Georges Bizet
He died at thirty-six. He went believing his last opera had failed, yet that work would become one of the most performed operas in the world.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAimée Delsarte
His mother, a fine pianist, who taught her son his first notes and was the chief recipient of his letters from Rome.
- TeacherFromental Halévy
His composition teacher at the Conservatoire; Bizet later married his daughter and became his son-in-law.
- InfluenceCharles Gounod
An elder colleague who shaped the young Bizet's melodic sense, he served as the model for the Symphony in C and read the eulogy at his funeral.
- FriendshipErnest Guiraud
A lifelong friend made in Rome, he composed the recitatives for “Carmen” and the second “L'Arlésienne” suite after Bizet's death.
- FamilyGeneviève Halévy
The wife he married in 1869; after Bizet's death she remarried and presided over a celebrated Paris salon.
- InfluencePyotr Tchaikovsky
Captivated by “Carmen,” he predicted it would become the most beloved opera in the world.
I. The only son in Paris · 1838–1848 (age 0–10)
(Birth) He was born in Paris, France, in October 1838, on the 25th. His birth was registered under the name Alexandre-César-Léopold, but it was Georges, the name he received at baptism, that followed him all his life. His father, Adolphe Bizet, had been a wigmaker and barber before changing trades to become a singing teacher. He had no formal musical training, yet he taught voice and wrote the occasional small piece. (Mother) His mother, Aimée Delsarte, was a fine pianist, and her family counted several musicians. Her brother, François Delsarte, was a renowned singing teacher in Paris. Bizet grew up an only child, and his mother taught him his notes along with his letters. His attachment to her was profound; years later, most of the letters he sent from Rome were written to her. (The door ajar) It is said that while his father taught singing to students in the parlor, the young Bizet listened outside the door and learned the songs by heart. Singing voices filled the house constantly. It is hard to believe that his later path—above all, a composer for the voice and the theater—had nothing to do with this. (Admission) His exceptional ear showed itself early, and his parents decided to send him to the Paris Conservatoire. Though slightly below the required age, he was admitted on the strength of his ability in October 1848, a few weeks before his tenth birthday. That year, the February Revolution toppled the monarchy in Paris and ushered in a republic. The boy set out on a musician's path in the heart of a city in upheaval.
II. Star pupil of the Conservatoire · 1848–1857 (age 10–19)
(Teachers) At the Conservatoire he studied piano with Antoine Marmontel, organ with François Benoist, and composition with Fromental Halévy, composer of the opera “La Juive.” In 1852 he won first prize in piano, and he took prizes in organ and fugue as well. Marmontel remembered him as one of his finest pupils. Yet Bizet never chose the path of a concert pianist. (Gounod) Whenever Pierre Zimmerman, his teacher of counterpoint (the technique of weaving several melodies together at once), was absent, his son-in-law Charles Gounod took the class instead. The clear, lyrical melodies of Gounod, twenty years his senior, sank deep into the boy. Bizet arranged Gounod's works for piano, learning that idiom by hand. The “Symphony in C,” written in little more than a month in the autumn of 1855, bore clear traces of Gounod's First Symphony as its model. The seventeen-year-old Bizet never had it performed and put it away in a drawer. (Offenbach) In 1856 Jacques Offenbach held a competition for one-act operettas at his own theater, the Bouffes-Parisiens. Bizet's “Le docteur Miracle” shared first prize with a work by Charles Lecocq and reached the stage the following spring. Bizet also frequented the gatherings Offenbach held every Friday, and there he absorbed a feel for light, witty theater music. (Prix de Rome) In 1857 his cantata “Clovis et Clotilde” won the Prix de Rome, the highest honor the state bestowed on a young composer. The prize carried a state stipend for several years and a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. At the end of that year, the nineteen-year-old set off for Italy.
Written at seventeen on Gounod's model and then tucked away in a drawer, it preserves intact the brilliance and fearless technique of his Conservatoire years.
- In the second movement (Adagio), the strings lay down an accompaniment in a technique of plucking the strings with the fingers (pizzicato), and above it the oboe sings a long, plaintive melody. It is the most famous passage in the work and a solo cherished by oboists.
- In the middle of the same second movement comes a fugue-like passage (fugato) in which the strings take up a single theme in turn, one chasing another. Here the skill in counterpoint (the technique of weaving several melodies together) honed at the Conservatoire comes to the fore.
- The fourth movement is a buoyant finale in which the violins drive relentlessly through rapid notes. Whether the strings, running side by side, keep their quick notes perfectly aligned is the measure of an orchestra's skill.
- In the vigorous chords and nimble theme that open the first movement, one senses the brightness of a French classical style descended through Mozart and Rossini. The work became widely known in 1947, when Balanchine made it into the ballet “Le Palais de cristal.”
