Georges Bizet
Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, known as Georges Bizet (Paris, October 25, 1838-Bougival, June 3, 1875), was a French composer, mainly operas. In a career cut short by his untimely death, he achieved few successes until his last work, Carmen, which became one of the most popular and performed works in the entire operatic repertoire.
Bizet won several prizes throughout his brilliant career as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognized as an exceptional pianist, though he preferred not to take advantage of his ability and rarely played on public. Upon returning to Paris after spending almost three years in Italy, he realized that the main Parisian opera houses preferred to perform the most established classical repertoire over works by new composers. His orchestral and keyboard compositions were also largely ignored by him, which stalled his career so that he had to make a living mainly by arranging and transcribing others' music. In pursuit of his long-awaited success, he began several theatrical projects during the 1860s, many of which he abandoned. Neither of the two operas that were staged — The Pearl Fishermen and The Fair Girl from Perth — were immediately successful.
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, in which Bizet served in the National Guard, he had some success with his one-act opera Djamileh, although the orchestral suite L& Derived in its incidental music from Alphonse Daudet's play of the same name, the Arlésienne was an instant success. The production of Bizet's last opera, Carmen, was delayed due to fears that his themes of treason and murder might offend the audience. After its premiere on March 3, 1875, Bizet was convinced that the work was going to be a failure; he died of a heart attack three months later, unaware that it would prove a spectacular and lasting success.
Bizet's marriage to Geneviève Halévy was intermittently happy and the fruit of which they had a son. After his death, his compositions, except Carmen, were generally neglected. Manuscripts were given away or lost, and published versions of his works were often revised and adapted by others. He did not create a school nor did he have disciples or obvious successors. After years of neglect, his works began to be performed again with more frequency in the XX century. Later critics have heralded him as a composer of great brilliance and originality whose untimely death was a great loss to French stage music.
Biography
Early Years
Georges Bizet was born in Paris on October 25, 1838. On his birth certificate he appears as Alexandre César Léopold, but on March 16, 1840 he was baptized in the church of Our Lady of Loreto as "Georges", name by which would be known for the rest of his life. His father, Adolphe Amand Bizet, had been a hairdresser and wig maker before becoming a singing teacher despite his lack of formal studies; his mother, Aimée Léopoldine Joséphine Delsarte, was a famous singer of the time who also came to compose a few works, including at least one song that was published. In 1837, the two were married against the wishes of the bride's family who considered the groom a low-key candidate; the Delsartes, though financially poor, were a family of a high cultural and musical level. Aimée was an accomplished pianist, while her brother François was a distinguished singer and teacher who performed at the courts of Louis-Philippe I and Napoleon III. Rosine, Delsarte's wife and a musical prodigy, had been assistant professor of music theory at the Paris Conservatoire at age thirteen.
Georges, as a child, showed signs of great musical aptitude and quickly learned the basics of musical notation from his mother, who would probably give him his first piano lessons. Listening through the front door In the room where Adolphe gave his lessons, Georges learned to sing difficult pieces by heart with precision and developed an ability to identify and analyze complex chordal structures. This precocity convinced his ambitious parents that he was ready to start studying at the Paris Conservatoire a year before he reached the minimum entry age of ten. Georges was interviewed by Joseph Meifred, a French horn virtuoso, member of the study committee of the conservatory. Meifred was so impressed with the display of the boy's abilities that he bypassed the age rule and offered to take him as soon as a place became available.
Conservatory
Bizet was admitted to the Conservatoire on October 9, 1848, two weeks before his tenth birthday. He made a good first impression; in less than six months he won first prize in music theory, a feat that impressed Pierre Joseph Guillaume Zimmermann, the Conservatoire's former piano teacher. Zimmermann gave Bizet private lessons in counterpoint and fugue, which continued until the aging professor's death in 1853. Through these classes Bizet met Zimmermann's son-in-law, the composer Charles Gounod, who would become a lasting influence on the musical style of the young pupil—although their relationship often became strained in later years. Under the instruction of Antoine François Marmontel, professor of piano at the Conservatoire, Bizet's pianism developed rapidly: he won second prize for piano at the Conservatoire in 1851 and first prize the following year. Bizet would later write to Marmontel: «In your classes one learns something else besides piano; one becomes a musician."
