6. Songs and choruses.

Many of the finer points of Gounod's musical style emerge in over 100 French secular songs (to which he added over 30 more in English and Italian for the British market). His first publication was Où voulez-vous aller? (Gautier) in 1839 and during his stay in Rome shortly thereafter Gounod composed some of the most striking mélodies of his entire career. In Le vallon (Lamartine) Gounod already exhibits an ambition to raise the artistic aims of the contemporary French romance to the level of the lied, which repertory he clearly knew. Gounod's bold introductory section captures the Weltschmerz of the romantic wanderer with incessantly repeated, bell-like octaves on the dominant while the voice unfolds from monotone iterations of the same pitch to greater lyricism. The strophic main section of Le vallon (ex.1) shows Gounod's skill at distributing Lamartine's Alexandrines for expressive effect, one of the hallmarks of his vocal style in opera and song. Gounod's chromatic language is quite developed in some of the early mélodies. In Venise (de Musset), perhaps the finest of these, he creates a splendid effect at the final cadence of each strophe by approaching the G major tonic via a tonicized A chord (with an added augmented 6th above the root), and subsequently alternating the G tonic with B major harmony. Le soir (later adapted for the opera Sapho) begins on a tonic chord in second inversion and makes a feint toward the subdominant before finally settling in the home key. Gounod repeatedly elaborated upon such techniques later in his career. For instance, he extended the technique used to articulate the final tonic in Venise into a progression for modulations to third-related keys, and sometimes moved through a succession of keys in this way: the song Oh! Happy Home (1872), for example, modulates from E major to G major and then to B major, in the space of 18 bars. Having established many elements of his overall style in the early mélodies and more completely by the time of Faust (1859), Gounod remained relatively isolated from Wagnerian influences and did not push against syntactical frontiers or evolve his sound much during his remaining career.

The earliest mélodies also amply demonstrate Gounod's characteristic shifting among metrical, agogic and registral accents for prosodic accuracy and expressive effect. The accentuation of the word ‘seul’ by durational stress on a weak beat (ex.1) is a thumb print of his style. A different configuration of the same technique occurs in Gounod's 1872 setting of Ronsard's Heureux sera le jour (ex.2), one of several settings of Renaissance French poets (also including Baïf and Passerat) that have always ranked among his most popular songs (together with his renditions of Hugo, Lamartine and de Musset). Unlike in Le vallon, Gounod hardly varies his rhythmic approach to each of the short lines in Heureux sera le jour, creating an artful simplicity that well matches Ronsard's tone. Despite the regularity of the rhythmic pattern and Gounod's characteristic quadratic phrase structure, the whole is shaped with a dynamic sense of direction towards the cadence.

As with most of his mélodies, Gounod adhered to the French romance tradition by setting Heureux sera le jour in strophic form. Also inherited from that genre are accompaniments that make limited technical demands upon the pianist. Gounod none the less achieved variety through evocative introductions and postludes as well as wide-ranging imagination in choice of piano textures. Sometimes an atmosphere is created with very limited means indeed: one thinks here of the austere accompaniments to A une jeune grecque (1862, poetry after Sappho) or Loin du pays (1873). The static, repeated triplet turn and modal progressions of the former create an appropriately archaic atmosphere for a piece styled ‘épitaphe’. Gounod wrote his own poetry for the latter, obviously intended as an expression of homesicknesses during his stay in England, and coloured it with simple diatonic block harmonies and secondary dominants, except for a single augmented triad strategically kept in reserve for the word ‘souffrance’. Sobriety produces some of the most successful moments in his secular output. Gounod did not completely avoid other forms. He fashioned Béranger's Le Juif errant into an impressive set of strophic variations where each strophe becomes progressively more dramatic and forceful. Départ (E. Augier, 1869) is laid out on a grand scale where, after a Schumannesque prelude, agitato sections alternate with introspective ones; introspection comes to dominate the song as Gounod convincingly traces the progressive lack of resolve of the departing lover. Mon habit (Béranger, 1857) is in the more familiar strophic mould, but Gounod varies the speaker's apostrophe to his old coat with many different performing indications. This is of particular interest because Gounod himself was said to have sung with great sensitivity, bringing, in the words of Saint-Saëns, ‘a thousand nuances of feeling’ to performances of his own work even though he was not a trained singer. One can only presume that the many markings in Mon habit document some of these, although the piece's indebtedness to the theatricality of the cabaret song should also be acknowledged.

