In the early twentieth century, Charles Gounod’s opera Faust was the most popular opera in the world: at the Paris Opéra alone, it achieved over 2,000 performances by the mid-1970s.   A typical dramatic work from France’s Second Empire, Faust’s grandiosity, sinewy lyricism, and brilliant orchestral color eschewed the motivic development of Richard Wagner’s contemporaneous German operas. The French libretto, devised by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, follows Goethe’s masterwork, Faust, Part One (1772-1806).

Charles-François Gounod (1818-1893) was the Parisian son of a Prix de Rome-winning painter and a pianist, and like many other composers he showed early musical promise. His mother took him to his first opera (Mozart’s Don Giovanni), which he later felt was formative: “I was chilled by a sensation of actual terror. When I heard terrible thundering roll of ascending and descending scales, stern and implacable as a death warrant, I was seized with such shuddering fear that my head fell on my mother’s shoulder and trembled in the dual embrace of beauty and of horror."

As a teenager, he devoted himself to musical study, specializing in church music and opera (under Fromental Halévy). At the Paris Conservatory, he won the coveted Prix de Rome, which allowed him to live in the Villa Medici for two years. He was a very religious young man, believing in redemption through divine grace and even considering a career as a Catholic priest. While in Rome, his favorite book was a French version of Goethe’s Faust, and he began to sketch ideas for a possible opera.

Faust is a multi-part work written by diplomat, artist, and author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1747-1832). His early Sturm and Drang novel The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) was so influential that it was banned in many parts of Germany for inspiring young men to commit “copycat” suicides. This magnum opus took Goethe over fifty-eight years to complete (Part II was published posthumously, in 1832). It is a classic tale of a man’s pact with the devil, based on legends of the real-life Georg Helmstetter, a fifteenth-century philosopher and astrologer (billed as “Doctor Faustus”) from Heidelberg. Martin Luther and Helmstetter’s biographers spread further tales of Faust’s pact with the devil, and Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus (1594) brought the story to life on the stage. By the eighteenth century, Faust became a favorite subject of puppet plays and farces, and Goethe developed the tale into a metaphor for the human struggle to understand good and evil. Gustav Mahler would incorporate its final words into his monumental Symphony No. 8.

After returning to Paris in his mid-twenties, the young Gounod was thrilled by Michel Carrés play Faust et Marguerite. He became friends with diva Pauline Viardot and librettist Jules Barbier. Barbier had written a Faust libretto for Giacomo Meyerbeer, leading composer for the Paris Opéra (who didn’t want it). Leon Carvalho, the director of the Théâtre Lyrique adopted the project, brought in Carré to collaborate, and hired Gounod. Faust finally had its premiere in March, 1859 in the form of an opéra comique with separate, sung “numbers” and spoken dialogue. Gounod later added music for the sung recitatives (replacing the spoken text) for the Strasbourg premiere in 1860.

Notable gems from Gounod’s score include Marguerite’s Jewel Song, Faust’s cavatine, “Salut, demeure et chaste pure,” Siebel’s “Faites-lui mes aveux,” Valentin’s “Avant de quitter,” and Mephistopheles’ “Le veau d’or” and “Vous que faites l’endormie.” Gounod’s mastery of choral and instrumental writing shines in the Soldiers’ Chorus, the waltz from the Kermesse scene, and the ballet movements (usually omitted outside of France).

The rehearsal process was challenging: Carvalho cast his own wife as Marguerite (over Gounod’s objections), the tenor singing Faust lost his voice, and one of the librettists (Barbier) had a nervous breakdown the week of the premiere. Gounod had to convince his friend, the Papal Nuncio to France, to intervene when censors tried to cut the Act III scene in the church, but the work was praised by critics and ran for fifty-seven performances. After its successful run at Paris’ Théâtre Lyrique in 1859, publisher Antoine Choudens marketed the opera throughout Europe, establishing himself as a major player in Romantic classical music.

In the same year as Faust’s premiere, Gounod composed his famous Ave Maria, based on music introduced to him by Felix Mendelssohn (Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier). Gounod’s next opera, the romantic and melodious Roméo et Juliette (1867), strengthened his reputation. From 1870-74, he lived in London, founding the one thousand-voiced Royal (Albert Hall) Choral Society, and he returned to Paris as an important teacher and master of sacred choral composition.

Laura Stanfield Prichard
Boston Baroque/Harvard University Library
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