III. Roman days · 1858–1860 (age 20–22)
(The villa) In January 1858 he arrived at the Villa Medici in Rome, where the laureates of the French Academy lived together. Bizet sent his mother long letters almost every week, filled with street scenes, evenings with his companions, and the books he was reading. The young man in those letters was cheerful and curious—and also someone who weighed his own talent with a cool eye. (Opera buffa) Laureates were required to send a work to Paris each year, and custom dictated a sacred piece for the first. Bizet ignored this and sent an Italian-style comic opera, “Don Procopio.” The Academy noted the breach of the rules but acknowledged his talent all the same. Around then he wrote a “Te Deum” in pursuit of a prize, but it won nothing. The experience seems to have made it clearer to him that he belonged to the theater rather than the church. (Travels) He journeyed throughout Italy, including Naples and Pompeii, taking in firsthand the uproar of carnival, folk songs, and the fervor of the opera houses. In 1859 he befriended Ernest Guiraud, who had come to Rome as a laureate. The friendship lasted a lifetime, and after Bizet's death it would be Guiraud who brought his works before the world. (Return) In the summer of 1860 Bizet left Rome and set out for home by way of Venice, hastened by news that his mother had fallen ill. Though time remained on his stipend, by that autumn he was already back in Paris. The southern colors he had absorbed in Italy lingered throughout his later exotic operas.
IV. Staves for a living · 1860–1868 (age 22–30)
(Loss) In September 1861 his mother died. The following March his teacher Halévy also passed away, in Nice. At twenty-three, Bizet was left alone with his widowed father. During this period Marie Reiter, who helped keep his father's house, gave birth in 1862 to a son, Jean, and the circumstances surrounding the child long remained a family secret. (Liszt) It is said that at a dinner around 1861, when Franz Liszt pointed out a difficult passage in one of his own pieces, Bizet sight-read it flawlessly. Liszt reportedly marveled that he had thought only two people could play like that, and now there were three. Even so, Bizet turned down the career of a concert pianist. (Livelihood) Instead he reduced other composers' operas for piano for publishers, corrected proofs, and gave lessons. In his letters he called this work drudgery, but it was what kept him afloat. His opera “Ivan IV” found no theater and was buried. The biographical record also notes that for a time he was close to his older neighbor, the writer Céleste Mogador. (The pearl fishers) In 1863 Léon Carvalho, director of the Théâtre Lyrique, entrusted him with “The Pearl Fishers,” an exotic love story set on the island of Ceylon. It closed after 18 performances, and the reviews were mostly harsh. Yet Hector Berlioz wrote in his newspaper column that the work did its composer great honor. In 1867 “La jolie fille de Perth” likewise managed only 18 performances. Through these hard years, Camille Saint-Saëns was an old friend who had recognized his gift early on.
Written when he first won a major stage, in the years he was tied to arranging work for a living. Its run ended after 18 performances, but Berlioz recognized its worth.
- The Act I duet for tenor and baritone, “Au fond du temple saint,” is a song in which two friends recall the moment they first saw a certain woman. The flute and harp first introduce the mysterious goddess melody, and then the two men sing it together. The recording by Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill is considered a classic.
- That 'goddess melody' returns whenever love and memory resurface. It is worth listening for the moments when the same tune comes back in a new place.
- Nadir's aria “Je crois entendre encore” demands very high notes sung as softly as a breath. The heart of the listening lies in a tenor's top notes produced lightly and gently, without forcing.
- In Leïla's songs, the horns and woodwinds lay down warm colors like a tropical night. Here one sees Bizet's skill at painting an exotic setting not with grand effects but with instrumental color.
V. Marriage and war · 1869–1872 (age 31–34)
(Marriage) Bizet fell in love with Geneviève, daughter of his teacher Halévy. Her family looked askance at a composer without a steady income, and matters at home were further complicated by her mother Léonie's severe emotional instability. The two were married on June 3, 1869. Geneviève was highly strung, and conflict with her family cast a shadow over the entire marriage. (War) When war with Prussia broke out in 1870, Bizet joined the National Guard and defended besieged Paris. The following year, when the civil strife of the Paris Commune erupted, the couple took refuge on the outskirts of the city. Amid hunger and the roar of cannon, he never stopped composing. (Children) In 1871, with the war over, he completed “Jeux d'enfants,” a set of piano duets (pieces played by two people together at one piano). Its twelve pieces depicted games such as the spinning top, the merry-go-round, and soap bubbles. For music written in a ruined city, it was astonishingly clear. In July 1872 his son Jacques was born. (Failure) In the spring of 1872 his one-act opera “Djamileh” closed after 11 performances. That autumn he wrote incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play “L'Arlésienne.” Owing to the theater's constraints, he wrung color from a small band of only twenty-six players, even adding a saxophone. The play failed, but the suite he drew from the music was warmly received in concert that November. It was the clearest success Bizet tasted in his lifetime.
