Louis Théodore Gouvy was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

.

Biography

Gouvy was born into a French speaking family in the Alsatian village of Goffontaine, in the Sarre

Sarre (département)

Sarre is the name of a department of the First French Empire which is now part of Germany and Belgium. It is named after the river Saar. It was formed in 1798, when the left bank of the Rhine was annexed by France. Prior to the occupation, its territory was divided between the Archbishopric of...

, a region on the France-Prussia border (now Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken is the capital of the state of Saarland in Germany. The city is situated at the heart of a metropolitan area that borders on the west on Dillingen and to the north-east on Neunkirchen, where most of the people of the Saarland live....

-Schafbrücke, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

). Because this region fell under Prussia

Prussia

Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...

n control shortly before his birth, Théodore Gouvy could not attain French citizenship until the age of 32. As a child, he showed no significant talent for music and after a normal preparatory education was sent to Paris in 1836 to study law. While there, he also continued piano lessons and became friendly with Adolphe Adam

Adolphe Adam

Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer and music critic. A prolific composer of operas and ballets, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle and Le corsaire , his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau , Le toréador and Si j'étais roi , and his Christmas...

. This led to further music studies in Paris and Berlin. Unable to pursue music instruction at the Conservatoire de Paris

Conservatoire de Paris

The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...

, he took up private courses.

Gouvy was a man of two cultures, divided between France and Germany, from which he drew his inspiration, his characteristics and his force. While to a certain extent he was known and recognized in his lifetime, he fell into obscurity following his death. Gouvy, drawn toward pure instrumental music as opposed to opera, set himself the unenviable task of becoming a French symphonist. It was unenviable because the French, and especially the Parisians, throughout most of the 19th century were opera-mad and not particularly interested in pure instrumental music. It was this disdain for instrumental music in general which led to Gouvy living the last third of his life almost entirely in Germany where he was much appreciated.

During his lifetime, his compositions, and especially his chamber music, were held in high regard and often performed in those countries (Germany, Austria, England, Scandinavia, and Russia) where chamber music mattered. But in France, he never achieved real acclaim. Gouvy was universally acknowledged for being a master of form and for his deft sense of instrumental timbre. Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...

 and Schumann

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

 were his models and his music developed along the lines one might have expected of those men had they lived longer. Virtually all of his works show that he was a gifted melodist whose music is a joy to hear.

That he and his music were held in high regard but nonetheless failed to achieve great fame is surely in part because he was a man of some means who was not forced to earn his living from music. There has always been a bias against those who had the freedom to live for their art but did not need to live by it. Musicians of the first rank such as Johannes Brahms, Carl Reinecke, and Joseph Joachim, who were familiar with Gouvy's music, held it in high regard.

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a...

 wrote in the Journal des Débats of April 13, 1851: "[t]hat a musician of the importance of M. Gouvy is still not very well known in Paris, and that so many midges bother the public with their tenacious buzzing, it is enough to confuse and inflame the naive spirits that still believe in the reason and the justice of our musical manners".

Berlioz's favorable reviews, however, changed nothing, and Gouvy remained unknown until the end of the 20th century. It is the recent action undertaken in Lorraine and the rediscovery of his Requiem, with its vigorous Dies iræ, which allowed Gouvy's work to come to light once more in 1994. Requiem has been championed by the Lorraine Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Jacques Houtmann; these artists have issued a compact disc

Compact Disc

The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

 of the piece for the K617 label. Stylistically the composition owes something to Mendelssohn, something to Gounod

Charles Gounod

Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...

, and something to Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...

, but remains quietly original despite these influences.

Although his work comprises more than two hundred compositions, including 90 opuses published in his lifetime, it largely remains ignored. In particular, he wrote twenty-four compositions for a full orchestra, including nine symphonies, as well as openings and variations. Chamber music comprises a large portion of Gouvy's work and accounts in particular for four sonatas in duet form, five trios, eleven quartets, seven quintets, an enormous piano repertoire — for two and four hands — and for two pianos, several scores for wind instrument

Wind instrument

A wind instrument is a musical instrument that contains some type of resonator , in which a column of air is set into vibration by the player blowing into a mouthpiece set at the end of the resonator. The pitch of the vibration is determined by the length of the tube and by manual modifications of...

 ensembles, as well as many melodies and Lied

Lied

is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...

er. We also know of five great dramatic cantata

Cantata

A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

s (Aslega, Œdipe à Colone, Iphigénie en Tauride, Électre, and Polyxène), two operas (Le Cid and Mateo Falcone) as well as some large religious works, including a Requiem, a Stabat Mater, a Messe brève, and the cantata Golgotha.

A list of his works was compiled by François-Joseph Fétis and Pougin.

