5  

Somehow or other, in the midst of all this, Gounod managed to work. More than sixty-three songs, two masses, psalms and anthems, and the scores of Polyeucte, Jeanne d’Arc, and Georges Dandin come from that period. In the afternoon and evening of most days his admirers and the plain curious called on him. Georgina inaugurated Sunday at-homes where the guests included Edgar Degas. In effect, Gounod had his London salon. He adapted to his surroundings sufficiently to cast off the brown suit in which she had first seen him at Benedict’s and took to wearing a loose red shirt and on occasion a soft jacket and flowing necktie. One visitor mistook him for Garibaldi. He smoked cigars, chatted amiably, revived all his old greenroom stories and was told some in exchange. In 1872 the Parisian cartoonist Petit depicted him as Paris imagined him to be. He is in red troubadour clothes, playing a guitar with only three strings and looking wet-eyed and troubled. In the bottom right of the design a tempestuous woman is attacking the piano. Staves of music rise to make a frame around the picture, falling at last on the protesting head of a roadsweeper crouching in the bottom left. Gounod could afford to ignore such things. The test of his time in England was whether he could create, and he found that he could.

“I internally approved every word, every gesture of Gounod’s,” Georgina wrote many years later. “I discovered that Gounod grew more and more like the ideal I had so long imagined him to be. I had imagined him just, without earthly desires, wrapped up in God and his heart full of love for his fellow creatures.”

If it was not quite like that, perhaps the reality was better. The Gounod she had more likely imagined was someone not unlike herself—impetuous, untidy, and at heart deeply irrational. When he said God sent angels to dictate melodies to him, it seemed plausible to her that all art arrived in this way. In this she was no more ignorant than most people of her class. In her amateur career, ballads and songs had been either noble in a hearty sort of way or pathetic, enough to bring an audience to tears. She had the source of the second stream right there in the house. Cajoling, prompting, dominating by turns, she filled his day and he hers. If the results were sometimes unfortunate, he seemed to have suffered them with extraordinary patience. He was, for example, very fond of painting.

“Come on, old man,” I would say to him, “your sands are very pretty, very sweet, very soft, but you have no distance. Put at the back on the line of the horizon to the left a little hill. Now then, old man, if you had a little sunset to the right, that would mark the horizon.”

“There it is, the sunset. Don’t you see that faint crimson line? There it is.”

“No, it all seems sand to me, and you have little crimson dashes all over the place, so one can’t make out the sunset at all. I can assure you that no one would dream of it being a sunset.”

By degrees, when he was in a good humour I would get my sunset. That gained, I would say, coaxing him judiciously, “Now my dear old man, you must really draw something in the foreground—a few briars, a little brushwood, a little stream.” Sometimes he would silently hand me his brush. I would then show him what I wanted.

In the history of the College of Arms, Harry’s brief biographical note includes the statement that he once ran a circus. One wonders whether this wasn’t a rather good joke at the expense of his colleagues. In many ways Tavistock House was a circus and Georgina rich entertainment. The people who came to visit were really more curious than friendly. If you were French—certainly if you were Parisian—you would want to see for yourself the woman who had abducted Gounod. Such visitors found Georgina not at all wanton but alarmingly forthright. She was without question eccentric, and she could be vindictive, but no one could deny she had colossal energy. Some of this was emotional fervor—she often spoke before she thought, or attributed good to an idea because it was in some vague way “worthy” or “elevated.” But she also had a tremendous physical presence. Nothing daunted her. No challenge was too great. Part of her gift was never to see the absurd in life. It made her amusing to others, certainly, and a sense of humor might have saved her from some of the more irresponsible actions she took. But not to see the absurdity in things was more of a strength than a weakness. It absolved her from ever being wrong.