Bizet's earliest surviving compositions are two wordless songs for soprano, dated to around 1850. In 1853 he joined Fromental Halévy's composition classes and began creating works of increasing sophistication and quality. of his songs, "Petite Marguerite" ('Little Daisy') and "La Rose et l'abeille" ('The Rose and the Bee'), were published in 1854. In 1855 he composed an ambitious overture for large orchestra and prepared versions for piano four hands of two works by Gounod: the opera La nonne sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) and the Symphony in D. The work done on Gounod's symphony inspired him, after his seventeenth birthday, to compose his own symphony, very similar to Gounod's (in some passages he even note for note). This work was subsequently lost, was rediscovered in 1933 and finally performed in 1935.
In 1856, Bizet competed for the prestigious Prix de Rome for musical composition. His participation in 1856 was unsuccessful, but neither was any other: the prize for musicians was not awarded in that edition. After this rejection, Bizet entered an opera competition organized by Jacques Offenbach for young composers, with an prize of 1200 francs. The challenge was to put music to the one-act libretto of Le docteur Miracle by Léon Battu and Ludovic Halévy. The prize went ex aequo to Bizet and Charles Lecocq, a result criticized years later by Lecoq on the grounds that Fromental Halévy had manipulated the jury in favor of Bizet. Thanks to his success, Bizet He became a regular guest at the parties that took place every Friday at Offenbach's house, where, among other musicians, he met an elderly Gioachino Rossini, who introduced himself to the young man with a photograph signed by him. Bizet was a great admirer of Rossini's music, writing not long after their first meeting that "Rossini is the greatest of all, since, like Mozart, he has all the virtues".
For his participation in the 1857 Rome Prize, Bizet, with Gounod's enthusiastic approval, decided to set Amédée Burion's cantata Clovis et Clotilde to music. Bizet won the award after a vote by members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts overturned the judges' initial decision in favor of oboist Charles Colin. Under the conditions of the award, Bizet would receive a scholarship for five years, spending the first two in Rome, the third in Germany, and the remaining two in Paris. The only requirement was to present an "envoi" each year, an original work according to the indications of the Académie. Before leaving for Rome in December 1857, a performance at the Académie of Bizet's award-winning cantata was given to an enthusiastic reception.
Rome (1858-60)
On January 27, 1858, Bizet arrived at the Villa Médici, a XVI century mansion that since 1803 had hosted the French Académie in Rome and described by him in a letter he sent home as "paradise". Under the direction of the painter Jean-Victor Schnetz, the villa provided the perfect environment for Bizet and his fellow awardees could do their best artistically. Bizet liked the convivial atmosphere and soon became involved in the distractions of his social life; during the first six months in Rome he could only compose one Te Deum, for soloists, mixed choir and orchestra, written for the Rodrigues Prize, a competition to compose a new religious work open to the participation of the winners of the Prize of Rome. The piece failed to impress the judges, who awarded the prize to Adrien Barthe, the only other entrant.Bizet was discouraged to the point of swearing that he would write no more religious music. His Te Deum remained forgotten and unpublished until 1971.
Throughout the winter of 1858-59 Bizet worked on his first shipment, an opera buffa version of the libretto Don Procopio by Carlo Cambiaggio. Under the conditions of the prize, Bizet's first submission was to be a mass, but after his experience with his Te Deum he had an aversion to writing religious music. He was concerned about how this breach of the rules would be received at the Académie, but his response to Don Procopio was initially positive, praising "the bright, simple touch" and "the youthful style." and daring" of the composer.
For his second shipment, no longer wanting to tempt his luck with the tolerance of the Académie, Bizet proposed to send a quasi-religious work in the form of a secular mass based on a text by Horace. This work, entitled Carmen Saeculare, was originally going to be a song to Apollo and Diana. No fragment of it has been found, and it is likely that Bizet did not even start it. The tendency to conceive ambitious projects, only to quickly abandon them, became commonplace with Bizet during his years in Rome; In addition to the Carmen Saeculare project, he considered up to five opera projects but finally discarded them, two symphony attempts and a symphonic ode on a theme by Ulysses and Circe. After Don Procopio, Bizet finished only one other work in Rome, the symphonic poem Vasco da Gama. This served to replace Carmen Saeculare as the second submission by him, and was well received by the Académie , though quickly forgotten afterwards.
