Very soon after its production Gounod’s masterpiece began to exert a potent influence upon his contemporaries.  One of the first French composers to admit its power was Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896).  Thomas was an older man than Gounod, and had already written much for the stage without achieving any very decisive success.  He was a man of plastic mind, and was too apt to reproduce in his own music the form and even the ideas which happened to be popular at the time he wrote.  Most of his early works are redolent of Auber or Halevy.  Gounod’s influence acted upon him like a charm, and in ‘Mignon’ (1866) he produced a work which, if not strictly original, has an element of personality too distinctive to be ignored.

If we can dismiss all thoughts of Goethe and his ‘Wilhelm Meister’ from our minds, it will be possible to pronounce MM.  Barbier and Carre’s libretto a creditable piece of work.  Mignon is a child who was stolen in infancy by a band of gipsies.  She travels with them from town to town, dancing in the streets to the delight of the crowd.  One day in a German city she refuses to dance, and Jarno the gipsy chief threatens her with his whip.  Wilhelm Meister, who happens to be passing, saves her from a beating, and, pitying the half-starved child, buys her from the gipsies.  Among the spectators of this scene are Laertes, the manager of a troupe of strolling players, and Philine, his leading lady.  Philine is an accomplished coquette, and determines to subjugate Wilhelm.  In this she easily succeeds, and he joins the company as poet, proceeding with them to the Castle of Rosenberg, where a grand performance of ’A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is to be given.  Mignon, at her earnest request, accompanies him, disguised as a page.  While at the castle Mignon is distracted by Wilhelm’s infatuation for Philine, and when Wilhelm, prompted by Philine, tries to dismiss her, she puts on her old gipsy clothes and rushes away.  Outside the walls of the castle she meets with an old half-witted harper, Lothario, who soothes the passion of her grief.  In a moment of jealous fury at the thought of Philine she utters a wish that the castle were in flames.  Lothario hears her words and proves his devotion by setting fire to the theatre while the performance is in progress.  Mignon had been sent by Philine to fetch her bouquet from the green-room.  The fire breaks out while the unfortunate girl is in the building, and she is given up for lost, but is saved by Wilhelm.  The last act takes place in Italy.  Mignon’s devotion has won Willielm’s heart, and the opera ends by the discovery that she is the long-lost daughter of Lothario, who is actually the Count of Cipriani, but after the disappearance of his daughter had lost his reason, and wandered forth in the guise of a harper to search for her.  The score of ‘Mignon’ reveals the hand of a sensitive and refined artist upon every page.  It has no claims to greatness, and few to real originality, but it is full of graceful melody, and is put together with a complete knowledge of stage effect.