Instrumental Music
Made popular as the opening music to Alfred Hitchcock Presents… the Marche funèbre d’une marionnette by Gounod lingers deep in the memories of many. It was the silhouette of an old parrot, an English music critic, that inspired the piece's memorable limp. And after that, who would imagine that the same composer could also have written the utterly different, but no less lively, inno e marcia pontificale (the Vatican's national anthem from 1948)?
Known to posterity as the lyrical composer par excellence, Gounod worked to develop his craft. His first printed scores were Six mélodies pour cor et piano (1839) dedicated to Raoux, an evangelist for the French horn and a soloist in the Théâtre italien. They recall Bellini or Rossini, whose Otello, which set Gounod on the path of his vocation when he heard it as a child. As for his later musical ideas, he would set them down for string quartets: the five quartets which have survived to this day owe as much to Gounod's worship of Mozart as to Gounod's theatrical background, which sees him treating motifs as actors in a plot that is presented, complicated, and resolved.
The same could be said of the symphonies: the Allegro that rounds off the second is a finale from opera buffa without words. These symphonies, written in 1855 and widely played, are representative of a neoclassicism which found a second wind in the dying days of a pallid romanticism. Thirty years later, the lively or nocturnal Mozartian grace of the Petite symphonie for wind instruments (1885) anticipated the spirit of the 1920s. Among the twenty-odd compositions for piano, the melancholic La Veneziana (1873) must be one of the most troubling.
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