In the summer of 1859, Bizet and several of his companions traveled to the mountains and forests of the Anagni and Frosinone regions. He also visited a convict settlement at Anzio; Bizet sent an enthusiastic letter to Marmontel, recounting his experiences.In August he made a long journey south visiting Naples and Pompeii. The first did not impress him but the latter enchanted him: «Here you live with the ancestors; you see their temples, their theaters, their houses where you find their furniture, their kitchen utensils... »Bizet began to sketch a symphony based on his Italian experiences, but made very little progress; the project, which would become his Rome Symphony, would not be finished until 1868. After returning to Rome, Bizet successfully managed to extend his stay in Italy for another year, rather than go to Germany, so that he could complete "a work important" (which has not been identified). In September 1860, while visiting Venice with his friend Ernest Guiraud, with whom he shared the prize, Bizet received news that his mother was seriously ill in Paris and returned home.
Emerging Composer
Paris (1860-1863)
Back in Paris, with two years of scholarship remaining, Bizet was for the moment financially secure and could momentarily ignore the difficulties other young composers faced in the city. The two state-subsidized operas, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique', each featuring traditional repertoires that tended to stifle and frustrate new local talent; only eight of the 54 laureates of the Prix de Rome between 1830 and 1860 had had works performed at the Opéra. Despite the fact that French composers were better represented at the Opéra-Comique, the style and character of the productions had remained largely unchanged since the 1830s. A number of small theaters offered operettas, a field in which the composer Offenbach was then central, while the Théâtre Italien he specialized in second-rate Italian opera. The best prospects for aspiring opera composers were those of the Théâtre Lyrique company which, despite repeated financial crises, had been operating intermittently in various establishments thanks to Léon Carvalho, a resource manager. This company had staged the premieres of Faust and Romeo and Juliet by Gounod, and an abridged version of The Trojans by Hector Berlioz.
On March 13, 1861, Bizet attended the Paris premiere of Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser, a performance that was met with riots from the audience, kept in check by the influential Jockey Club in Paris. Despite the distractions, Bizet revised his views of the German composer's music, which he had previously dismissed as merely eccentric. He now considered Wagner "beyond all living composers." Accusations of "Wagnerism" were often leveled against Bizet later, throughout his compositional career. As a pianist, Bizet had shown great skill from his childhood. A contemporary claimed that his future in concert halls might have been assured, but he chose to hide his talent "as if it were a vice". In May 1861, Bizet gave an unusual demonstration of his virtuosity when, at dinner at which Franz Liszt was among those present, astonished everyone by playing at first sight, impeccably, one of the most difficult pieces of the master. Liszt commented on this: "I thought that there were only two men capable of overcoming such a difficulty [...] there are three, and [...] the youngest is perhaps the boldest and most brilliant".
Bizet's third shipment was delayed by almost a year due to the prolonged illness of his mother, who finally died in September 1861. In the end, he sent three orchestral works: an overture titled La Chasse d'Ossian ("The Hunt for Ossian"), a scherzo and a funeral march. The overture has been lost; the scherzo would form part of his Rome Symphony and the funeral march was arranged and used in The Pearl Fishermen. In 1862, Bizet had a son with the family's housekeeper, Maria Reiter. The boy was raised believing that he was the son of Adolphe Bizet, and only on his deathbed, in 1913, did his mother reveal his true paternity to her.
Bizet's fourth and final shipment, which kept him busy for most of 1862, was a one-act opera, La guzla de l'émir. As a state-subsidized theatre, the Opéra-Comique was obliged from time to time to stage the works of the Rome Prize winners and, not surprisingly, rehearsals for La guzla began in 1863. However, in April Bizet received an offer from Count Walewski to compose an opera in three acts entitled The Pearl Fishermen, using the libretto by Michel Carré and Eugène Cormon for this purpose. Because one of the conditions of the offer was that the opera was to be the composer's first work to be performed publicly, Bizet hastily withdrew La guzla from the production and incorporated parts of its music into the new opera. The premiere took place on September 30 by the Théâtre Lyrique company. Critical opinion was generally hostile, though Berlioz praised it, writing that it indeed "does M. Bizet the highest honour". Audience response was lukewarm, and the opera ran for only eighteen performances. It would not be performed again until 1886.
