Maître Pierre is an uncompleted project by Charles Gounod

Charles Gounod

Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...

, intended as his twelfth opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 and planned in the summer of 1877 with the librettist Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet was an inexhaustible French writer of operatic libretti, plays, romances, memoirs, pamphlets, and innumerable articles, who is remembered above all for his adaptations of fiction—and Scripture— to provide librettos of cantatas and opera, notably by composers Georges...

. The "Master Pierre" of the title was Pierre Abélard, the twelfth century scholar-philosopher and lover of Heloise.

The projects progress is documented in five letters by Gounod to Paul Poirson, the scenarist for Cinq-Mars

Cinq-Mars (Gounod)

Cinq-Mars, subtitled , is an opera in four acts by Charles Gounod to a libretto by Paul Poirson & Louis Gallet loosely adapted from Alfred de Vigny's historical novel.-Performance history:...

, and in an 1878 interview with the critic Eduard Hanslick

Eduard Hanslick

Eduard Hanslick was a Bohemian-Austrian music critic.-Biography:Hanslick was born in Prague, the son of Joseph Adolph Hanslick, a bibliographer and music teacher from a German-speaking family, and one of his piano pupils, the daughter of a Jewish merchant from Vienna...

. The question of how Abelard's castration would be handled was a subject of ribald speculation in the press; when Hanslick pressed it Gounod explained that he was murdered at the end of the fourth act, his ghost visiting Héloïse in the last act.

Although the opera was half orchestrated by summer of 1878, Gounod abandoned the work to begin Le tribut de Zamora

Le tribut de Zamora

Le tribut de Zamora is an opera in four acts by Charles Gounod, his last work for the stage. The libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery was offered to Gounod after negotiations with Verdi stalled, and involves a young couple on their wedding day, a forced tribute of twenty virgins, a slave auction at which...

. The music was later arranged by the composer as a Suite dramatique en quatre parties; the full score is preserved in the Bibliothèque National. In 1904 Gounod's widow asked Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...

 to complete the fifth act. He supplied recitatives to connect the existing numbers, and in 1939 Reynaldo Hahn

Reynaldo Hahn

Reynaldo Hahn was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic and diarist. Best known as a composer of songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie....

conducted a concert performance of the final tableau: "du grand Gounod" was one judgment.