GEORGE BIZET

Biography & History

Georges Bizet was an illustrious French composer, mainly of operas. His
career was cut short by his untimely death and he achieved very little
success before his final work, ‘Carmen’. ‘Carmen’ gained immense
popularity and became one of the most frequently performed works in the
entire opera repertoire. Bizet had an extraordinary student career at the
Conservatoire de Paris and earned many prizes including one of the most
highly esteemed Prix de Rome in 1857. He was widely admired as an
outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalize on this skill and
seldom performed in public. Bizet was never involved in the establishment
of any school and had no obvious disciples or successors. After years of
oblivion, his works started being quite frequently performed in the 20th
century. Music pundits in later years hailed Bizet as a composer of brilliance
and originality and his untimely death was considered to be a tremendous
loss to French musical theatre.
 Biogra
Georges Bizet was born on 25 October 1838 in Paris.
phy
Though initially registered as Alexandre César Léopold,
he was later baptized as "Georges" on 16 March 1840, and
was known by this name for the rest of his life. He was
the son of Adolphe Bizet, who was a hairdresser and
wigmaker and later started teaching music despite of his
lack of formal training. George’s father is also said to
have composed a few works, including one published
song. George’s mother, Aimée, was an accomplished
pianist herself, and her brother François Delsarte was a
renowned singer and teacher who performed at the courts
of both Louis Philippe and Napoleon III.
George’s mother, Aimée, was an accomplished pianist herself, and her
brother François Delsarte was a renowned singer. Georges, the only child of
his parents received his first lessons in piano from his mother. He showed
immense aptitude for music and quickly picked up the basics of musical
notation from his mother.

On 9 October 1848, a fortnight before his tenth birthday, Bizet was

admitted to Paris Conservatory of Music. His teachers were Pierre
Zimmermann (fugue and counterpoint; often assisted by his son-in-law
Charles Gounod), Antoine François Marmontel (piano), François Benoist
(organ) and, on Zimmermann's death, Fromental Halévy, whose daughter
Bizet later married. He was awarded the first prizes for organ and fugue in
1855, and he completed his earliest compositions there.
 History
In November 1855, when Bizet was seventeen, he wrote his first
symphony, the Symphony in C, as a student’s assignment. Until 1933,
it remained hidden, when it was discovered in the archives of the
Paris Conservatory library. When it was performed for the first time
in1935, it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and also a
great addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. Bizet
competed for the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1856. None of the
entries including Bizet’s were successful, as the musician's prize was
not awarded that year. After this, Bizet entered an opera competition
organized by Jacques Offenbach for young composers, which had a
prize money of 1,200 francs. The challenge thrown towards the
contestants was to set the one-act libretto of Le docteur Miracle by
Léon Battu and Ludovic Halévy.
He shared the prize with Charles Lecocq. In 1857 for Prix de Rome entry Bizet
chose to set the cantata Clovis et Clotilde by Amédée Burion. That year Bizet was
awarded the prize as a ballot of the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts
overturned the judges' initial decision in favor of the oboist Charles Colin. This
award offered Bizet a financial grant for five years, the first two of which will be
spent in Rome, then one year in Germany and the final two in Paris. However
according to the terms of the award Bizet had to submit an "envoi," a piece of
original work to the satisfaction of the Académie each year. In December 1857,
before he departed for Rome, his prize cantata was performed at the Académie,
which received an enthusiastic response.

Bizet arrived at the Villa Medici, a 16th-century palace, which since 1803 had
housed the French Académie on 27 January 1858. Under the director Jean-Victor
Schnetz, a painter the villa offered an optimal ambience in which Bizet and his
fellow-laureates could pursue their artistic endeavors.
In Rome during the first six months, Bizet’s only composition was a Te Deum,
which was written for the Rodrigues Prize, a competition for a new religious work
open to Prix de Rome winners. Bizet’s work failed to impress the judges, and the
prize was awarded to Adrien Barthe, the only other entrant. Bizet was so
disheartened that he vowed to write no more religious music. Te Deum remained in
oblivion until 1971.

In July 1860, just after Bizet left Rome, and was still touring in Italy, an idea of
writing a symphony in which each of the four movements would be a musical
evocation of a different Italian city – Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples occurred
to him. But after he heard of his mother's serious illness, he was compelled to wrap
up his Italian travels. He returned to Paris in September 1860; his mother died a
year later. Though the Scherzo of the symphony got completed by November 1861,
yet it was not until 1866 that the first version of the complete symphony was
written. It went through a number of revisions through to 1871 and Bizet died
before he could produce that can be considered to be a definitive version. Therefore,
sometimes the work is said to be an "unfinished" one, but this is not the right
description as it was fully scored. In 1880, it was published as the Roma Symphony.
Bizet’s family maid, Marie Reiter, gave birth to a son,
Jean Bizet in June 1862. The boy was believed to be
George's half-brother. But, on her deathbed, the maid
later revealed that the boy’s true father was Georges
Bizet. In 1862, his former teacher Halévy died, leaving
his last opera Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but
remained unperformed till 1885, ten years after Bizet's
own death.
In June 1871, Bizet's was appointed as chorus-master at The Opéra and
he was due to begin his duties in October, but on 1 November, the post
was assumed by Hector Salomon. In Bizet’s biography, Mina Curtis
wrote that Bizet either resigned or refused to take up the position as a
protest against what he thought was the director's unjustified closing of
Ernest Reyer's opera Erostrate after only two performances. In 1871,
Bizet wrote the piano duet entitled Jeux d'enfants, and a one-act opera,
Djamileh, which opened at the Opéra-Comique in May 1872. However, it
was poorly staged and incompetently sung as a consequence was closed
after 11 performances, not to be heard again until 1938
'Carmen' (1875) based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by
the French writer Prosper Mérimée is Bizet’s most significant work. He
composed the title role for a mezzo-soprano. A major part of it was
completed during the summer of 1873, but remained incomplete until the
end of 1874, during the time his marriage went through a lot of strain
and he separated from his wife for two months. 'Carmen' was premiered
on 3 March 1875, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Though initially not
well-received, it ran for 37 performances in the next three months, an
average of three a week, making it Bizet's biggest success till that day.
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