Georges Bizet
Born: Paris, 25 October 1838
Died. Bougival, 3 June 1875
Acclaimed in his lifetime as a composer of concert music
who had regrettably dabbled with the theatre, Bizet
tragically died before his final masterpiece, Carmen, went
on to conquer the opera houses of the world.
Bizet was a precocious child, reading music by the age of four, playing Mozart piano sonatas from
memory by the time he was nine, and entering the Paris Conservatoire before his tenth birthday.
He studied there with Jacques-François Halévy (whose daughter he later married) but learnt most
in private lessons during the 1850s with Charles Gounod, who assisted in the gestation of Bizet’s
first major work, the Symphony in C of 1855. Bizet’s first operas date from this time, but they
were Italian-influenced works that he later disowned. By the 1860s the influence of Donizetti and
Rossini was beginning to yield to that of Gounod, Meyerbeer and Halévy, and Bizet’s own
distinctive lyrical voice first emerged in The Pearl Fishers in 1863. Premiered in 1867, La jolie
fille de Perth (based on Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth) proved another success and Bizet
seemed to be getting into his stride.
However, his next five projects got no further than sketches before he finally completed the
one-act Djamileh in 1871. This so impressed the director of the Opéra Comique that Bizet was
invited to compose a full-length work with the librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
(Offenbach’s former collaborators). Unfortunately, when Carmen was premiered in March 1875,
it was savaged by the Parisian critics for its supposed vulgarity and lack of originality; and,
although a small band of devotees hailed it as a masterpiece, Bizet was shattered. Plagued by
illness and obsessed by what he took to be his failure, he died three months (and two heart
attacks) later, aged just 36. Tragically, it was only after his death that Carmen began its
unstoppable rise to global popularity.
In an age dominated by Verdi and Wagner, Bizet was one of the very few opera composers to
create a genuinely individual style. His music might have evolved from the opéras lyriques of
Gounod and Delibes, but with Carmen he took French opera into a new dimension.
In his homeland it was Massenet who most strongly continued where Bizet had left off, and in
Russia his legacy is clear in the operas of Tchaikovsky, but it was in Italy that Bizet had the
biggest impact, for Carmen can truly be called the very first verismo opera.