Gounod's two great operatic masterworks, Faust and Roméo et Juliette, tell stories that have long been an integral part of Western culture. What matters is not the outcome of the story, but the manner of its telling. The absorbing quality of both narratives depends as much on stillness as on movement, on time suspended as on forward momentum, on the singers' ability to mesmerize the listener as on the conductor's sense of direction.

The roles of Faust and Roméo were fundamental in establishing Björling's international reputation as a great singer of French music, for they were the only two of the eight French roles he sang that were performed in the original language and recorded complete. When he studied the parts in translation in the early 1930s he would have felt himself very much part of an ongoing performing tradition: Gounod—who in 1865 became, as Björling would ninety-one years later, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music—was one of the most popular operatic composers in Sweden between 1870 and 1950. Although casts in Stockholm were less illustrious than those at the Paris Opéra or the Met, Nordic voices proved well suited to the composer's style, which requires a consistently limpid tone and an elegantly drawn line. Björling assimilated this style above all from his fellow Swedes, and in particular from John Forsell, the distinguished baritone and director of the Royal Opera, who in the early 1930s went over the entire role of Roméo with him on the island of Stenungsön, near Gothenburg, where star pupils were given extra summer training.