Years of hardships
When the Rome Prize scholarship expired, Bizet soon found that he could not survive on music composition alone. He took some composition and piano students, two of whom, Edmond Galabert and Paul Lacombe, became close friends of his.;Enfance du Christ by Berlioz and Mireille by Gounod. His main work in this period, however, was arranging works by other composers. He made piano transcriptions of hundreds of operas and other pieces, and prepared choral scores and orchestral arrangements of all kinds of music. He was also, for a short time, music critic for La Revue Nationale et Étrangère, under the pseudonym "Gaston de Betzi". Bizet's only contribution appeared on August 3, 1867, after which he clashed with the publication's new editor and resigned.
Since 1862 Bizet had been working intermittently on the opera Ivan IV, based on the life of Ivan the Terrible. Carvalho did not keep his promise to produce it, therefore, in December 1865, Bizet offered it to the Opéra, but it was rejected. The work would not be performed until 1946. In July 1866, Bizet signed another contract with Carvalho to put music to the libretto for The Beautiful Girl of Perth by J. H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges based on the novel 1826 namesake by Sir Walter Scott. It was described by Bizet's biographer Winton Dean as "the worst script Bizet ever had to arrange". Problems arose over casting and other issues that delayed its release for a year, and it was finally performed at the Théâtre Lyrique on 26 December. from 1867. The reception by the press was more favorable than any other opera by Bizet; the review of Le Ménestral praised the second act as "a masterpiece from beginning to end". Despite the success of the opera, due to Carvalho's financial problems it was only performed eighteen times.
During rehearsals for The Beautiful Girl of Perth, Bizet worked with three other composers, each contributing one act to the four-act operetta Marlborough s' en va-t-en guerre ("Mambrú went to war"). The work was a great success when it premiered at the Théâtre de l'Athénée on December 13, 1867 and the Revue et Gazette Musicale lavished particularly on the act that Bizet performed: «nothing could to be more elegant, more intelligent and, at the same time, more distinguished". Bizet also found time to finish his long-gestating Rome Symphony and composed several works for keyboard and songs. However, this time for Bizet was marked by several disappointments. At least two projected operas were abandoned with little or no work on them. Several competition entries, including a cantata and a hymn composed for the 1867 World's Fair in Paris, failed. La coupe du roi de Thule ("The Cup of the King of Thule"), his entry for an opera competition, was not in the top five. Of the fragments that have come down to our days, analysts have identified reminiscences that will appear in Carmen. On February 28, 1869, the Sinfonía Roma was premiered at the 'Cirque Napoléon (now Cirque d'hiver), under the direction of Jules Pasdeloup. Bizet would later inform Galabert that the work was a success considering the large number of applause, whistles and whispers from the audience.
Marriage
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Not long after Fromental Halévy's death in 1862, Bizet had received a request from Madame Halévy to complete Noah, his former mentor's unfinished opera. did nothing about it, Bizet continued to get along on friendly terms with the Halévy family. Fromental left two daughters; the eldest, Esther, died in 1864, a fact that so traumatized Mrs. Halévy to the point of not tolerating the company of her youngest daughter Geneviève, who at the age of fifteen lived with other close relatives. Science is not known. certain when she and Bizet became emotionally attached to each other, but in October 1867 she reported to Galabert: 'I have met a lovely girl whom I love! In two years she will be my wife!” The couple became engaged, despite the fact that the Halévy family initially rejected the union. In Bizet's own words they considered it an unsuitable party: "poor, left-wing, anti-religious and bohemian", which Dean notes as strange objections coming from "a family full of artists and eccentrics". In the summer of 1869, his objections were overcome and the wedding took place on June 3 of that same year. Ludovic Halévy wrote in his post: “Bizet has spirit and talent. he must succeed'.
As a belated homage to Fromental, Bizet took the Noah manuscript and completed it. He took advantage by reusing parts of his dying operas Vasco da Gama and Ivan IV, but the future production at the Théâtre Lyrique could not materialize because Carvalho's company eventually went bankrupt and Noah would not be released until 1885. Bizet's marriage was happy at first, but it was affected by his wife's nervous instability (inherited from both parents), his strained relationship with his mother and by Mrs. Halévy's meddling in the couple's affairs. Despite this, Bizet maintained a friendly relationship with his mother-in-law with whom he often corresponded. During the year after the wedding, he had as a project up to half a dozen new operas and began sketching the music for two of them: Clarissa Harlowe based on Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa and Grisélidis with libretto by Victorien Sardou. However, his progress on both projects was interrupted in July 1870 due to the outbreak of the Gu Franco-Prussian era.
