Cooper classes "Le Médecin malgré lui" (1858) as one of Gounod's finest works, "witty, quick-moving and full of life". In complete contrast to its predecessor, it is a three-act comedy, regarded as a masterpiece by Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky. Cooper says of the score that Gounod seems to have learned more from Mozart than from Rossini or Auber, and to have "divined by instinct the great comic possibilities of what passed at that time for a ferociously 'learned' style, namely counterpoint." The piece held its place in the repertory during the latter part of the 19th century, but by the time Serge Diaghilev revived it in 1924 Gounod was out of fashion. In Stravinsky's words, "dream of a Gounod 'revival' failed in the face of an indifferent and snobbish public who did not dare applaud the music of a composer not accepted by the avant-garde". For his revival Diaghilev commissioned Erik Satie to compose recitatives to replace the original spoken dialogue, and that version is sometimes used in the occasional modern productions of the piece, such as that by Laurent Pelly at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in 2016.