Georges Bizet

I

Introduction

Georges Bizet (1838-1875), French composer, best known for his operas. He was born Alexandre César Léopold Bizet in Bougival near Paris on October 25, 1838. His parents were musical: His father was a singing teacher and his mother, a pianist. The young Bizet entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine, where he won first prize for piano in 1852 and studied composition with French composers Jacques Halévy and Charles Gounod. By the time Bizet won the much coveted Prix de Rome in 1857, he had already composed his Symphony No. 1 in C Major (1855).

II

Bizet’s Time in Rome

Bizet spent three years in Rome, more impressed by the natural beauties and the visual arts of Italy than by the music. Although Bizet’s comic opera Don Procopio (1858-1859), composed during his time in Rome, leans heavily on the operas of Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti, Gounod remained for a long time the strongest influence on Bizet among living composers. Bizet took a long time to find his own musical voice, often doubting his creative capacity as a composer and going so far as to destroy early works that did not fulfill his ambitions. Several projects were started and dropped before and after he returned to Paris in 1861.

III

Bizet’s First Operas

Bizet’s first important opera was Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers, 1863), a work that shows the influence of Gounod and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Although the opera was initially not well received, its lyrical charm and exotic coloring have since won it a place in the French operatic repertory. Afterward Bizet found it difficult to make a living and had to take on hack work for music publishers, work that distracted him from serious composition. His next completed opera was La jolie fille de Perth (1867), which used a libretto based on the novel Fair Maid of Perth by Sir Walter Scott. Neither it nor his next opera, Djamileh (1872), was a success with the public. In Djamileh, however, Bizet further developed his gift for creating local color, for poetic characterization, and for writing for individual orchestral instruments. His incidental music (1872) to the play L’Arlésienne (The Woman from Arles), by Alphonse Daudet, represents a further advance. In it he was able to evoke the atmosphere of Provence, as well as the lyrical and tragic elements of the drama.

IV

Bizet’s Carmen

The opera Carmen (1875) is generally considered Bizet’s most important work. Although not an immediate success, it soon became one of the most popular works in operatic history. Bizet had an excellent libretto for the opera based on the novel Carmen (1845) by Prosper Mérimée. However, the plot was considered vulgar and repulsive; the characters, brutal. In the opera Carmen leads the soldier Don José to desert the army and join her band of gypsies who live by stealing; Carmen soon scorns him, but still obsessed by her, Don José stabs and kills her. Nor did critics find the music—with its sustained melodic line and use of recurrent themes—any more to their liking.

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Three months after Bizet’s death on June 3, 1875, Carmen met with spectacular success at the Vienna Opera. Many celebrated composers paid homage to this inventive work. German composer Richard Wagner praised the opera for its musical ideas. Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky declared that it conveyed the efforts of an entire musical epoch and predicted that in ten years it would become the most popular opera. Bizet was an outstanding musical dramatist, and his style influenced the realistic, or verismo, school of opera in the later 19th century.

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