War and social unrest
After several provocations by Prussia that culminated in the offer of the Spanish crown to the Prussian Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, the Emperor of France Napoleon III declared war on July 15, 1870. Initially this step was supported by an outburst of patriotic fervor and certain expectations of victory. Bizet, along with other composers and artists, joined the National Guard and began training period. He was critical of the antiquated equipment with which he was supposed to fight, the his unit's weapons, he said, were more dangerous to themselves than to the enemy. and deposed, thus ending the Second French Empire.
Bizet enthusiastically welcomed the proclamation in Paris of the Third French Republic. The new government did not sue for peace, and by 17 September Prussian armies had surrounded Paris. Unlike Gounod, who fled to England, Bizet refused several opportunities to leave the city under siege: "I cannot leave Paris! It is impossible! It would simply be an act of cowardice on my part," she wrote to Mrs. Halévy. Life in the city became frugal and harsh, although efforts were made in October to restore normality. Pasdeloup resumed his regular Sunday concerts and on November 5 the Opéra reopened its doors with excerpts from works by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer.
An armistice was signed on January 26, 1871, but the departure of Prussian troops from Paris in March heralded a period of confusion and civil unrest. Following an uprising, the city's municipal authority was taken over by dissidents who established the Paris Commune. It was then that Bizet decided that he was no longer safe in the city, and he and Geneviève escaped to Compiègne. Later, they moved to Le Vésinet, where they remained for the two months the Commune lasted, hearing the shots echoing in the distance as government troops gradually crushed the uprising: "The cannons rumble with incredible violence," Bizet wrote to his mother-in-law on May 12. By May 25 hostilities had ceased, it was later estimated that during the Commune and the reprisals that followed it, around 25,000 lives were taken.
Late Race
Djamileh, L'Arlésienne and Don Rodrigo
While life in Paris returned to normal, in June 1871, Bizet's appointment as choirmaster at the Opera was apparently confirmed by its director, Émile Perrin. Bizet was to begin his duties in October, but on November 1 the position was filled by Hector Salomon. In her biography of Bizet, Mina Curtiss surmises that he either resigned or refused to take office in protest against what he believed to be the unwarranted end by the director of Ernest Reyer's opera Erostrate after of only two performances. Bizet returned to work on Clarissa Harlowe and Grisélidis, but plans for the second to be premiered at the Opéra-Comique fell through, and neither two works were finished; only fragments of his music survive. Other works composed in 1871 included the piano duet titled Jeux d'enfants and a one-act opera, titled Djamileh, which premiered at the Opéra-Comique in May 1872. It was poorly staged and incompetently sung: at one point the lead singer forgot thirty-two bars of music. It closed with only eleven performances and would not be performed again until 1938. On July 10 Geneviève gave birth to Jacques, the couple's only child.
Bizet's next major assignment came from Carvalho, now managing the Vaudeville theater in Paris, who wanted incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne. When the work opened on October 1, the music was rejected by critics as too complex for popular taste. However, encouraged by Reyer and Jules Massenet, Bizet created a four-movement suite from the music, which was performed under Pasdeloup on 10 November to an enthusiastic reception. In the winter of 1872-73, Bizet oversaw preparations for a revival of Gounod's still-absent opera Romeo and Juliet at the Opéra-Comique. Relations between the two had been icy for some years, but Bizet responded positively to his former mentor's request for help, writing: "You were the beginning of my life as an artist. I sprang from you."
In June 1872, Bizet informed Galabert: «I have just received orders to compose three acts for the Opéra-Comique. [Henri] Meilhac and [Ludovic] Halévy are writing the libretto for my play.” The theme chosen for this project was Carmen, a short novel by Prosper Mérimée. Bizet began the music in the summer of 1873, but the management of the Opéra-Comique was concerned about the suitability of this bawdy story for a theater that usually always offered "wholesome" entertainment, and the play was suspended. Bizet then began composing Don Rodrigo, an adaptation of the El Cid story by Louis Gallet and Édouard Blau. He played a version for piano before a select audience that included Gabriel Fauré, hoping that Fauré's approval might influence the directors of the Opéra to stage the work. On the night of October 28/29, the Opéra burned to the ground, and the management, amid other worries, left Don Rodrigo aside. It was never finished; Bizet later adapted a theme from the last act as the basis for his 1875 overture, Patrie.