A set of piano duets depicting children's games, written in Paris just as the war and civil strife had ended. His son was born the following year, and Bizet orchestrated five of the pieces to create the “Petite suite.”
- In “La toupie,” one player keeps up a rapid, ceaselessly whirling figure that depicts the spinning top, while the other lays a melody above it.
- In “Les chevaux de bois,” the same rhythm circles round and round, mirroring the rise and fall of the wooden horses. In the orchestral version, listen for how the strings and woodwinds share out this rotation.
- “Petit mari, petite femme” is a tender piece in which two melodies trade phrases as if leaning on each other. It seems to reflect the home life of the newly married composer.
- “Le bal” ends with a fast dance (galop). The charm of duet playing lies in two people keeping together on one keyboard without their arms and hands colliding.
The play failed, but this suite, drawn from its incidental music, was the surest success Bizet enjoyed in his lifetime. The limits of a small theater orchestra ended up giving birth to new colors of sound.
- The “Prélude” opens with the orchestra playing, forcefully and in unison, the old Provençal Christmas song “March of the Kings.” Variations follow, recasting the same theme in one guise after another.
- Midway through the “Prélude,” an alto saxophone sings a soft, mournful melody. It portrays the innocent younger brother in the play, and it is often cited as one of the earliest uses of the then brand-new instrument in an orchestra.
- The “Adagietto” is a short piece for strings alone, played with mutes (devices that soften the sound). In the play it accompanies the scene in which an elderly couple meet again after many long years.
- In the “Carillon,” the horns repeat three notes without pause, ringing the village bells. Between them, the woodwinds slip in a pastoral melody.
VI. Carmen · 1873–1875 (age 35–37)
(Conception) When the Opéra-Comique commissioned a new work, Bizet chose Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen. The libretto went to Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, his wife's cousin. The theater was so genteel that it was said to be where families went to arrange marriages. Its co-director, Adolphe de Leuven, objected to an ending in which the heroine is murdered on stage, and in the end he stepped down. Bizet finished the orchestration in the summer of 1874 at Bougival, outside Paris. (Rehearsals) The rehearsals did not go smoothly. The chorus balked at staging that required them to smoke and quarrel as they moved about the stage, and the orchestra complained that the score was too hard. Célestine Galli-Marié, who sang Carmen, stood by him to the end. At her request he rewrote the “Habanera” several times; the melody, which Bizet had taken for a folk song, was in fact a song by the Spanish composer Sebastián Iradier. (Premiere) At the premiere on March 3, 1875, the first act was applauded, but the house grew colder with each act that followed. Several critics condemned the work as immoral. It was performed forty-eight times that year alone, yet Bizet felt it had failed and fell into deep despondency. Around the time of the premiere he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. (Death) Long troubled by an inflammation of the throat, he went swimming in the Seine at Bougival in late May and fell gravely ill. On June 3, 1875, his 6th wedding anniversary, he died at the age of thirty-six. Gounod delivered the eulogy at his funeral. That autumn, Carmen triumphed in Vienna. Tchaikovsky wrote that within ten years it would be the most beloved opera in the world, and Brahms, too, cherished it deeply.
This work reached the stage in spite of a genteel theater's resistance and grueling rehearsals. The composer died three months later, convinced it had failed, and only afterward did the opera spread across the world.
- Late in the prelude, the cellos and lower strings bring in a short, ominously writhing phrase. Commonly called the “fate motif,” it returns whenever Carmen and death become entwined. Follow its returns all the way to the final scene.
- In the “Habanera,” the cellos lay down the “boom—ta-ta-ta” rhythm of the Cuban habanera dance, while Carmen sings a melody that slides down a semitone at a time (a descending chromatic line). Her nature, slipping away just as she seems within reach, lives in this melody.
- In the Act 3 “Card Song,” Carmen sees death turn up each time she lays out the cards. Unlike her usual nimble singing, this passage sinks heavily into the low register, which makes it a fine place to compare the dark tones of different mezzo-sopranos.
- Don José's “Flower Song” carries a direction that its final high note be sung very softly. Whether a tenor belts the note out or sings it softly as marked is often said to be what separates a great performance from the rest.
- In the final scene, the cheers from the offstage bullring and the “Toreador Song” ring out over the catastrophe onstage. Don't miss the dramatic clash between the festival outside and the tragedy within.
