Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/379



ONS. GOUNOD was born at Paris, and educated in music at the Conservatoire under Halévy and Zimmermann. Our first portrait represents him in his student days. At twenty-two he was appointed organist at a church in Paris, for which he wrote several masses. At the age of twenty-nine he married the daughter of Zimmermann. His first opera, "Sapho," was produced in 1851, with some success; but it was not until 1859, when he was forty-one, that he suddenly attained to world-wide fame and popularity with the well-known opera of "Faust," the melody and tenderness of which quite took the world of music by surprise. His two most important works since that time are the opera of "Romeo et Juliette" and the oratorios of the "Redemption" and "Mors et Vita."