Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet was born in Paris on 25 October 1838. Christened Alexandre César Léopold, he was always called Georges. His father, Adolphe-Amand, a former hairdresser turned singing teacher, and his mother, Aimée Delsarte, a good pianist, gave him his first lessons. A child prodigy, he learned his notes at the same time as his letters. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1848, before he was even ten, and collected first prizes in piano, organ and fugue.

There he studied composition with Fromental Halévy, composer of La Juive, and received advice from Charles Gounod, who influenced him deeply. In 1855, aged seventeen, he composed a fresh, lively Symphony in C major, which was forgotten in the Conservatoire archives and not performed until 1935. In 1857 he won an operetta competition organised by Jacques Offenbach with Le Docteur Miracle, sharing the prize with Charles Lecocq, and then the Grand Prix de Rome.

From 1858 to 1860 he stayed at the Villa Medici in Rome. He discovered Italian life, travelled throughout the country and composed the comic opera Don Procopio. He was also an exceptional pianist: Liszt himself, having heard him sight-read flawlessly one of his most difficult pieces, considered him one of the best pianists in Europe. But Bizet did not want a virtuoso career: he dreamed only of the theatre.

Back in Paris he had to earn his living by teaching and making transcriptions and arrangements for publishers. In 1863 he premiered Les Pêcheurs de perles at the Théâtre-Lyrique, the story of two friends in love with the same priestess in Ceylon. The work had a mixed reception, but Berlioz defended it, and its duet “Au fond du temple saint” became famous. He then composed La Jolie Fille de Perth (1867) and began many projects he later abandoned.

In 1869 he married Geneviève Halévy, daughter of his former teacher; they had a son, Jacques. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 he served in the National Guard during the siege of Paris. In 1871 he composed Jeux d’enfants, a suite of twelve pieces for piano four hands evoking the spinning top, the doll, the merry-go-round, soap bubbles and blind man’s buff. He later orchestrated five of them. These charming little works have remained very popular.

In 1872 he wrote incidental music for L’Arlésienne, a play by Alphonse Daudet set in Provence. The play failed, but the music, which uses Provençal tunes such as the “March of the Kings” and a saxophone, was so successful that Bizet drew an orchestral suite from it. The Opéra-Comique then commissioned an opera from him: he chose Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, the story of a free, passionate Gypsy woman in Seville who would rather die than give up her freedom.

Carmen was premiered at the Opéra-Comique on 3 March 1875. The audience, used to a respectable family theatre, was shocked by the violence, sensuality and realism of the work, and the critics were harsh. Bizet, disappointed and ill, died at Bougival near Paris on 3 June 1875 of a heart attack, aged thirty-six, on the very night of the thirty-third performance. He never knew that Carmen, admired by Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Nietzsche, would become one of the most performed operas in the world, with its Habanera and Toreador Song.