the late 1840s, after the upheaval caused by the French revolution, Bach was rarely performed in public concerts in France and it was preferred that church organists play operatic arias or popular airs instead of counterpoint. One exception was a public performance in the Paris Conservatoire in December 1833, repeated two years later in the Salons Pape, of the opening allegro of Bach's concerto for three harpsichords BWV 1063, played on pianos by Chopin, Liszt and Hiller. Berlioz later described their choice as "stupid and ridiculous", unworthy of their talents. Charles Gounod, having won the Prix de Rome in 1839, spent three years in the Villa Medici in Rome, where he developed a passionate interest in the polyphonic music of Palestrina. He also met Mendelssohn's sister Fanny, herself an accomplished concert pianist and by then married to the artist Wilhelm Hensel: Gounod described her as "an outstanding musician and a woman of superior intelligence, small, slender, but gifted with an energy which showed in her deep-set eyes and in her burning look." In response Fanny noted in her diary that Gounod was "passionately fond of music in a way I have rarely seen before." She introduced Gounod to the music of Bach, playing from memory fugues, concertos and sonatas for him on the piano. At the end of his stay in 1842, the twenty-five-year-old Gounod had become a confirmed Bach devotee. In 1843, after a seven-month stay in Vienna, with a letter of introduction from Fanny, Gounod spent 4 days with her brother in Leipzig. Mendelssohn played Bach for him on the organ of the Thomaskirche and conducted a performance of his Scottish Symphony by the Gewandhaus orchestra, specially convened in his honour. Back in Paris, Gounod took up an appointment as organist and music director in the Église des Missions Étrangères on the rue de Bac, on condition that he would be allowed to have autonomy over the music: Bach and Palestrina figured strongly in his repertoire. When churchgoers initially objected to this daily diet of counterpoint, Gounod was confronted by the Abbé, who eventually yielded to Gounod's conditions, although not without commenting "What a terrible man you are!" In the late 1840s and 1850s a new school of organist-composers emerged in France, all trained in the organ works of Bach. These included Franck, Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Widor. In the aftermath of the French revolution, there had already been