Georges Bizet

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(b Paris, 25 Oct 1838; d Bougival, 3 June 1875). French composer. He was trained by his parents, who were musical, and admitted to the Paris Conservatoire just before his tenth birthday. There he studied counter-point with Zimmerman and Gounod and composition with Halévy, and under Marmontel's tuition he became a brilliant pianist. Bizet's exceptional powers as a composer are already apparent in the products of his Conservatoire years, notably the Symphony in C, a work of precocious genius dating from 1855 (but not performed until 1935). In 1857 Bizet shared with Lecocq a prize offered by Offenbach for a setting of the one-act operetta Le Docteur Miracle; later that year he set out for Italy as holder of the coveted Prix de Rome.

During his three years in Rome Bizet began or projected many compositions; only four survive, including the opera buffa, Don Procopio (not performed until 1906). Shortly after his return to Paris, in September 1861, his mother died; the composer consoled himself with his parents maid, by whom he had a son in June 1862. He rejected teaching at the Conservatoire and the temptation to become a concert pianist, and completed his obligations under the terms of the Prix de Rome. The last of these, a one-act opéra comique, La guzla de l′emir, was rehearsed at the Opéra-Comique in 1863 but withdrawn when the Théâtre-Lyrique director, who had been offered 100 000 francs to produce annually an opera by a Prix de Rome winner who had not had a work staged, invited Bizet to compose Les pêcheurs de perles .

Bizet completed it in four months. It was produced in September 1863, but met with a generally cool reception: an uneven work, with stiff characterization, it is notable for the skilful scoring of its exotic numbers. In the ensuing years Bizet earned a living arranging other composers music and giving piano lessons. Not until December 1867 was another opera staged - La jolie fille de Perth, which shows a surer dramatic mastery than Les pêcheurs despite an inept libretto. It received a good press but had only 18 performances.

1868 was a year of crisis for Bizet, with more abortive works, attacks of quinsy and a re-examination of his religious stance; and his attitude to music grew deeper. In June 1869 he married Geneviève, daughter of his former teacher, Halévy, and the next year they suffered the privations caused by the Franco-Prussian war (Bizet enlisted in the National Guard). Bizet found little time for sustained composition, but in 1871 he produced the delightful suite for piano duet, Jeux d′enfants (some of it scored for orchestra as the Petite Suite), and he worked on a one-act opera, Djamileh. Both the opera and Daudet's play L′arlésienne, for which Bizet wrote incidental music, failed when produced in 1872, but in neither case did this have anything to do with the music.

Bizel was convinced that in Djamileh he had found his true path, one which he followed in composing his operatic masterpiece, Carmen. Here Bizet reaches new levels in the depiction of atmosphere and character. The characterization of José, his gradual decline from a simple soldier's peasant honesty through insurbordination, desertion and smuggling to murder is masterly; the colour and vitality of Carmen herself are remarkable, involving the use of the harmonic, rhythmic instrumental procedures of Spanish dance music, to which also the fate-laden augmented 2nds of the Carmen motif may owe their origin. The music of Micaela and Escamillo may be less original, but the charm of the former and the coarseness of the latter are intentional attributes of the characters. The opera is the supreme achievement of Bizet and of opéra comique, a genre it has transformed in that Bizet extended it to embrace passionate emotion and a tragic end, purging it of artificial elements and embuing it with a vivid expression of the torments inflicted by sexual passion and jealousy. The work, however, was condemned for its ‘obscene’ libretto, and the music was criticized as erudite, obscure, colourless, undistinguished and unromantic. Only after Bizet's death was its true stature appreciated, and then at first only in the revised version by Guiraud in which recitatives replace the original spoken dialogue (it is only recently that the original version has been revived). The reception of Carmen left Bizet acutely depressed; he fell victim to another attack of quinsy and, in June 1875, to the two heart attacks from which he died.

works:
Dramatic music

• Le Docteur Miracle (1857)
• Don Procopio (1858-9, perf. 1906)
• Les pêcheurs de perles (1863)
• Ivan IV (1865, perf. 1946)
• La jolie fille de Perth (1867)
• Djamileh (1872)
• Carmen (1875)
• L′arlésienne, incidental music (1872
• also suites)

Orchestral music

• Ov., a-A (c 1855)
• Sym., C (1855)
• Roma, sym., C (1860-68, rev. 1871)
• Petite suite (1871)
• Patrie, ov. (1873)

Vocal music

• c 8 choral works
• 47 songs, incl. Adieux de l′hôtesse arabe (1866)
• 3 duets

Piano music

• c 18 works, incl. Trois esquisses musicales (1858)
• Variations chromatiques (1868)
• Jeux d′enfants, pf duet (1871)

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With his opera "Carmen", French composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875) revitalized the French lyric stage by challenging both the oversized species of grand opera and the tired repertory of the opéra comique.

