If Georges Bizet had composed only Carmen, he would still have earned his place in classical music’s Hall of Fame. Alas, he died at the tender age of 36 – believing that his recently premiered Carmen was a flop – leaving only a slender body of work, much of which quickly fell into obscurity. Even his teenage Symphony in C, now a mainstay of the orchestral repertoire, was only rediscovered in 1933.
He was born Alexandre César Léopold Bizet in Paris on 25th October 1838 – the family quickly adopted the names Georges, which is how he was baptised in 1840. His father, Adolphe, had been a hairdresser and wigmaker before becoming a singing teacher. Aimée Delsartes, his mother, came from a poor but cultured family and was a fine pianist, who probably taught young Georges the piano.
He became quite the prodigy and, two weeks before his tenth birthday, was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Charles Gounod, who would prove a close mentor (“You were the beginning of my life as an artist”), and Fromental Halévy, whose daughter, Génévieve, he would marry in 1869.
In 1857, at the second attempt, Bizet won the coveted Prix de Rome for his cantata Clovis et Clotilde, a prize that was effectively a passport to Italy and a two-year, all expenses paid residency at the Villa Medici, to focus on composition. Bizet had grand ideas how he would spend his time in Rome profitably. “I want to do nothing chic,” he wrote. “I want to have ideas before beginning a piece, and that is not how I worked in Paris.” Bizet certainly conceived ambitious projects there, but most were discarded. Apart from an opera buffa (Don Procopio), the only other work completed in Rome was the ode-symphonique, Vasco da Gama, which was largely modelled on Gounod and Meyerbeer.
Once his Prix de Rome grant expired, Bizet struggled to make ends meet and accepted teaching jobs, playing for rehearsals and arranging others’ works. He was a brilliant pianist, who rather hid his light under a bushel. At a soirée at which Franz Liszt was present, Bizet astonished the guests by sight-reading, flawlessly, one of Liszt’s most challenging works.
Two operatic projects Les Pêcheurs de perles (1863) and La Jolie Fille de Perth (1867) – met with less critical success, although Berlioz praised The Pearl Fishers, writing that it “does M. Bizet the greatest honour”. Then, in 1875, the realism of Carmen caused a scandal when it premiered at the Opéra-Comique. Bizet was convinced of its failure, “I foresee a definite and hopeless flop.” Within three months, he was dead (from a heart attack), unaware that Carmen would become one of the world’s best-loved and most-performed operas.
In recent years, efforts to explore the composer beyond Carmen have borne fruit and our top ten playlist includes a number of works that may be happy discoveries. For this playlist, we have used several less common selections from Palazetto Bru Zane’s recently released Georges Bizet: Portrait.
1Carmen
Carmen has a fair claim to the title of the world’s most popular opera. It was based on a gritty novella by Prosper Mérimée, a gritty, sardonic tale, much of it told from the perspective of the soldier Don José, who is in prison, awaiting his execution for murdering Carmen. Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy were the librettists charged with adapting the story for a family audience at the Opéra Comique, strongly resisted by Bizet.
As an operatic heroine, Carmen surely paved the way for Salome and Lulu. Her carefree attitude is set out in her habanera, her powers of seduction emerge in the Seguidilla, but it’s the second half of the opera where her tragic grandeur fully blossoms. Célestine Galli-Marié sang the title role at the 1875 premiere. In 2023, Palazzetto Bru Zane delved into the archives to discover what that premiere may have looked like, with a production staged at Opéra de Rouen.
2L’Arlesienne
In 1872, Bizet composed incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlesienne (The Girl from Arles) – 27 numbers including entr’actes, melodramas and dances. The play flopped, but Bizet later took eight numbers, arranged them for large orchestra and fashioned them into two suites. Perhaps the most famous number is the Farandole, a popular dance in Provence.
3Symphony in C major
Bizet was only 17 when he composed the Symphony in C, a student assignment given to him by Gounod that fizzes with the precociousness of teenagers such as Mozart and Mendelssohn. It shares a similar flavour to Gounod’s own First Symphony… which Bizet had transcribed for two pianos, providing him with the perfect template. Bizet’s symphony was never performed during the composer’s lifetime. The manuscript was only discovered in 1933, in the library of the Paris Conservatoire, soon becoming an audience favourite.