Charles Gounod - La chanson du pécheur (1895)

Charles-François Gounod (17 June 1818 – 18 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been Faust (1859); his Roméo et Juliette (1867) also remains in the international repertory. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his Ave Maria (an elaboration of a Bach piece), and Funeral March of a Marionette.

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La chanson du pécheur, CG 397 (1895)
Lyrics: Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)

Tassis Christoyannis, baritone and Jeff Cohen, piano

This is one of the many songs Gounod composed, it was published posthumously in 1895.

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.

While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.

Gabriel Fauré also set La chanson du pécheur to music. It is his Op. 4, No. 1 (c.1872).
The list of composers who used Gautier's poetry is large. Composers like Hector Berlioz, Jacques Offenbach, Ernest Chausson, Georges Bizet, Henri Duparc, Benjamin Godard, Florent Schmitt, Reynaldo Hahn, Gabriel Pierné, and many, many more.