Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet's premature death meant he didn't have time to savor the success of his opera Carmen, one of the most widely performed in the world. With a father who was a singing teacher and a mother who was a pianist, Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, born in Paris on October 25, 1838 and renamed Georges at his baptism in 1940, came into contact with music from an early age. At the age of nine, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Antoine Marmontel (piano) and François Benoist (organ). Awarded first prize in 1851 and second prize in 1852, the following year he entered the harmony classes of Pierre Zimmermann and the composition classes of Fromental Halévy, author of the hugely successful opera La Juive (1835). A promising pupil, the young Bizet won first prize for organ and fugue in 1854, then second prize in 1855, before being awarded the Grand Prix de Rome in 1957 for his cantata Clovis et Clotilde. In the same year, he was awarded a prize by Jacques Offenbach for his one-act opéra-bouffe Le Docteur Miracle, voted ex aequo with Charles Lecocq's work of the same name and performed in alternation with it at the Bouffes Parisiens. Bizet's talent as a composer was not long in coming: at the age of seventeen, in 1855, he had already written a masterpiece, the Symphony in C, which was not premiered until February 26, 1935 in Basel (Switzerland). From the Villa Medici in Rome, where he stayed for three years, the composer commissioned to send his works delivered the opéra-bouffe Don Procopio (1859), which was not premiered until 1906 in Monte-Carlo, the overture La Chasse d'Ossian and the opéra-comique La Guzla de l'émir, based on a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. Dissatisfied with the result, he burned the score before the first rehearsal. This period, which was the happiest of his life, far from Parisian academicism and close to the splendors of Italy, also saw the completion of the Vasco de Gama choral symphony, of which he sent only two movements. Back in Paris, Bizet found himself in a difficult financial situation, and was forced to make numerous transcriptions of famous pieces for piano. The premiere on September 30, 1863 of his opera Les Pêcheurs de perles at the Théâtre-Lyrique de Paris, commissioned by its director Léon Carvalho, proved another failure, following that of the Te Deum in 1858. Appreciated by the public during eighteen performances, the work, based on a love story on the island of Ceylon and recycling several themes from previous works, was shot down by the critics, who attacked the libretto by Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré. Supported by Berlioz, however, it has since found better press and appears regularly on opera bills. In 1864, the composer left the operetta La Prêtresse unfinished, continuing the work begun two years earlier on the opera Ivan IV, which neither the Théâtre-Lyrique nor the Opéra de Paris would accept. Bizet, who was also composing the melodies for Feuilles d'album (1866) and Chants des Pyrénées (1867), received a new commission from Carvalho for the opera La Jolie Fille de Perth, adapted from Walter Scott's novel and premiered on December 26, 1867 at the Théâtre-Lyrique, which was no better received than its predecessor and criticized for the same reasons. The composer later wrote an orchestral suite, often called Scènes bohémiennes. On June 3, 1869, he married Geneviève Halévy, the daughter of his former teacher Fromental Halévy, whose opera Noé he completed, long unpublished for the stage. In 1872, the couple welcomed the birth of Jacques, Marcel Proust's childhood friend and future doctor. Meanwhile, the war of 1870 broke out, during which Bizet enlisted in the Garde nationale, returning to Paris after the Commune. In 1871, Bizet published a suite of twelve pieces for piano four-hands, Jeux d'enfants, a beautiful score for which he later orchestrated five movements for the Petite Suite, premiered by Édouard Colonne at the Théâtre de l'Odéon on March 2, 1873. Two lyric works remained unfinished, the comic opera Clarisse Harlowe (1870) and Grisélidis (1871), before the premiere of Djamileh, based on a libretto by Louis Gallet and freely inspired by Alfred de Musset's Namouna , which suffered another setback at the Opéra-Comique on May 22, 1872. Disappointed but by no means discouraged, the composer turned to incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne, performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville from October 1, 1872. Bizet's two concert suites for symphony orchestra were highly acclaimed, and are among his most frequently performed works, the first for his famous Prelude taken from the initialOverture, and the second for his Farandole. He completed his work with two pieces for piano four-hands. In 1874, his marriage broke up and his wife left him for six months, each of them having separate affairs. He saw his symphonic overture Patrie performed at the Concerts Pasdeloup and, leaving Rodrigue unfinished, worked on what was to be his swan song, the four-act opera Carmen, based on Prosper Mérimée's short story and libretto by the duo Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, his wife's cousin and Offenbach's collaborator. On the day of its premiere at the Opéra-Comique, March 3, 1875, Bizet was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, but the performance proved disastrous, the auditorium emptied and the critics attacked its scandalous subject matter. Nevertheless, the work remained on the bill thirty-seven times, establishing itself over time before being revived everywhere from London to New York, via St Petersburg, Vienna and Naples. Carmen, which plunges the listener into traditional Spanish Seville, is packed with tasty arias, including the children's chorus "Avec la garde montante", the famous habanera "L'Amour est un oiseau rebelle" (Love is a rebellious bird), which has been adapted a thousand times, the toreador's verses and the quintet and aria "La fleur que tu m'avais jetée" (The flower you threw at me), all in the first act. Now the opera of choice, Carmen has been the subject of countless stage and film adaptations, and its heroine has been portrayed by the greatest voices. Bizet, who later wrote two orchestral suites, retired to Bougival to complete it. After a swim in the Seine on May 29, 1875, he suffered a ruptured aneurysm and died of a heart attack on the night of June 2-3, at the age of 36.