Georges Bizet was born in Paris. He showed precocious ability in music and at the age of 10 was admitted to the conservatory. There he worked under Jacques Halévy and Charles Gounod in composition and studied piano, organ, and theory. His progress was so outstanding that he won several prizes, culminating in 1857 with the Prix de Rome for composition, which enabled him to live in Italy for 3 years.

Bizet had already composed a number of piano pieces, choruses, and orchestral works. By far the best is the Symphony in C Major, written in a month's time in 1855 but not performed until 1935. Bizet regarded it as too imitative in style, and it does have touches of Gounod, Mozart, Rossini, and even Offenbach. Yet this symphony has such melodic charm, vivacity, and control of musical structure and orchestration that it ranks as a masterpiece of teen-age creation.

Bizet's operatic career began less spectacularly with the composition at the age of 18 of a one-act comic opera entitled Le Docteur Miracle. After arriving in Rome he wrote a second comedy, Don Procupio (1858-1859). Both pieces are rather Italianate in style, mildly attractive, but of no great consequence except as giving an early indication of theatrical talent.

After Bizet returned to Paris, he earned a living by giving private lessons and doing hackwork for publishers. It is possible that he might have had a career as a pianist, for he was by all accounts a remarkably fine player, applauded by Franz Liszt himself. Bizet had no desire, however, to perform publicly, choosing rather to devote himself to composition. The world of music was ultimately the better for that, although his efforts in the 1860s did not produce a single major success. A second symphony, known as the Roma, occupied him off and on from 1860 until its final revision in 1871, but it was a failure.

During this period Bizet also wrote several songs, some piano solos, and three operas bearing the earmarks of the gaudy tradition of French grand opera established 30 years before by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Ivan le terrible (1865), which was not performed until 1946, and La Jolie fille dePerth (1866) suffered most from this inheritance of inflated rhetoric and are now simply historical curiosities. Les Pêcheurs de perles (1863) has fared better. A failure in its own day, it gradually won a place in the French repertory. Its drama is old-fashioned and sentimental, and the musical score sags badly toward the end; but it contains enough good moments to keep it alive as a second-class, if not a first-class, opera.

Bizet reached his stride in the 1870s. The opera Djamileh, a short love story with much exotic atmosphere and some excellent music, and 12 pieces for piano duet called Jeux d'enfants were composed in 1871. The following year he wrote incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne, consisting of 27 numbers rich in melodic quality, with imaginative use of a 16-piece orchestra. The symphonic overture Patrie (1873) was less successful. Then came Carmen (1875), an opera as close to perfect as any ever written. Here Bizet was not innovative in his musical resources or form, but he created a faultless drama of real people and their passions (based on a story by Prosper Mérimée) expressed through music that is uniformly direct, relevant, colorful, and stamped with a personal accent.

Bizet brooded a good deal over the roles of intuition and reason in artistic creation and how they affected his own work. This may indicate some lack of self-confidence, and it perhaps accounts for the fact that he began and then put aside an extraordinary number of compositions. He left relatively few completed works and even fewer important ones. He was no advanced thinker in music, but at his best he commanded an unusual wealth of original melody linked to a fine sense for orchestral sonorities and impeccable craftsmanship.

Further Reading

The most complete biographical account of Bizet is Mina Stein Curtiss, Bizet and His World (1958). See also Martin Cooper, Georges Bizet (1938). Winton Dean, Bizet (1948), is useful for musical analysis and appraisal. Gerald E. Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (1938; 3d ed. 1964), is recommended for a view of the century in which Bizet lived.

Additional Sources

Curtiss, Mina Stein Kirstein, Bizet and his world, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Dean, Winton, Bizet, London: Dent, 1975; Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979.

(bee-zay)

A French composer of the nineteenth century, best known for his opera Carmen.

