ABSTRACT
Charles Gounod (1818–1893) is one of many great composers remembered today by most people for a limited number of compositions. As Camille Saint-Saëns is remembered for his Carnival des animaux, Gustav Holst for The Planets, and Englebert Humperdinck for Hänsel und Gretel, although they were all more productive and well-rounded composers, Gounod is perhaps best remembered for his operatic masterpiece Faust. However, upon closer investigation, there is much more to this prolific, complex, and extremely important composer whose career, along with Hector Berlioz and Camille Saint-Saëns, was one of the most influential upon French musical culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
