most famous works created before the 70s, which can serve as examples of the new genre of “lyrical opera” (the dates of the premieres of these works are indicated):

1859 – “Faust” by Gounod, 1863 – “Pearl Seekers” Bizet, 1864 – “Mireille” Gounod, 1866 — “Minion” Thomas, 1867 – “Romeo and Juliet” Gounod, 1867 – “Beauty of Perth” Bizet, 1868 – “Hamlet” by Tom.

With certain reservations, Meyerbeer’s last operas Dinora (1859) and The African Woman (1865) can be included in this genre.

Despite the differences, the listed operas have a number of common features. In the center is an image of a personal drama. The delineation of lyrical feelings is given priority attention; for their transmission, composers widely turn to the romance element. The characterization of the real situation of the action is also of great importance, which is why the role of genre generalization techniques increases.

But for all the fundamental importance of these new conquests, lyric opera, as a certain genre of the French musical theater of the XNUMXth century, lacked the breadth of its ideological and artistic horizons. The philosophical content of Goethe’s novels or Shakespeare’s tragedies appeared “reduced” on the stage of the theater, acquiring an everyday unpretentious appearance – classical works of literature were deprived of a great generalizing idea, sharpness of expression of life conflicts, and a genuine scope of passions. For the lyrical operas, for the most part, marked the approaches to realism rather than gave its full-blooded expression. However, their undoubted achievement was democratization of musical language.

Gounod was the first among his contemporaries who managed to consolidate these positive qualities of the lyric opera. This is the enduring historical significance of his work. Sensitively capturing the warehouse and character of the music of urban life – it was not without reason that for eight years (1852-1860) he led the Parisian “Orpheonists”, – Gounod discovered new means of musical and dramatic expressiveness that met the requirements of the time. He discovered in French opera and romance music the richest possibilities of “sociable” lyrics, direct and impulsive, imbued with democratic sentiments. Tchaikovsky correctly noted that Gounod is “one of the few composers who in our time write not from preconceived theories, but from the instillation of feelings.” In the years when his great talent flourished, that is, from the second half of the 50s and in the 60s, the Goncourt brothers occupied a prominent place in literature, who considered themselves the founders of a new artistic school – they called it the “school of nervous sensitivity.” Gounod can be partly included in it.

However, “sensibility” is a source not only of strength, but also of Gounod’s weakness. Nervously reacting to life impressions, he easily succumbed to various ideological influences, was unstable as a person and an artist. His nature is full of contradictions: either he humbly bowed his head before religion, and in 1847-1848 he even wanted to become an abbot, or he completely surrendered to earthly passions. In 1857, Gounod was on the verge of a serious mental illness, but in the 60s he worked a lot, productively. In the next two decades, again falling under the strong influence of clerical ideas, he failed to stay in line with progressive traditions.

Gounod is unstable in his creative positions – this explains the unevenness of his artistic achievements. Above all, appreciating the elegance and flexibility of expression, he created lively music, sensitively reflecting the change of mental states, full of grace and sensual charm. But often the realistic strength and completeness of expression in showing the contradictions of life, that is, what is characteristic of genius Bizet, not enough talent Gounod. Traits of sentimental sensitivity sometimes penetrated into the music of the latter, and melodic pleasantness replaced the depth of content.

Nevertheless, having discovered sources of lyrical inspiration that had not been explored before in French music, Gounod did a lot for Russian art, and his opera Faust in its popularity was able to compete with the highest creation of French musical theater of the XNUMXth century – Bizet’s Carmen. Already with this work, Gounod inscribed his name in the history of not only French, but also world musical culture.

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The author of twelve operas, over a hundred romances, a large number of spiritual compositions with which he began and ended his career, a number of instrumental works (including three symphonies, the last for wind instruments), Charles Gounod was born on June 17, 1818. His father was an artist, his mother was an excellent musician. The way of life of the family, its broad artistic interests brought up the artistic inclinations of Gounod. He acquired a versatile compositional technique from a number of teachers with different creative aspirations (Antonin Reicha, Jean-Francois Lesueur, Fromental Halévy). As a laureate of the Paris Conservatoire (he became a student at the age of seventeen), Gounod spent 1839-1842 in Italy, then – briefly – in Vienna and Germany. Picturesque impressions from Italy were strong, but Gounod became disillusioned with contemporary Italian music. But he fell under the spell of Schumann and Mendelssohn, whose influence did not pass without a trace for him.