• Born: October 25, 1838
• Died: June 03, 1875
• Genres: Classical
• Instrument: Composer, Fender Rhodes, Orchestration

Biography

A French composer of piano, vocal, and dramatic music known for the opera Carmen (1875). Torn between his gift for evocation of narrative imagery with an extraordinary musicality, and a respect and love for simple classic form, Bizet achieved a powerful synthesis of the two in the "L'Arlésienne Suites" and the famous "Carmen" shortly before he died in his mid-30s. ~ Blue Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide

• Born: Oct 25, 1838 in Paris, France
• Died: Jun 03, 1875 in Bougival, France
• Active: '30s, '50s, '70s-2000s
• Major Genres: Music, Theater
• Career Highlights: Carmen, Carmen Jones, Carmen
• First Major Screen Credit: The Burlesque on Carmen (1916)

Biography

Bizet's music has appeared in 85 feature films between the years 1913 and 2000. As may be expected, the overwhelming majority employ excerpts from or are full productions of the composer's most successful opera, Carmen (1875). This innovative work offers many of Bizet's most exquisite melodies with rich, atmospheric orchestrations highlighting a plot, based on Prosper Mérimée's novel, filled with drama, conventional comedy, romance, and stark realisms that were shocking at the time: Carmen's blatant sexuality, her risqué discarding of men like so many picked flowers, the cigar factory women who smoke and fight, and Carmen's being stabbed to death by Don José in full view of the audience. Nevertheless, the opera became very popular and admired by other composers. Nietzsche declared that Carmen was "the perfect antidote to Wagnerian neurosis."

Although silent films were hardly ever that, instead often filled with sound effects, live voices, and musicians, the interesting problem of how to transfer operatic materials to silent film was solved in De Mille's Carmen (1915) starring diva Geraldine Farrar. Although she never sings in the film, Farrar later incorporated the sexuality and cat fighting into her Metropolitan Opera role. Hugo Riesenfeld, one of the founders of film music accompaniment, arranged the film score from Bizet's original opera. He has several arias and orchestral excerpts repeat throughout the film in a leitmotif manner, gives originally vocal melodies to various solo instruments, and generally treats the opera score as atmosphere for the movie which is not a staging of the opera. A soprano and tenor, seated with the pit orchestra, occasionally sing excerpts from a few arias and duets, but are treated as other instruments. Several scenes from the opera are truncated and their original sequence is re-ordered; for example, De Mille chose to begin the film with a suspense-filled purple-tinted night shot of smugglers at work near the coast of Seville, which in the opera does not occur until Act III.

In Cedric Klapisch's 58-second contribution to Lumière et compagnie (1995), a collection of brief films shot on the first motion picture camera, the Lumière Cinematograph, a man and a woman approach from opposite sides of the screen against a white-draped background to the accompaniment of Carmen's famous aria in habañera rhythm, "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" ("Love Is a Rebellious Bird"), its melody borrowed from Iradier. The couple rehearse an embrace. The music stops immediately as the couple briskly disengage and make gestures to the unseen director that they wish to try the moves again, and walk offscreen. Once more, the couple attempt a new approach. They stop again, make some confirming gestures, walk offscreen. On the third and final take, they enter the scene walking at a much slower and more sensual pace, and this time the embrace is fully passionate and seems natural and unrehearsed, although as viewers to the preparatory moves, the audience may experience mixed emotions because of this aesthetic realism.

The fabulous Dorothy Dandridge is a civilian parachute-maker who falls for army man Joe (Harry Belafonte) in the updated version of Bizet's opera in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954), which excerpts the opera music and adds modern lyrics.

Bizet's La Jolie fille de Perth had a television realization in 1998; The Pearl Fishers has been heard in The Man Who Cried (2000), Little Women (1994), and Gallipoli (1981); and L'Arlésienne in The Eye of Vichy (1993), Manon of the Spring (1953), and L'Arlésienne (1942). Unfortunately, no biopics of the composer have been created. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Movie Guide

Carmen [Covent Garden] Buy this Movie	Carmen Buy this Movie	Carmen Buy this Movie	Carmen Buy this Movie
Carmen (Wiener Staatsoper) Buy this Movie	Carmen Buy this Movie	Scenes from Bizet's Carmen Buy this Movie	Carmen Jones Buy this Movie

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