“Dear Mrs. Weldon,” Charles Bulkely wrote to her about the academy:

What are we to understand? In aid of the education of young girls? Education in what? Spooning, learning to work the telegraph or perhaps a thorough education in the use of the Globes? Dear Mrs. Weldon, economy is everything. Don’t remove from your present quarters or we shall have the expense of sending you back again. However, supposing you should have any pupils who might require what is termed a more finished education, please remember Charlie Bulkely’s seminary where morals and calisthenics are combined with love and strong drink.

It was the kind of joke she needed to have explained to her. Whatever Gounod was to her, and whether or not they were actual lovers, he had unlocked something in her that Harry and his Beaumaris cronies had never done. With him in the house she was nearer to what she believed herself to be—talented, artistic, and, most important, sought after. This was a house of devotions, to each other and to music. It was nothing like the salon Sara Prinsep had created for Watts, though that comparison may have crossed her mind. There were too many crosscurrents, too complicated a cast of characters. Bewildered orphans she had found in the street mingled with the sons and daughters of those who believed she was running a respectable school of music. Gounod appeared from time to time from the upstairs study, his head full of music, his eyes full of sentimental tears.

One of Georgina’s pupils was the young Danish tenor George Werranrath, whom Harry would one day come to cite in his adultery suit. Werranrath is treated badly by Georgina in the Mémoires, where she describes him as an illiterate baker’s boy. However, long after all the muddle and uproar of those years had died away, he wrote a highly literate account of Gounod’s work method while in residence at Tavistock House:

He would “think out” his theme sometimes in a house full of people. The noise and confusion would not disturb him, but on such occasions his friends understood they were not to distract him. In writing for the orchestra he would write each full chord for all the instruments instead of writing out each part separately. He rarely made alterations. Having thought out the subject for a few hours, he would sometimes make a few private marks, a kind of musical shorthand, over the words, and then played and sang the whole thing as it was in his mind. Even at this time the whole conception of the Redemption was in his brain and he frequently alluded to it.

In the spring of 1872 Gounod assembled a choir of twelve hundred voices and soloists for a season of concerts at the Albert Hall. The choir was formed into a society, an initiative of Gounod’s himself, and joined forces with an existing and well-regarded choir under the direction of Joseph Barnby, which had been promoted for the past four years by Novello’s. Gounod was given permission to call the new choir the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society (later the Royal Choral Society). The Queen accepted an invitation to attend the first concert. Gounod’s new partner, Barnby, was organist and choirmaster of the fashionable church of St. Anne’s, Wells Street. He had studied at the Royal Academy with Sullivan, where they had competed together for the first Mendelssohn Scholarship. He was by no means the junior or inexperienced partner in the enterprise, and his choir had been commercially exploited in a successful series of oratorio concerts.

Almost at once things started to go wrong. It seemed to Gounod only proper that since he had given his name and his energies to creating the society, the first concert should contain work almost exclusively by him. With some of Georgina’s insensitivity, he packed the program. Along with new music for the occasion, he also wrote new settings for “The Old Hundredth” and “God Save the Queen.” The management of the Albert Hall was understandably alarmed. Though Gounod was a valued client of theirs, the music publishers Novello’s were also very uneasy. Under the energetic direction of Henry Littleton, the firm had branched out to become a highly successful concert promoter. Littleton certainly had an interest in Gounod’s musical career, but he also bore in mind that Gounod might not be in London forever. The Barnby Choir, now in the belly of the whale that was sometimes called the Gounod Choir, had done very well for Novello’s in its own right.

There was a second sticking point. Gounod had the uncomfortable job of telling Georgina that neither the Albert Hall nor Novello’s wished to see her included in the program as soloist. Again, this was not solely an artistic judgment. The Queen had laid the foundation stone of the Albert Hall, and this opening concert was the first she would attend in a place so very precious to the memory of her husband. The whiff of scandal that hung over Tavistock House was more than either management dared ignore. When he heard of this new condition, Gounod bridled. At first, he tried to stand on the principle of artistic integrity. To suggest altering the program and attempting to dictate his choice of soloists was interference, pure and simple. The two managements stood firm, and he had the unenviable task of going home and explaining the situation to Georgina.