Lesser-known stories
Marie Reiter, who worked in the Bizet household, gave birth to a son, Jean, in 1862. For many years Jean was regarded within the family as something like Georges's “younger brother.” Then a record survives that before her death in 1913, Marie Reiter revealed that the child's father had been Georges. Because the story came to light only after everyone involved had died, most short biographies leave it out. Jean Reiter went on to spend his life working for a newspaper. The Symphony in C, so often performed today, went unknown for almost 80 years after it was written. Bizet's papers passed through his wife Geneviève to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, who donated them to the library of the Paris Conservatoire. There, in 1933, the score drew attention once more, and in 1935 it was performed for the first time in Basel, Switzerland, under Felix Weingartner. Because Bizet never once mentioned the piece in his lifetime, its very existence had been forgotten. Carmen was originally an opéra comique, in which actors exchange spoken dialogue between the songs. But for the 1875 Vienna production, Guiraud turned the dialogue into recitative, declaimed almost like song, and for nearly a century this version served as a kind of world standard. From the 1960s on, research and performances aimed at reviving the original spoken-dialogue version brought renewed light to the pacing and texture Bizet actually intended for the drama. After Bizet's death, his wife Geneviève married the lawyer Émile Straus and opened one of the most celebrated salons in Paris. Marcel Proust was a regular there. Scholars regard her as one of the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes in In Search of Lost Time. Bizet's son Jacques was Proust's schoolmate and friend.
Glossary 📚🔎
Opéra comique
(Word meaning) French for “comic opera,” though despite the name it does not necessarily mean a funny story. (In music) In 19th-century France, an operatic form in which actors exchange spoken dialogue between the songs, and also the name of the Paris theater that staged such works. Tragedies in which the protagonist dies, like Carmen, were written in this form too. It is much like a school play where the cast trades lines and then everyone sings together at the important moments. (Elsewhere) In everyday French, comique simply means “funny” or “comic.”
Recitative
(Word meaning) From the Italian recitare (to recite), meaning “singing as if reciting.” (In music) Singing in opera that stays close to the rhythms of speech in order to move the story forward. It pairs with the aria, which unfolds emotion in ornate melody. After Bizet's death, Guiraud replaced the spoken dialogue of Carmen with recitative. Think of how you speak almost normally when quickly telling a friend what happened today, then your voice rises like song at the really happy part.
Habanera
(Word meaning) A dance named after Havana (La Habana), the capital of Cuba, meaning “dance in the Havana style.” (In music) Its hallmark is a distinctive rhythm over a relaxed duple meter, “boom—ta-ta-ta,” in which the first beat lingers a little before breaking into quicker notes. It traveled from Cuba by way of Spain and spread widely across 19th-century Europe. Carmen's first aria is set on this rhythm. Clap “clap—clap-clap-clap” and you can feel its strolling rhythm in your body.
Cantata
(Word meaning) From the Italian cantare (to sing), meaning “a piece that is sung.” It is the counterpart of the sonata, a piece “played” on instruments. (In music) A vocal work in several sections for soloists, chorus and orchestra. It tells a story through song, without scenery or acting. In the Prix de Rome competition, setting a prescribed poem as a cantata was the final-round task, and Bizet won the prize with Clovis et Clotilde. Picture a recital that tells a story through song and narration alone, with no acting onstage.
Incidental music
(Word meaning) The Korean busu eumak means music “attached” (附隨) to a play. (In music) Music written to be played during a stage play: before the curtain rises, during scene changes, and as background to key moments. Unlike opera, where song is central, the actors' dialogue drives the story and the music supports the atmosphere. The music for L'Arlésienne was of this kind. It does almost the same job as the background music that plays under scenes in films or games.
Suite
(Word meaning) The Korean moeumgok means a piece made by gathering (moeum, “gathering”) several pieces into one bundle. The Western name suite comes from “things that follow,” that is, things that come one after another. (In music) A form in which several short pieces are played in succession as if they were a single work. In Bizet's day it was common to pick the best passages from opera, theater or ballet music and rework them for the concert hall. The L'Arlésienne suite was born this way. Think of a highlight reel that strings together only the best scenes of a long drama. (Elsewhere) Hotels call a room with a connected bedroom and living room a suite. The name comes from the same word.
Motive (motif)
(Word meaning) The Korean donggi means “the first impulse that sets something in motion.” In music it refers to the smallest seed-like phrase that drives a piece forward. (In music) A short, distinct phrase or rhythm of a few notes that weaves the story by recurring or changing shape within a piece. In opera it is paired with a particular character or fate and is heard again whenever that idea surfaces. The “fate motif” in Carmen is one such example. It is like a game where the same short sound effect always plays just before a boss appears, so that the sound alone tells you what is about to happen. (Elsewhere) In everyday Korean, donggi means a motive, the reason that drives an action, as in one's motivation to study.