In the meantime, “Faust” began to bring him encouragement, and his next opera was on the subject of the “Queen of Sheba” (1862).  This being unsuccessful, he wrote two more light operas, “Mireille” and “La colombe” (1866).  The next was “Romeo et Juliette” (1867).  This was very successful, and marks the culmination of Gounod’s success as an opera composer.  In 1870 he went to London, where he made his home for a number of years.  His later operas, “Cinq-Mars” (1877), “Polyeucte” (1878), and “Le tribut de Zamora” (1881), met with small success, and have rarely been given.

In his later years, as we know, he showed his early predilection for religious music; and his oratorios “The Redemption,” “Mors et Vita,” and several masses have been given with varying success.  Perhaps one of the greatest points ever made in Gounod’s favour by a critic was that by Pougin, who asks what other composer could have written two such operas as “Faust” and “Romeo et Juliette” and still have them essentially different musically.  The “Garden Scene” in the one and the “Balcony Scene” in the other are identical, so far as the feeling of the play is concerned; also the duel of Faust and Valentine and Romeo and Tybalt.

Ambroise Thomas’s better works, “Mignon” and “Hamlet,” may be said to be more or less echoes of Gounod; and while his “Francesca da Rimini,” which was brought out in 1882, was by far his most ambitious work, it never became known outside of Paris.  Ambroise Thomas was born in 1811, and died within a year of Gounod.  His chief merit was in his successful direction of the Conservatoire, to which he succeeded Auber in 1871.

Georges Bizet (his name was Alexander Cesar Leopold) was born in 1838, in Paris.  His father was a poor singing teacher, and his mother a sister-in-law of Delsarte; she was a first-prize piano pupil of the Conservatoire.  As a boy, Bizet was very precocious, and entered the Conservatoire as a pupil of Marmontel when he was ten.  He took successively the first prizes for solfege, piano, organ, and fugue, and finally the Prix de Rome in 1857, when he was nineteen years old.  The latter kept him in Rome until 1861, when he returned to Paris and gave piano and harmony lessons and arranged dance music for brass bands, a metier not unknown to either Wagner or Raff.

Until 1872, Bizet wrote but small and unimportant works, such as “The Pearl Fisher,” “The Fair Maid of Perth,” and several vaudeville operettas, some of which he wrote to order and anonymously.  He married a daughter of Halevy, the composer, and in 1871-72 served in the National Guard.  His first important work was the incidental music to Alphonse Daudet’s “L’Arlesienne” and finally his “Carmen” was given (but without success), at the Opera Comique, in March, 1875.  He died June 3, 1875.

Camille Saint-Saens was born in Paris, in 1835; he commenced studying piano when only three years old.  I believe it is mostly through his piano concertos and his symphonic poems that his name will live; for his operas have never attained popularity, with perhaps the one exception of “Samson and Delilah.”  His other operas are:  “The Yellow Princess,” “Proserpina,” “Etienne Marcel,” “Henry VIII,” “Ascanio.”