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Messe solennelle (Ste-Cécile) pour soli, choeurs et orchestre by Charles Gounod

2019; Music Library Association; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2019.0119

1534-150X

Erick Arenas,

Historical Influence and Diplomacy

Reviewed by: Messe solennelle (Ste-Cécile) pour soli, choeurs et orchestre by Charles Gounod Erick Arenas Charles Gounod Messe solennelle (Ste-Cécile) pour soli, choeurs et orchestre. Edited by Hans Schellevis. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017. [Preface in Eng. and Ger., p. iii–x; score, p. 1–137; crit. report in Eng., p. 138–46. ISMN 979-0-006-56397-5; pub. no. BA 8966. €79.] Though only a handful of his works may be described as well-known in our time—most significantly the operas Faust (1859) and Roméo et Juliette (1867)—Charles Gounod (1818–1893) stood among the most prominent composers of his age and exerted considerable influence in French musical culture over many decades. His prominence reached well beyond the opera house to the realms of orchestral music and particularly sacred music, in which he achieved international success through his wide array of Catholic liturgical compositions and oratorios. It is thus fitting that the recent bicentennial of his birth, marked otherwise by rather limited fanfare, should elicit new editions of the most popular of his seventeen known settings of the Mass Ordinary, the Messe solennelle en l'honneur de Sainte-Cécile of 1855. The present urtext edition from Bärenreiter, which adopts the title as given in the first published edition, stands as a valuable reference text of generally high critical and typographical quality. The Sainte-Cécile Mass is a pivotal work in Gounod's oeuvre, as it represents the culmination of his early endeavors as a church musician while also marking his establishment as a composer in the wider Parisian musical sphere. Gounod had developed a deep fascination with the Church and its music during his studies in Rome and Vienna as winner of the Prix de Rome, from 1840 to 1843. Upon his return to Paris he accepted the post of maître de chapelle at the church of the Foreign Missions Seminary, where he cultivated a program of traditional Catholic church music. He embarked on studies toward the priesthood by the late 1840s, but ultimately withdrew and expanded his aspirations as a composer. In the early 1850s he went on to compose his first operatic works and marry the daughter of an influential piano professor. It was during a brief retreat from the theatrical world, following the failure of his La nonne sanglante in 1854, that Gounod completed the Sainte-Cécile Mass as well as his two symphonies. He would begin preliminary work on Faust in the following year. The Mass was his first concerted setting since his student period, and far exceeded the type of musical resources available to him during his years as maître de chapelle. Composed for the annual celebration of the feast of St. Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, by the Parisian Association des artistes musiciens, it was tailored to the most ample ensemble available for a liturgical performance in Paris at the time. In this context, at the church of Saint-Eustache, it was first heard on 29 November 1855, postponed from the actual feast day (November 22) due to logistical reasons related to the concurrent [End Page 320] World Exposition ("Messe de M. Charles Gounod" in La France musicale [2 December 1855]: 379). It soon entered the active repertory of French church music, and by the early years of the twentieth century achieved popularity as far away as the United States. To this day it is still embraced by various church music programs that sustain the practice of orchestral masses. In its basic structure Gounod's setting follows the typical outlines of an orchestral solemn mass demonstrated by more widely familiar late-eighteenthcentury Austrian examples, especially those by Mozart and Haydn. It presents all five prayers of the Ordinary, and the musical organization of their individual movements accord with traditional textual-formal divisions. For example, the Gloria and Credo are cast in continuous, mainly ternary forms, with grandiose outer segments framing more affective middle sections. The ensemble includes a large orchestra with organ, four-voice choir (in the French configuration dessus I, dessus II, tenor, bass) and soloists (soprano, tenor, bass). Choral sonorities predominate, their textures ranging from unison to polyphonic. In...