Georges Bizet

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Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet

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.

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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 it himself, and it was not 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 was not 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 Bizet failed to win the Prix, and the Te Deum score remained unpublished until 1971.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 (premiered also in the Theatre Lyrique, in 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!).

Tomb of Georges Bizet in Père Lachaise Cemetery
Tomb of Georges Bizet in Père Lachaise Cemetery

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 was not 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 did not 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.

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Persondata
NAME Bizet, Georges
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bizet, Alexandre-César-Léopold
SHORT DESCRIPTION Composer, Conductor
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris, France
DATE OF DEATH June 3, 1875
PLACE OF DEATH Bougival, France