She was outraged. It is a sign of Gounod’s infatuation that he could not or would not accept what amounted to an ultimatum. At subsequent rehearsals he read out lengthy addresses to the embarrassed choir, as if they were judge and jury in the affair. These were inspired by and may even have been written by Georgina. It was, however, an argument the composer could not win, and in his heart he knew it. The Queen’s patronage of the first concert superseded all other considerations, and although Georgina may have wished to take on the two managements, Gounod capitulated. Georgina’s name was removed from the billing. In the event, the music press savaged him anyway.

Henry Lunn, in the Musical Times, which was owned and published by Novello’s, wrote, “If the first of a series of choral concerts given on the 8th ult. may be accepted as a specimen of those which are to follow, it becomes an important question whether the art which this grand aristocratic temple was intended to foster (as we were positively informed by its promoters) will not seriously suffer by its influence.” Lunn noted the preponderance of Gounod’s own compositions and praised him with some sarcasm for not reworking the “Hallelujah Chorus,” which had been included in the program. In September he returned to the attack, in a general review of the London musical season.

The Albert Hall, struggling against its acoustical effects and its amateur management has met the fate we from the first predicted. Had the aid of the highest professional talent in the country been sought to ensure the perfect presentation of massive musical compositions . . . success would have been ensured; but the performance of a choir without orchestral accompaniment (to say nothing of the feeble programmes which were provided for each concert) . . . were scarcely attractions to draw audiences from the West End concert rooms.

In a fit of sulks Gounod turned the whole Gounod Choir enterprise over to Barnby, who saw the project through to the creation of the Royal Choral Society and continued with it until his death in 1896. (His bust, subscribed for by the Royal Choral Society, can be found in the Albert Hall.)

Gounod acted in a very petulant way with the management of the Albert Hall and was convinced that his publisher and concert promoter, Littleton, had done him wrong. It was comforting to go back to Tavistock House and rant and rage in French with Georgina, but it might have been wiser to listen to others. Georgina was beginning to exhibit the first signs of a persecution mania. She suspected Sullivan of orchestrating a campaign against her. It had not gone unnoticed by either of them that Lunn had praised Sullivan’s Te Deum at the Crystal Palace in the same issue of the Musical Times that trounced the first Albert Hall concert.

In November Lunn wrote a long leader entitled “Paper Reputations” which heaped scorn on people who styled themselves “Professors of Singing” or advertised “Academies of Music” without having the slightest professional qualification. Georgina was not mentioned by name, but the article was a swipe at her end of the music business. The modest sort of enterprise noticed with approval by the Musical Times was this sort of thing: “A most successful Amateur Concert was given at the School Rooms of Holy Trinity, Upper Chelsea, on Weds 26th April, for the purpose of establishing a Society for the Promotion of Window Gardening among the poor of the parish. The programme included ‘When the quiet moon,’ ‘Twilight is darkening’ and ‘The Rose’ (specially composed for the occasion).”

Lunn—and of course his proprietor, Littleton—were by no means against the small and the amateur. That was their market. Their quarrel with Gounod and by inference Georgina was straightforward. The critic and his paper were reflecting a growing determination that the business should be a business, and one in which the standards should be as professionally exacting as anywhere else in Victorian England. It was all very well for Gounod to bluster to Tavistock House visitors: “At the present day, vampires are said to inhabit only certain villages of Illyria. Nevertheless it is by no means necessary to undertake such a long journey in order to engage in monsters of this kind. They come across us in all parts of civilized Europe under the form of Music Publishers and Theatrical Managers.”

In the autumn of 1872, and after an ill-advised series of more or less hysterical letters to Novello’s, culminating in one signed by Gounod and published in the Times, Littleton found he had endured enough. He issued a writ for libel.