La Rédemption is based on much earlier sketches, which were finished only after his publisher, Novello, arranged for its performances at the Birmingham Festival in 1882.
[4] An orchestration of the oratorio composed by Berthold Tours gave rise to a copyright controversy after it was played differently at the Boston Theatre on 21 January 1883.
[6] Though the reception of La Redemption was contrasted, artists such a pianist Franz Liszt considered that it was a "turn towards the sublime" and that success was not what Gounod was seeking.
[7] In England The Redemption was widely appreciated and given "a place among the highest things of well-judged and rightly applied art" according to music critic Joseph Bennett.
After hearing La Rédemption being played in Vienna, another music critic Eduard Hanslick wrote a bitter commenterary in the Neue Freie Press in which he said that he considered Charles Gounod had written his oratorio "more as a devotee than as a musician".