The Worker (F. Weatherly, 1872) is an orchestrated lyric scene, one of Gounod's few forays into the sub-genre of orchestral song which became so popular at the end of the century. This work forms part of a small number of Gounod's songs that appeal to social conscience, here executed with a slant proposing Christian salvation for the downtrodden proletariat. The generic line between secular and pious song is thin in The Worker: its rising triadic melody with accompanying triplet quavers portraying a voice from on high strikes a note of exaltation characteristic of Gounod's religiosity (or at least one side of it). This melody brings the piece to a rousing close but in the postlude Gounod makes a diminuendo from the final vocal cadence with one of his favourite concluding gambits: a sequence involving tonicization of the subdominant over a tonic pedal. Charges of grandiloquence frequently levelled at Gounod with good reason should be balanced by acknowledging the poignancy and restraint of such passages. The grand tune in the ‘scène sous forme de prière’ Repentir (1894) is even more extroverted and displays the lyrical sweep that many of his contemporaries found so compelling (ex.3). In this passage Gounod characteristically broadens the tune at the cadence by drawing out the last ‘Pardonne à ma faiblesse’ over three bars instead of two. Many of Gounod's sacred or pious songs and partsongs are much more unassuming than this. He composed a sizable corpus of music suitable for services on both sides of the Channel, and well within the grasp of amateur performers. The most famous of such pieces is the ‘chant évangélique’ Jésus de Nazareth for baritone (1856), with its four-square tunefulness, church progressions emphasizing mediant and submediant, and varied accompaniments from verse to verse. Part of Gounod's fame was attached to this kind of repertory, functional music that filled a role in mid- and late 19th-century musical culture without necessarily aspiring to the status of high art. In such instances the boundary between church and salon was not clear: Jésus de Nazareth rubs shoulders with Le vallon and Mon habit in the first collection of Gounod songs brought out by Choudens in 1867.

Also in a popular vein is the music Gounod wrote for Orphéon choirs. Male a cappella choruses such as the La Fontaine settings La cigale et la fourmi or Le corbeau et le renard represent an updating of the 16th-century Jannequin-type chanson. La cigale et la fourmi contains imitative entries in quick succession, rapid ‘la-la-la’s on single pitches, and ‘bouche fermée’ passages with staccato notes against sustained harmonies. Gounod is meticulous in his performance directions for the dialogue of this fable, as he is in Le corbeau et le renard, which offers many portamento effects and piquant harmonies. L'enclumefrom the same period is also filled with much onomatopoeia. Among the very best examples of Gounod's choral writing are many of the numbers in the much-admired incidental music to Ponsard's Ulysse. The five swineherd choruses respond to the story rather like a Greek chorus and span a range of affects from their hatred of the suitors triggered by diminished 7th chords (acerbically scored for trumpet and winds) to a sense of awe before Ulysse's great bow much later in the play. Gounod's skill as an orchestrator came into full bloom in Ulysse, not only in the novel effect of the glass harmonica with muted triangle and strummed harp chords in the first chorus of nymphs but, more generally, in the transparent counterpoint woven with soloistic winds throughout. The chorus for unfaithful servants in Act 3 is coloured with a rich variety of figuration and timbres; its relatively simple harmonic vocabulary (mainly tonic and dominant pedals) produces an especially apt evocation of pagan insouciance and shallowness.

Gounod, Charles-François