Since the beginning of the 50s, Gounod has become more active in the musical life of Paris. His first opera, Sappho, premiered in 1851; followed by the opera The Bloodied Nun in 1854. Both works, staged at the Grand Opera, are marked by unevenness, melodrama, even pretentiousness of style. They weren’t successful. Much warmer was the “Doctor involuntarily” (according to Molière), shown in 1858 at the “Lyric Theater”: the comic plot, the real setting of the action, the liveliness of the characters awakened new sides of Gounod’s talent. They showed up in full force in the next work. It was Faust, staged at the same theater in 1859. It took some time for the audience to fall in love with the opera and realize its innovative nature. Only ten years later she got into the Grand Orera, and the original dialogues were replaced with recitatives and ballet scenes were added. In 1887, the five hundredth performance of Faust was held here, and in 1894 its thousandth performance was celebrated (in 1932 – the two thousandth). (The first production of Faust in Russia took place in 1869.)

After this masterfully written work, in the early 60s, Gounod composed two mediocre comic operas, as well as The Queen of Sheba, sustained in the spirit of Scribe-Meyerbeer dramaturgy. Turning then in 1863 to the poem of the Provençal poet Frederic Mistral “Mireil”, Gounod created a work, many pages of which are expressive, captivate with subtle lyricism. Pictures of nature and rural life in the south of France found a poetic embodiment in music (see choirs of acts I or IV). The composer reproduced authentic Provençal melodies in his score; an example is the old love song “Oh, Magali”, which plays an important role in the dramaturgy of the opera. The central image of the peasant girl Mireil, who is dying in the struggle for happiness with her beloved, is also warmly outlined. Nevertheless, Gounod’s music, in which there is more grace than juicy plethora, is inferior in realism and brilliance to Bizet’s Arlesian, where the atmosphere of Provence is conveyed with amazing perfection.

Gounod’s last significant artistic achievement is the opera Romeo and Juliet. Its premiere took place in 1867 and was marked by great success – within two years ninety performances took place. Although tragedy Shakespeare is here interpreted in the spirit lyrical drama, the best numbers of the opera – and these include the four duets of the main characters (at the ball, on the balcony, in Juliet’s bedroom and in the crypt), Juliet’s waltz, Romeo’s cavatina – have that emotional immediacy, truthfulness of recitation and melodic beauty that are characteristic of individual style Gounod.

The musical and theatrical works written after that are indicative of the onset ideological and artistic crisis in the composer’s work, which is associated with the strengthening of clerical elements in his worldview. In the last twelve years of his life, Gounod did not write operas. He died on October 18, 1893.

Thus, “Faust” was his best creation. This is a classic example of French lyric opera, with all its virtues and some of its shortcomings.

M. Druskin

Essays

Operas (total 12) (dates are in parentheses)

Sappho, libretto by Ogier (1851, new editions – 1858, 1881) The Bloodied Nun, libretto by Scribe and Delavigne (1854) The Unwitting Doctor, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1858) Faust, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1859, new edition – 1869) The Dove, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1860) Philemon and Baucis, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1860, new edition – 1876) “The Empress of Savskaya”, libretto by Barbier and Carre (1862) Mireille, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1864, new edition – 1874) Romeo and Juliet, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1867, new edition – 1888) Saint-Map, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1877) Polyeuct, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1878) “The Day of Zamora”, libretto by Barbier and Carré (1881)

Music in drama theater Choirs to Ponsard’s tragedy “Odysseus” (1852) Music for Legouwe’s drama “Two Queens of France” (1872) Music for Barbier’s play Joan of Arc (1873)

Spiritual writings 14 masses, 3 requiems, “Stabat mater”, “Te Deum”, a number of oratorios (among them – “Atonement”, 1881; “Death and Life”, 1884), 50 spiritual songs, over 150 chorales and others

Vocal music More than 100 romances and songs (the best ones were published in 4 collections of 20 romances each), vocal duets, many 4-voice male choirs (for “orpheonists”), cantata “Gallia” and others

Symphonic works First Symphony in D major (1851) Second Symphony Es-dur (1855) Little Symphony for wind instruments (1888) and others

In addition, a number of pieces for piano and other solo instruments, chamber ensembles

Literary writings “Memoirs of an Artist” (posthumously published), a number of articles