Carmen
Adolphe de Leuven, the co-director of the Opéra-Comique who most bitterly opposed Carmen's project, resigned his position at the beginning of 1874, thus removing the main barrier to the work being published. produced. Bizet finished the score over the summer, and was pleased with the result: "I have written a work that is all clarity and liveliness, full of color and melody." professionally as "Galli-Marié"), was hired to sing the title role. According to Dean, she was as delighted with her part as Bizet was with his suitability for singing. There were rumors that he and the singer were having a brief affair, as his relations with Geneviève were strained at the time, and they had been living apart for several months.
When rehearsals began in October 1874, the orchestra had difficulties with the orchestration, finding some parts impracticable. The choir likewise declared some parts of the music impossible to sing and were dismayed at having to perform individually, smoking and fighting on stage rather than merely standing in line. Bizet also had to fight any further attempts by the Opéra-Comique to modify parts of the performance that were considered improper. Only when the main singers threatened to withdraw from the production did the management have to relent. Having to solve these problems, the premiere was delayed until March 3, 1875, when in the morning, by chance, the announced Bizet's appointment as a Knight of the Legion of Honour.
Major musical figures at the premiere included Massenet, Camille Saint-Saëns and Gounod. Geneviève, suffering from an abscess in her right eye, was unable to attend. The first performance of the opera stretched over four and a half hours, the final act not beginning until after midnight. Subsequently, Massenet and Saint-Saëns congratulated the composer, Gounod not so much. One report accused Bizet of plagiarism – 'Georges has robbed me! Extract the Spanish airs from the score and there is nothing left of Bizet himself except the sauce that masks the taste of the fish!"—and most of the press comments were negative, expressing dismay that the heroine was an amoral seductress, rather than a virtuous woman. Galli-Marié's performance was described by one critic as "the very incarnation of vice". the Opéra-Comique by Daniel Auber and François-Adrien Boieldieu. Léon Escudier in L'Art Musical describes the music as "opaque and dark [...] the ear gets tired of waiting for a cadence that never arrives". part of the poet Théodore de Banville, who applauded Bizet for presenting a drama with real men and women instead of the usual "puppets" of the Opéra-Comique. The audience's reaction was lukewarm, and Bizet was soon convinced of his mistake.: «I foresee a definitive and irremediable failure».
Bizet's habanera in Carmen, «Love is a rebel bird», is a translation with some variants of Sebastián Iradier's habanera, called «El arreglito»; Bizet said that he used it, believing it to be from an anonymous author; that is, belonging to the popular folkloric heritage.
Illness and death
For most of his life, Bizet had suffered from a recurring throat complaint. A chain smoker, he may have further undermined his health by overworking himself during the mid-1860s, working on transcriptions from his publishers up to 16 hours a day. In 1868, he reported to Galabert that he had been very ill with abscesses in the windpipe: "I have suffered like a dog." In 1871, and again in 1874, upon completing Carmen , he had been indisposed by severe attacks of what he described as "angina throat", and suffered a final attack in late March 1875. At this time, depressed by the evident failure of Carmen , Bizet was slow to recover and fell ill again in May. At the end of the month he went to his vacation home in Bougival and, feeling a little better, went swimming in the Seine. The next day, June 1, he was stricken with a high fever and aches, followed by an apparent heart attack. He temporarily looked like he was going to recover, but in the early morning of June 3 he suffered a second fatal attack.
The suddenness of Bizet's death, and knowledge of his depressed mental state, fueled rumors that he had committed suicide. Although the exact cause of death was never established with certainty, doctors discounted those theories and ultimately determined that he had died of "a cardiac complication of acute articular rheumatism". Parisian music; because Galli-Marié was too shaken to go on stage, that evening's performance of Carmen was canceled and replaced by La dame blanche by Boieldieu.
At the funeral, which took place on June 5 at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Montmartre, more than 4,000 people were present. Adolphe Bizet led the mourners along with Gounod, Thomas, Ludovic Halévy, Leon Halévy and Massenet. An orchestra conducted by Pasdeloup performed Patrie, and the organist improvised a fantasy on themes from Carmen. At the burial that continued in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, Gounod gave the eulogy. He said that Bizet had been shot down just as he was being recognized as a true artist. Towards the end of his speech, Gounod broke down in tears and was unable to deliver his final speech. Following a special performance of Carmen at the Opéra-Comique that same evening, the press, which had almost universally condemned the piece three months earlier, he now regarded Bizet as a genius.
