Gounod the man was the essential French romantic: at turns religious, overly sensitive, hyper-emotional, sensuous and passionate. In his early years he would often get so excited about music or the arts that he’d collapse in a delirium, and even in his later years he was prone to psychosomatic ailments. But it was exactly this combination of elements that made him not only a man of his time but an extraordinarily successful composer at the height of the Second Empire. At the zenith of his career, no other French composer was able to match him, and with Faust, which appeared in 1859, he set the standard for French opera through the rest of the 19th century influencing younger composers like Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Massenet. Faust did have a rather torturous journey to the stage: another theatre in the city was planning a theatrical spectacle based on the same subject at virtually the same time, something that frightened both the director of the Paris Opéra as well as Leon Carvalho, the intendant at the Théâtre Lyrique who originally commissioned the work. When the ‘other’ Faust was postponed, Carvalho regained his courage and produced the opera. But even the larger music publishers (Colombier, Heugel and Escudier) refused to touch the work, leaving it to the smaller house of Antoine Choudens who marketed the work to smaller opera houses throughout France and Germany. When Faust became the huge success that it is, Choudens (and Gounod’s!) future was assured and it became one of the most important music publishing houses in Europe.
Four Gounod operas followed Faust in succession (Philémon et Baucis, 1860, La colombe, an opéra comique, 1860, La reine de Saba, 1862, and Mireielle, 1864), but none of them had much success. Mireielle and Philémon were more successful in revival a few years (and not-so-few revisions) later. Yet even through these years of relative operatic failure, Gounod was still considered the leading French composer of opera. He showed interest in an operatic version of Roméo et Juliette in 1864 and turned to Jules Barbier and Michel-Florentin Carré, the masters of the mid-19th century French opera libretto, to set the verses (the composer also had an earlier encounter with the story of Romeo and Juliet; as a young student he was present at a rehearsal of Berlioz’ dramatic symphony on the same subject and was greatly moved, vowing even then to eventually write an opera). They in turn used the original Shakespeare play for their inspiration (see the next article, The Libretto and Source of Roméo et Juliette). Gounod returned to Provence, the coastal town of St.-Raphaël, where he had spent time previously working on Mireielle at the invitation of the poet Mistral. Here, between April and July of 1865, he worked sporadically on the score, being afflicted by the nervous illness that often disturbed his work during this period. The Mediterranean climate must have done him some good, as the entire opera was sketched out by mid-summer and within a year the work was ready for production. Again, Leon Carvalho produced the work at the Lyrique, happily providing his wife, the soprano Marie Caroline Carvalho, for the role of Juliette. She was not, however, able to sing the dramatic “Amour ranime mon courage”, Juliette’s ‘poison’ aria at the end of the opera; so the composer provided “Je veux vivre”, Juliette’s waltz for the first act at the last moment, something that sopranos ever since have been thanking him for. (In past years, “Amour” has been cut from the opera to allow lighter sopranos to sing the entire role. Sopranos who can master both the lightness of the waltz and the dramatic heft of the poison aria are far and few between!)
To understand the success of the opera for Gounod one must realize that the Exposition Universelle of 1867 opened in April that year, attracting 9.2 million visitors to the French capitol. This was a godsend to the Théâtre Lyrique and Carvalho’s production, making Roméo et Juliette Gounod’s most immediate success. The opera played to sold-out houses night after night. Based on its success in Paris, it traveled to all the major opera centers in Europe before coming back and becoming a staple at the Opéra Comique and, finally, the Paris Opéra in 1888. It is still today a staple of the French operatic repertoire.