[11] While still at school Gounod studied music privately with Anton Reicha – who had been a friend of Beethoven and was described by a contemporary as "the greatest teacher then living"[12] – and in 1836 he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris.

He severely criticised operas by Donizetti, Bellini and Mercadante, composers he described as merely "vines twisted around the great Rossinian trunk, without its vitality and majesty" and lacking Rossini's spontaneous melodic genius.

[43][n 6] Despite the brevity of Sapho's run, the piece advanced Gounod's reputation, and the Comédie-Française commissioned him to write incidental music for François Ponsard's five-act verse tragedy Ulysse (1852), based on the Odyssey.

It was written for the St Cecilia's day celebrations of 1855 at Saint-Eustache, and in Flynn's view demonstrates Gounod's success in "blending the operatic style with church music – a task at which many of his colleagues tried and failed".

[29] As well as church and concert music, Gounod was composing operas, beginning with La Nonne sanglante (The Bloody Nun, 1854), a melodramatic ghost story with a libretto that Berlioz had tried and failed to set, and that Auber, Meyerbeer, Verdi and others had rejected.

The director of the Opéra, Nestor Roqueplan, was supplanted by his enemy, François-Louis Crosnier, who described La Nonne sanglante as "filth" and shut the production down after its eleventh performance.

[59] The composer later recalled that the opera "did not strike the public very much at first",[60] but after some revision and with a good deal of vigorous promotion by Gounod's publisher, Antoine de Choudens, it became an international success.

The city enchanted him as much as ever: in Huebner's words "renewed exposure to Rome's close entwining of Christianity and classical culture energized him for the travails of his career back in Paris".

[n 9] To earn a living in London, Gounod wrote music for a British publisher; in Victorian Britain there was a great demand for religious and quasi-religious drawing room ballads, and he was happy to provide them.

[87] The pressures on him in England and the comments about him in France brought Gounod to a state of nervous collapse, and in May 1874 his friend Gaston de Beaucourt came to London and took him back home to Paris.

[95] Resuming operatic composition, Gounod finished Polyeucte, on which he had been working in London, and during 1876 composed Cinq-Mars, a four-act historical drama set in the time of Cardinal Richelieu.

[100] He reworked the role of Glycère, the deceitful villainess of the piece, with the image of Weldon in his mind: "I dreamt of the model … who was terrifying in satanic ugliness"[101] Throughout these disappointments Faust continued to attract the public, and in November 1888 Gounod conducted the 500th performance at the Opéra.

[103] His greatest popular successes in his later career were religious works, the two large oratorios La Rédemption (1882) and Mors et vita (1885), both composed for and premiered at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival in England.

On 15 October 1893, after returning home from playing the organ for Mass at his local church, he suffered a stroke while working on a setting of the Requiem in memory of his grandson Maurice, who had died in infancy.

Robert Orledge judges that in the 1850s and 1860s Gounod introduced to French opera a combination of "tender, lyrical charm, consummate craftsmanship, and genuine musical characterization", but his later works tend to "sentimentality and banality ... in his quest for inspired simplicity".

[40] A more recent reviewer remarks on Gounod's "genuine talent for music-drama ... exercised in the Quartet of Act 1 where each character has an independent part, making effective counterpoint in dramatic as well as musical terms".

[113] La Nonne sanglante (1854), a work on a larger scale than Sapho, suffers from a libretto that Huebner describes as an "unhappy blend of historico-political grand opera and the supernatural".

He observes that in the traditions of grand opera it features processions, ballets, large ensemble numbers, and "a plot where the love interest is set against a more or less clearly drawn historical backdrop".

A reviewer praised its "verve and imagination ... colourful and percussive music, well adapted to evoke the horror of the situations ... quite voluptuous in the arias (in a score that one can nevertheless find rather academic in parts)".

[116] Cooper says of the score that Gounod seems to have learned more from Mozart than from Rossini or Auber, and to have "divined by instinct the great comic possibilities of what passed at that time for a ferociously 'learned' style, namely counterpoint.

[117] For his revival Diaghilev commissioned Erik Satie to compose recitatives to replace the original spoken dialogue, and that version is sometimes used in the occasional modern productions of the piece, such as that by Laurent Pelly at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in 2016.

[119] Another popular song is Valentin's "Avant de quitter ces lieux", which Gounod, rather reluctantly, wrote for the first London production, where the star baritone required an extra number.

The most famous number, the waltz-song "O légère hirondelle", a favourite display piece for many coloratura sopranos, was written to order for the prima-donna of the Théâtre Lyrique a year after the premiere.

Another popular number is Ourrias's swaggering "Si les filles d'Arles" described by the critic Patrick O'Connor as an attempt by the composer to repeat the success of Méphistophélès' Veau d'or from Faust.

He said that it had never been popular in England except as a vehicle for Adelina Patti and then Nellie Melba, and that in New York it had only featured regularly at the Metropolitan Opera when it was under the control of Maurice Grau in the late 19th-century.

(words by Gautier, 1839) – which challenged comparison with Berlioz, who had already set the poem in his Les Nuits d'été[n 18] – and "Venice" (Musset), 1842, described by Johnson as "astonishingly evocative with its turbulent interludes painting that city's ability both to intoxicate and disturb".

[135] Johnson compares Gounod with Mendelssohn in terms of artistic decline, suggesting that their celebrity as establishment figures led them to adopt a style "suitable for the pomposities of gigantic music festivals.

"[135] Nevertheless, Johnson observes that some of the songs written during Gounod's stay in England in the 1870s are excellent of their kind, such as "Oh happy home" (words by Edward Maitland, 1872), "If thou art sleeping, maiden" (Longfellow, 1872 or 1873) and "The Worker" (Frederic Weatherly, 1873).

[138] Gounod's time in Britain also produced arrangements of Scottish folk songs, and settings of poetry by Wordsworth, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hood, Byron, Shelley and Francis Palgrave.

In Cooper's words, "he was more than an individual composer: he was the voice of a deep and permanent strain in the French character ... [A] whole range of emotion, which had been voiceless before, had found in him its ideal expression, and his influence will perhaps never quite disappear for that reason".