59 Facts About Bizet

Georges Bizet was a French composer of the Romantic era.

Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

Bizet was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public.

Bizet founded no school and had no obvious disciples or successors.

Georges Bizet was born in Paris on 25 October 1838.

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Bizet was registered as Alexandre Cesar Leopold, but baptised as "Georges" on 16 March 1840, and was known by this name for the rest of his life.

Bizet composed a few works, including at least one published song.

Bizet was admitted to the Conservatoire on 9 October 1848, two weeks before his 10th birthday.

Bizet made an early impression; within six months he had won first prize in solfege, a feat that impressed Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman, the Conservatoire's former professor of piano.

Bizet met another of Gounod's young students, the 13-year-old Camille Saint-Saens, who remained a firm friend of Bizet's.

Under the tuition of Antoine Francois Marmontel, the Conservatoire's professor of piano, Bizet's pianism developed rapidly; he won the Conservatoire's second prize for piano in 1851, and first prize the following year.

Bizet's first preserved compositions, two wordless songs for soprano, date from around 1850.

Bizet never published the symphony, which came to light again only in 1933, and was finally performed in 1935.

Bizet's entry was not successful, but nor were any of the others; the musician's prize was not awarded that year.

Bizet was a great admirer of Rossini's music, and wrote not long after their first meeting that "Rossini is the greatest of them all, because like Mozart, he has all the virtues".

Bizet was awarded the prize after a ballot of the members of the Academie des Beaux-Arts overturned the judges' initial decision, which was in favour of the oboist Charles Colin.

Under the terms of the award, Bizet received a financial grant for five years, the first two to be spent in Rome, the third in Germany and the final two in Paris.

On 27 January 1858, Bizet arrived at the Villa Medici, a 16th-century palace that since 1803 had housed the French Academie in Rome and which he described in a letter home as "paradise".

Bizet relished the convivial atmosphere, and quickly involved himself in the distractions of its social life; in his first six months in Rome, his only composition was a Te Deum written for the Rodrigues Prize, a competition for a new religious work open to Prix de Rome winners.

Bizet was discouraged to the extent that he vowed to write no more religious music.

Bizet was apprehensive about how this breach of the rules would be received at the Academie, but their response to Don Procopio was initially positive, with praise for the composer's "easy and brilliant touch" and "youthful and bold style".

On his return to Rome, Bizet successfully requested permission to extend his stay in Italy into a third year, rather than going to Germany, so that he could complete "an important work".

In September 1860, while visiting Venice with his friend and fellow-laureate Ernest Guiraud, Bizet received news that his mother was gravely ill in Paris, and made his way home.

Back in Paris with two years of his grant remaining, Bizet was temporarily secure financially and could ignore for the moment the difficulties that other young composers faced in the city.

On 13 March 1861, Bizet attended the Paris premiere of Wagner's opera Tannhauser, a performance greeted by audience riots that were stage-managed by the influential Jockey-Club de Paris.

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Bizet now declared Wagner "above and beyond all living composers".

In May 1861 Bizet gave a rare demonstration of his virtuoso skills when, at a dinner party at which Liszt was present, he astonished everyone by playing on sight, flawlessly, one of the maestro's most difficult pieces.

Bizet's fourth and final envoi, which occupied him for much of 1862, was a one-act opera, La guzla de l'emir.

In 1862, Bizet had fathered a child with the family's housekeeper, Marie Reiter.

When his Prix de Rome grant expired, Bizet found he could not make a living from writing music.

Bizet accepted piano pupils and some composition students, two of whom, Edmond Galabert and Paul Lacombe, became his close friends.

Bizet worked as an accompanist at rehearsals and auditions for various staged works, including Berlioz's oratorio L'enfance du Christ and Gounod's opera Mireille.

Bizet made piano transcriptions for hundreds of operas and other pieces and prepared vocal scores and orchestral arrangements for all kinds of music.

Bizet was, briefly, a music critic for La Revue Nationale et Etrangere, under the assumed name of "Gaston de Betzi".

Since 1862, Bizet had been working intermittently on Ivan IV, an opera based on the life of Ivan the Terrible.

Carvalho failed to deliver on his promise to produce it, so in December 1865, Bizet offered it to the Opera, which rejected it; the work remained unperformed until 1946.

Bizet found time to finish his long-gestating Roma symphony and wrote numerous keyboard works and songs.

Bizet's marriage was initially happy, but was affected by Genevieve's nervous instability, her difficult relations with her mother and by Mme.

Bizet was critical of the antiquated equipment with which he was supposed to fight; his unit's guns, he said, were more dangerous to themselves than to the enemy.

Bizet greeted with enthusiasm the proclamation in Paris of the Third Republic.

Bizet decided that he was no longer safe in the city, and he and Genevieve escaped to Compiegne.

Bizet resumed work on Clarissa Harlowe and Griselidis, but plans for the latter to be staged at the Opera-Comique fell through, and neither work was finished; only fragments of their music survive.

Bizet's other completed works in 1871 were the piano duet entitled Jeux d'enfants, and a one-act opera, Djamileh, which opened at the Opera-Comique in May 1872.

Bizet began the music in the summer of 1873, but the Opera-Comique's management was concerned about the suitability of this risque story for a theatre that generally provided wholesome entertainment, and work was suspended.

Bizet then began composing Don Rodrigue, an adaptation of the El Cid story by Louis Gallet and Edouard Blau.

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Bizet played a piano version to a select audience that included the Opera's principal baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, hoping that the singer's approval might influence the directors of the Opera to stage the work.

Bizet finished the score during the summer and was pleased with the outcome: "I have written a work that is all clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody".

Bizet had to counter further attempts at the Opera-Comique to modify parts of the action which they deemed improper.

The public's reaction was lukewarm, and Bizet soon became convinced of its failure: "I foresee a definite and hopeless flop".

Adolphe Bizet led the mourners, who included Gounod, Thomas, Ludovic Halevy, Leon Halevy and Massenet.

Bizet said that Bizet had been struck down just as he was becoming recognised as a true artist.

Bizet's first orchestral piece was an overture written in 1855 in the manner of Rossini's Guillaume Tell.

The exception is the above-described Jeux d'enfants duet suite; here Bizet avoids the virtuoso passages that so dominate his solo music.

Bizet wrote most of his operas in the traditions of Italian and French opera established by such as Donizetti, Rossini, Berlioz, Gounod, and Thomas.

In Don Procopio, Bizet followed the stock devices of Italian opera as typified by Donizetti in Don Pasquale, a work which it closely resembles.

Music critic Harold C Schonberg surmises that, had Bizet lived, he might have revolutionised French opera; as it is, verismo was taken up mainly by Italians, notably Puccini who, according to Dean, developed the idea "till it became threadbare".

Bizet founded no specific school, though Dean names Chabrier and Ravel as composers influenced by him.

Bizet showed little interest in her first husband's musical legacy, made no effort to catalogue Bizet's manuscripts and gave many away as souvenirs.

Bizet died in 1926; in her will, she established a fund for a Georges Bizet prize, to be awarded annually to a composer under 40 who had "produced a remarkable work within the previous five years".