Music
Early works
Bizet's early compositions, mainly songs and keyboard pieces written as exercises, give the first hints of his emerging power and gifts as a melodist. Dean sees this as evident in the piano work Romance sans parole, written before 1854, of "the conjunction of melody, rhythm, and accompaniment" that is characteristic of his mature works. Bizet's first orchestral piece was an overture written in 1855, in the manner by William Tell by Rossini. Critics found it mediocre, but the Symphony in C Major of the same year was highly praised by later commentators, who compared the work favorably to Mozart and Franz Schubert. Dean, the symphony has "few rivals, and perhaps no youthful work surpasses this one". Music critic Ernest Newman suggests that Bizet may have realized at this time that his future lay in the field of instrumental music, before a "inner voice" (and the reality of the French musical world) directed him towards the opera stages.
Orchestra, piano and vocal works
After his first Symphony in C Major, Bizet's purely orchestral output was sparse. The Roma Symphony on which he worked for more than eight years pales poorly when compared, according to Dean, to his predecessor. This work, Dean says, is influenced by Gounod and contains passages reminiscent of Carl Maria von Weber and Felix Mendelssohn. However, Dean maintains that the work suffers from poor organization and an excess of pretentious music, which he calls a "backfire". Another mature work for orchestra, the overture Patrie, similarly rejects it: "a dire warning about the danger of confusing art with patriotism". Musicologist Hugh Macdonald claims that the best music Bizet's orchestral music is found in the suites that are derived, respectively, from the piano work Jeux d'enfants and the incidental music to L'Arlésienne. They demonstrate a maturity of style that, had they lived longer, could have been the basis for great future orchestral works.
Bizet's piano works have not entered the concert pianist's repertoire and are generally too difficult for beginners to perform. An exception is the set of twelve pieces that evoke the world of children's games, Jeux d'enfants, written by four hands. In this case, Bizet avoids the virtuoso passages that tend to dominate his solo works. Earlier individual pieces bear the influence of Chopin, later works, such as the Variations Chromatiques and the Chasse Fantastique, owe more to Liszt. Most of Bizet's songs were written in the period 1866 to 1868. Dean defines the main weaknesses of these songs as an unimaginative repetition of the same music for each verse. and a tendency to write for orchestra rather than voice. Much of Bizet's larger-scale vocal music has been lost; an early Te Deum, which survives in its entirety, is dismissed by Dean as "a wretched work [which] only shows Bizet's inability to compose religious music".
Dramatic works
Bizet's early one-act opera Le Docteur Miracle offers the first clear signs of his commitment to this genre, sparkling music and, according to Dean, "many happy touches of parody, orchestration and comic characterization". Newman sees evidence of Bizet's later achievements in many of his early works: "Time and time again we shall come across some touch or other that only a musician with such an important dramatic root in him could have achieved." Until Carmen, however, Bizet was not essentially an innovator in musical theater. Most of his operas are written in the Italian and French operatic tradition established by composers such as Gaetano Donizetti, Rossini, Berlioz, Gounod and Thomas. Macdonald suggests that he, technically, surpassed them all, with a sensitivity to the human voice comparable only to Mozart's.
In Don Procopio, Bizet followed the patterns and outlines of Italian opera established by Donizetti in Don Pasquale, a work to which he closely resembles. Nevertheless, the familiar idiom is interspersed with original touches in which Bizet's imprint undoubtedly emerges. In his first major opera, The Pearl Fishermen, Bizet was hampered by a dull script and a laborious plot; however, the music, according to Dean, sometimes reaches "a higher level than contemporary French opera". Notable among its many original details is the introduction to the cavatina "Comme autrefois dans la nuit sombre" played by two horns on a background of cellos, an effect that, in the words of analyst Hervé Lacombe, "resounds in the memory like a fanfare lost in a distant forest". While the music of The Pearl Fishermen is atmospheric and deeply evocative of the oriental setting in which the opera takes place, in The Fair Girl from Perth Bizet made no attempt to introduce color or Scottish feeling, although the orchestration includes highly imaginative touches such as the brass band -wood and ropes during the seduction scene of the third act.
