Everything about Georges Bizet totally explained
Georges Bizet (
October 25,
1838 –
June 3,
1875) was a
French composer and
pianist of the
romantic era. He is best known for the opera
Carmen.
Biography
Bizet was born in
Paris at 28 Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne. He was registered with the legal name
Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, but was baptized
Georges Bizet and was always known by the latter name. He entered the
Paris Conservatory of Music in 1848, a
fortnight before his tenth birthday.
His first symphony, the
Symphony in C Major, was written in 1855, when he was still only sixteen, evidently as a student assignment. It seems that Bizet completely forgot about himself, and it wasn't discovered again until 1935, in the archives of the Conservatory library. Upon its first performance (February 26, 1935), it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. A delightful work (and a prodigious one, from a seventeen-year-old boy), the symphony is noteworthy for bearing an amazing stylistic resemblance to the music of
Franz Schubert, whose work was virtually unknown in Paris at that time (with the possible exception of a few of his songs).
At the Conservatoire Bizet studied under
Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Genéviève he later married. Halévy died in 1864, leaving his last opera
Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but it wasn't performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death.
In
1857 a setting of the one-act operetta
Le docteur Miracle won him a share in a prize offered by
Jacques Offenbach. He also won the Music Composition scholarship of the
Prix de Rome, the conditions of which required him to study in
Rome for three years. There, his talent developed as he wrote such works as the
opera Don Procopio (1858-59). There he also composed his only major sacred work,
Te Deum (1858), which he submitted to the Prix Rodrigues competition, a contest for Prix de Rome winners only. Bizet failed to win the Prix, and the
Te Deum score remained unpublished until 1971. He made two attempts to write another symphony in 1859, but destroyed the manuscripts in December of that year. Apart from this period in Rome, Bizet lived in the
Paris area all his life.
His mother died shortly after his return to Paris. He composed the opera
Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) for the Theatre-Lyrique in 1863, which was an initial failure. He followed it with
La jolie fille de Perth (1867), a symphony titled
Roma (1868), and
Jeux d'enfants (
Children's games) for piano duet (1871).
The popular
L'Arlésienne was originally produced as
incidental music for a
play by
Alphonse Daudet, first performed on
1 October 1872. Bizet himself derived a suite from the music (first performed 10 November 1872), and
Ernest Guiraud later arranged a second suite; both these suites contain considerable rewriting of the original score.
That year (22 May 1872) also saw the production of the romantic opera
Djamileh, which is often seen as a precursor to
Carmen. His overture
Patrie was written in 1873 (it had no connection with
Victorien Sardou's play
Patrie!).
Carmen (1875) is Bizet's best-known work and is based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by
Prosper Mérimée. Bizet composed the title role for a
mezzo-soprano.
Carmen wasn't initially well-received but praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including
Claude Debussy,
Camille Saint-Saëns and
Peter Illych Tchaikovsky.
Johannes Brahms attended over twenty performances of it, and considered it the greatest opera produced in Europe since the Franco-Prussian war. The views of these composers proved to be prophetic, as
Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. However Bizet didn't live to see its success as he died from a heart attack at the age of 36, on his third wedding anniversary, only a few months after
Carmen's first performances. He was buried in the
Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
His widow Genéviève later had an alliance with Élie-Miriam Delaborde, generally believed to have been the illegitimate son of
Charles-Valentin Alkan, but married a banker with Rothschild connections and became a noted society hostess.
Marcel Proust used her as a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his roman fleuve
A la recherche du temps perdu. The Bizets' son Jacques had been a school-friend of Proust.
Bizet's music has been used in the twentieth century as the basis for several important ballets. The Soviet-era "Carmen Suite" (1967), set to music drawn from
Carmen arranged by
Rodion Shchedrin, gave the
Bolshoi ballerina
Maya Plisetskaya one of her signature roles; it was choreographed by
Alberto Alonso. In the West the "L'Arlesienne" of
Roland Petit is well-regarded, and the "Symphony in C" by
George Balanchine is considered to be one of the great ballets of the twentieth century. It was first presented as Le Palais de Crystal by the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947, and has been in the repertory there ever since. The ballet has no story; it simply fits the music: each movement of the symphony has its own ballerina, cavalier, and Corps de Ballet, all of whom dance together in the finale.
Stage works
- La prêtresse, operetta (1854)
- Le docteur Miracle, opéra bouffe (1857)
- Don Procopio, opéra bouffe (1859)
- Les pêcheurs de perles, opera (1863)
- Ivan IV, grand opera (unfinished)
- La jolie fille de Perth, opera (1867)
- Noé, opera by Fromental Halévy finished by Bizet (1869)
- L'Arlésienne, 'musique de scène' (1872)
- Djamileh, one-act opera (1872)
- Carmen, opera (1875)
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