Orchestra

• Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 9 (1845)
• Serenade for strings, Op.11
• Symphony No. 2 in F major, Op. 12 (1848)
• Le Giaour Overture, Op.14
• Symphony No. 3 in C major, Op. 20 (1850) (premiered by 1854 in Leipzig)
• Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 25 (1855) (premiered 1856 at Gürzenich)
• Symphony No. 5 in B major, Op. 30 (pub.1868)
• Symphony No. 6 in G major, Op. 58, entitled Symphonie brève; variations et rondo pour orchestre (1855?)
• Jeanne d'Arc (concert Overture) (1858)

• Fantaisie symphonique in G minor, op. 69 (1879)
• Sinfonietta in D major, Op.80
• Symphony No. 7 in G minor, Op. 87
• Pharaphrases symphoniques, Op.89 (1886)
• Le Festival Overture
• 4 Pieces for String Orchestra
• Swedish Dance (from - tirée de l'Otteto), Op.71
• Symphony in B minor
• Tragic March for organ and orchestra
• Variations for Orchestra on Theme of Scandinavia
• Fantasie Pastorale for violin and orchestra
• Hymne et marche triomphale

Chamber Music

• Piano Trio No．1 Op．8 (1844)
• Piano Trio No．2 Op．18 (1847)
• String Quartet in E minor (1848)
• String Quartet in D major (1848)
• String Quartet in A minor (1848)
• String Quartet in B major (1855)
• Piano Trio No．3 Op．19 (1855)
• String Quartet No．1 in B major Op．16-1 (1857)
• String Quartet No．2 Op．16-2 (1857)
• Piano Trio No．4 Op．22 (1858)
• Decameron, 10 Pieces for cello and piano Op．28 (1860)
• Piano Trio No．5 Op．33 (1860)
• Piano Quintet in A major Op．24 (ca.1850)
• Serenade(Piano Quartet) Op．31 (1865)
• Duets for violin and piano Op．34
• Duets for violin and piano, Op．50
• String Quintet in E minor (1869)
• String Quintet No．1 in G major Op．55 (1870)
• String Quintet in B minor (1871)
• String Quintet in B major (1872)
• String Quartet No．3 Op．56 No. 1 (1872)
• String Quartet No．4 Op．56 No. 2 (1873)
• Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor Op．61 (1873)
• String Quintet in D minor (1873) (first version)
• 6 Duets for Cello and Piano (1872-1876)
• String Quartet No．5 Op．68 (1874)
• Sonata in G for clarinet and piano Op．67 (1875)
• Impromptu for Cello and Quartet (1878)
• String Quintet in D minor, 2nd version (1879)
• Octet No．1 Op．71 (1879)
• String Quintet in A minor (1880)
• Le Nonetto (1883)
• Octet No．2 in G minor (1884)
• Sérénade vénitienne in E minor for viola and piano (1875)
• String Quartet in G minor (1886)
• Septuor(Septet) inedit dedicated to Paul Taffanel (1887)
• String Quartet in G major (reconstruction：Pierre Thilloy) (1888)
• Petite Suite Gauloise Op．90 (1888)

Piano

• 2 Studies for piano Op．1 (1842)
• 20 Sérénades for piano (1855)
• Divertissement for 2 pianos
• Sonata for Piano Op．29
• Sonata in D minor for piano 4 hands Op．36
• Sonata in C minor for piano 4 hands Op．49 (1869)
• Sonata in F major for piano 4 hands Op．51 (1869)
• Variations on a French Theme for piano 4 hands Op．57
• 6 Morceaux for piano 4 hands Op．59
• Fantaisie in G minor for piano 4 hands op. 69 (1879)
• Scherzo and Aubade for piano 4 hands Op．77
• Ghribizzi Op．83

Choral Works

• 12 Choral Works for Men's voices Op．23 (1860)
• Requiem Op．70 (1874)
• Stabat Mater Op．65 (1875)
• La Religieuse (1875)
• Asléga (1876)
• La Calvaire (1877)
• Missa Brevis Op．72 (1882)
• Spring (Frühlings Erwachen) Op．73 (1878)
• Oedipus in Colonna Op．75 (1880)
• Iphigénie en Tauride Op．76 (1883)
• Elektra Op．85 (1886)
• Egille Op．86 (1886)
• Polyxéne Op．88 (1894)
• Fortunato (1896)
• Golgotha
• Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian
• Didon

Songs

• Gondoliera Op．2 (1842)
• 6 Songs after Moritz Hartmann Op．21 (1857)
• 20 German Poems Op．26
• 40 Poèmes de Ronsard Op．37, Op.41, Op.42, Op.44 (1876)
• Songs and Sonnets by Desportes Op．45 (1867)
• La pléiade francaise Op．48 (1876)
• Que dites-vous, que faites-vous, mignonne? (1866)
• Regrets (1866)

External links