Volume 23 Issue 7 - April 2018

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Gounod won the Prix de Rome. She wrote a letter to her
brother in which she describes him as ‘charming.’ She extolled
to him the virtues of modern German music at the time, and
also Bach. Later, on his way back to France via Vienna, Gounod
visited them in Weimar for a few days and got to know the
brother Felix as well.”
On his return to Paris after the extended stay in Rome,
Gounod seemed to be in no rush to become an opera
composer. “What you’d normally do as a young composer is try
to hook up with a librettist and start composing, maybe a short
opera, in the hope that say the director of Opéra Lyrique would
see it and give you a commission. He instead took a job as a
church organist. He was that for a few years. He wrote masses
and choral pieces and didn’t try hard to get invited to salons
and meet librettists, schmooze, get to know people.” He also
got a job writing music for schoolkids.
It was Pauline Viardot who jump-started his career, says
Kettlewell. “He had met her in Rome. Then in Paris, when they
met again, she remembered him. Ah, le prêtre voluptueux! She
asked him if he was writing any operas and promised to set him
up with Émile Augier. She had just had a big hit at the Opera Garnier,
they wanted her to come back next year, and she said to Gounod that
she would if he composed that opera for her. And that was Sapho, his
first.” It wasn’t a great success then and the intervening centuries did
not re-evaluate it. The thoroughly heterosexual Sappho takes her own
life over a man, and there’s even a ballet added to the story in a later
version. What survives of the first Viardot-Gounod collaboration is the
aria O ma lyre immortelle, which is still heard in concerts and which
will be sung by Lorna Young in this program.
A lot of the operatic works of that time underwent rewrites and
recycling, extensions and cuts, demanded by opera house directors,
star singers or the state censor. “The second version of Gounod’s Faust,
with recitatives instead of spoken dialogue, was much more successful
than the first one,” says Kettlewell and hands me a book that’s been
lying on his coffee table. “I’m reading this right now, Second Empire
Opera: The Théàtre Lyrique Paris, 1851-1870 by T.J. Walsh, it’s
hilarious. It’s about Théâtre Lyrique, the house that wasn’t subsidized
by the government, unlike Opéra de Paris. [There are] a lot of
composers in this book that we’ve never heard of, operas we’ve never
heard of. The Lyrique would put on an opera and if it wasn’t very
successful, they’d put a work on that was successful last year but rejig
it for this year’s use. The stuff popular with the audience would push
other works aside. They had to make money off opera.”
The works commissioned by the state-subsidized Opéra de Paris
were always under the eye of the censor. Even Sapho was sent back
for an edit because in one scene there was a hint of a sexual bargain
Steven Kettlewell, Martha Spence and Tricia Haldane rehearsing.
between two minor characters. “All the while, the subscribers had
the right to go back stage and flirt with the ballerinas. Viardot once
said something to the effect that ‘what we were doing onstage was no
worse than what was happening in the wings during the performance’.”
The pestering of the ballerinas was part of the subscription
package.
The censors also kept a close eye on anything that might cause
political unrest. “They didn’t want people getting excited at the opera
house and then running out to the streets and rioting … which was
a French tradition.” Gounod’s own opera on Ivan the Terrible never
saw light of day because there was never a good time to show regicide
and assassination attempts onstage. While Gounod was writing
it, Napoleon III was nearly assassinated on his way to the opera with
his wife: somebody threw a bomb under their carriage. Gounod’s
opera plot, coincidence would have it, also contained an assassination
attempt. “People began saying to him, you’ll never get this on stage,
start something else.” So he did. He relinquished the libretto to Bizet
and moved on to other matters.
An example: the opera Cinq-Mars, which Gounod created for
Opéra-Comique, and which was revived only in 2017 in a German
opera house and recorded by Palazzetto Bru Zane as part of their
lavishly designed French Romanticism series. (Kettlewell of course
owns the CD.) When I tell him that Opéra-Comique is reviving
Gounod’s second opera, La nonne sanglante, in June this year
and that I have a ticket, since one of my favourite conductors is
on the podium, the conversation veers into the phenomenon of
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