Benjamin Godard

Benjamin Godard (b Paris, 18 Aug 1849; d Cannes, 10 Jan 1895). French composer. At the age of ten he was enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire where he studied with Henri Reber.

Although he was considered a child prodigy as a violinist, he did not win any prizes at the Conservatoire, and his submissions in 1863 and 1864 for the Prix de Rome were unsuccessful. A prodigious worker, he soon began to establish a reputation as a composer in Germany and Spain as well as in France, and by the 1870s was well known throughout Europe and considered by many to be one of the most important of the young French composers of his day, frequently compared to the young Mozart on account of his early display of talent. Critics agree, however, that early adulation jeopardized his later career.

Godard composed works in most genres with the exception of church music, but ultimately he made his reputation as a composer of salon pieces for piano and of songs, albums of which were translated into English. Also active as a poet, he provided some of his own song-texts, as well as setting contemporary French poetry, mainly in a romantic vein. His style was deliberately traditional and, being of Jewish extraction, he shunned any influence of Wagner, whose opinions he despised, particularly when he was critical of Beethoven whom Godard idolized. Mendelssohn’s easily lyrical style may be identified at the root of much of Godard’s music, which is founded upon solidly traditional principles of harmony.

His early promise did not really develop in his later works, although his early death from consumption meant that he had no chance to mature fully as a composer. The Symphonie légendaire is somewhat unusual as a genre. More like a song cycle with orchestral interludes, it combines poems based on legends by Charles Grandmougin, Leconte de Lisle and Godard himself, among others, and is divided into three parts, the central section being religious and the outer parts rooted in folklore. In his Symphonie orientale his collecting of genuine oriental music and its fusion with western harmony was much admired. Among his operas, Jocelyn had a successful première in Brussels, while Le Dante was criticized for having too many triple-time arias. Most successful was La vivandière, an opera set in the period of the Revolution whose title refers to a military canteen-keeper who reunites a republican soldier with his royalist father. Set in the Vendée and employing onstage military music and folksongs, it was unfinished at the time of Godard’s death but was completed by Paul Vidal, and ran to over 80 performances. His piano pieces, often published with the usual elaborately illustrated covers that adorned salon-music, display a wide variety of styles. They range from simple pieces for children and amateurs to more virtuoso studies, the best of which show considerable compositional skill and some degree of textural sophistication. These include the highly successful 12 études artistiques, and Lanterne magique, which preoccupied Godard over a long period of time, and in which each song is prefaced by a poem by the composer himself. His songs have considerable charm and one or two numbers from his operas have survived in the repertory in their own right.

Where most early 20th-century historians soon forgot Godard, or afforded him only a passing mention, the influential English critic Arthur Hervey summed him up well in his history of 19th-century French music, as having somewhat abused his talent for commercial gain. He saw Godard’s music as ‘full of charm’ and ‘breathing a gentle spirit of melancholy’, and said of the composer: ‘he can conjure up visions of the past, stir up memories of forgotten days … the best that was in him was perhaps expressed in works of small calibre, songs and pianoforte pieces’.