Of Bizet's unfinished works, Macdonald highlights La coupe du roi de Thule as an example of the clear signs of his power that would reach its peak with Carmen, and suggests that if Clarissa Harlowe and Grisélidis had been completed, Bizet's legacy would have been "infinitely richer". As Bizet departed from the accepted musical conventions of opera French, met with hostility from critics. In the case of Djamileh, the charge of "Wagnerianism" arose again, as the audience barely came to understand the originality of the score; many found the music pretentious and monotonous, lacking in rhythm and melody. On the contrary, current critical opinion, as represented by Macdonald, is that Djamileh is "a really lovely piece, full of touches." inventive, where the use of chromatic color stands out»
Ralph P. Locke, in his study of the origins of Carmen, draws attention to Bizet's successful evocation of Spanish Andalusia. Grout, in his History of Western Music , praises the extraordinary rhythmic and melodic vitality of the music and Bizet's ability to achieve maximum dramatic effect with minimal means. Early proponents of opera included Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Johannes Brahms, and particularly Wagner, who commented on it: "Here, thank God, at last a change on the part of someone with ideas in his head." Another promoter of the work was Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed to know it by heart: "It is a music unpretentious in depth, but charming in its simplicity, making it unaffected and sincere." By wide consensus, Carmen represents Bizet's final development as a master of musical drama and the culmination of of the opera-comique genre.
Legacy
After Bizet's death, most of his manuscripts were lost; her works were peer-reviewed and published in unauthorized versions so it is often difficult to distinguish which parts are truly authentic. Even Carmen was altered into a grand opera format as her dialogues were replaced with recitatives written by Guiraud, as well as other arrangements to the score. The musical world did not immediately recognize Bizet as a master and, apart from Carmen and the suite L'Arlésienne, few of his works were performed after his death. However, during the 20th century there was an increase in interest in his works. Don Procopio was given a revival in Monte Carlo in 1906. An Italian version of The Pearl Fishermen was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on November 13, 1916, with Enrico Caruso in the role of principal tenor, becoming a fundamental work in most operas. After its first performance in Switzerland in 1935, the Symphony in C Major entered the repertoire. of concerts and has been recorded by, among many others, Sir Thomas Beecham. Extracts from La coupe du roi de Thule, edited by Winton Dean, were broadcast on the BBC on 12 July 1955, and Le docteur Miracle was given a London revival on December 8, 1957 by the Park Lane group. Single pieces by Vasco da Gama and Iván IV have been recorded, as well as numerous songs and the entire piano music. Carmen, which received a warm reception in Paris after forty-five performances, became an é It was a worldwide success after performances in Vienna (1875) and London (1878). It was hailed as the first opera of the verismo school, emphasizing sordid and brutal themes, with art reflecting "life not idealized, but life as it was really lived".
Harold Charles Schonberg surmises that if Bizet had lived longer, he would have revolutionized French opera, since verismo was spearheaded mainly by Italians, most notably Giacomo Puccini who, according to Dean, stretched the idea "until it was worn out". Bizet did not found any particular school, although Dean mentions Emmanuel Chabrier and Maurice Ravel as composers directly influenced by him. Dean also suggests that Bizet's fascination with tragic heroes—Frédéri in L'Arlésienne, José in Carmen—is reflected in Tchaikovsky's later symphonies, particularly his Symphony in B minor "Pathétique". Macdonald writes that Bizet's legacy is limited by the shortness of his life and by discarded projects and a lack of focus that persisted into his last five years. «The spectacle of great unfinished works, either because Bizet had other distractions, or because no one asked him to write them, or because of his untimely death, is infinitely daunting, yet the brilliance and individuality of his best music is unmistakable.. He has further enriched a period of French music filled with composers of talent and distinction ».
As for Bizet's family circle, his father Adolphe died in 1886. His son Jacques committed suicide in 1922 after a heartbreak. Jean Reiter, Bizet's eldest son, had a brilliant career as editor of the newspaper Le Temps, was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, and died in 1939 at the age of 77. In 1886, Geneviève married Émile Straus, a wealthy lawyer; she became a famous hostess among Parisian society and a close friend of, among others, Marcel Proust. She showed little interest in the musical legacy of her first husband, she made no effort to catalog Bizet's manuscripts and gave many away as souvenirs. She died in 1926, and in her will he established a fund for the Georges Bizet Prize, awarded annually to a composer under the age of forty who "has produced remarkable work in the last five years." Award winners include Tony Aubin, Jean-Michel Damase, Henri Dutilleux and Jean Martinon.
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