GeorgesBizet

Outside the bullring, Carmen tells José that she will not return to him. Inside, the spectators cheer Escamillo. Bizet keeps both scenes audible: the tune of the Toreador Song is heard from inside the arena while José pleads with Carmen and then kills her. The melody first appeared in the opera as Escamillo’s song to the crowd. Carmen opened at the Paris Opéra-⁠Comique on 3 March 1875. Three months later its composer was dead, aged thirty-six. He had spent most of his working life trying to get an opera to stay on the stage.

ParisFamily and the Paris Conservatoire

Georges Bizet was born in Paris on 25 October 1838. His father Adolphe taught singing; his mother Aimée played the piano, and her brother François Delsarte was a singing teacher. Bizet entered the Conservatoire in October 1848, before his tenth birthday. Antoine Marmontel taught him piano, François Benoist organ, and Fromental Halévy composition. He won prizes for piano, fugue and organ. Charles Gounod was an especially important example to him, as a composer who made a career in the theatre without giving up the suppleness of a sung phrase.

In October 1872 Bizet told Gounod, “You were the beginning of my life as an artist. I come from you.” Gounod’s influence can already be heard in Bizet’s Symphony in C, written in 1855, when he was a teenager, after he had arranged Gounod’s D major Symphony for piano duet. Bizet’s score was not performed during his lifetime; its first public performance was given in Basel in 1935. His early operatic work reached an audience much sooner. His one-act Le Docteur Miracle, which includes a quartet in praise of an omelette, shared first prize with Charles Lecocq’s setting in Offenbach’s competition and was staged at the Bouffes-⁠Parisiens in April 1857.

RomePrix de Rome and Don Procopio

That summer Bizet won the Prix de Rome with the cantata Clovis et Clotilde. Early in 1858 he reached the Villa Medici. In Italy he travelled to Naples and Pompeii in 1859, and to Venice with Ernest Guiraud on the way home in 1860. He wrote Don Procopio, an Italian comic opera whose ensembles follow the manner of Rossini and Donizetti. He sent it to the French Academy, which expected a mass from a first-year pensioner.

The theatreTheatre works, 1863–⁠1872

Les Pêcheurs de perles was commissioned in 1863 and written that spring and summer. Its imagined Ceylon belongs to the Parisian theatre’s taste for distant settings. In “Au fond du temple saint” two men recall the same woman; later Nadir sings a romance. The work received eighteen performances at the Théâtre-⁠Lyrique. Berlioz praised the young composer, but the production did not establish him. Another Théâtre-⁠Lyrique opera, La Jolie Fille de Perth, followed in 1867; it has dances and a serenade, and its story turns on mistaken identity.

In June 1869 Bizet married Geneviève Halévy, the daughter of his former teacher. Their son Jacques was born in 1872. Between those events came the Franco-⁠Prussian War and the siege of Paris, during which Bizet served in the National Guard. During the Commune he spent time outside the capital, at Compiègne and Le Vésinet. In 1871 he composed Jeux d’enfants, twelve pieces for piano duet whose subjects include a swing, a spinning top, a doll and a procession. The two players share the keyboard and divide the material of each piece between them.

In 1872 Bizet had two further disappointments in the theatre. Djamileh, a one-act opera set in Cairo, had eleven performances at the Opéra-⁠Comique. Daudet’s spoken play L’Arlésienne also did poorly. Bizet wrote its incidental music for a small theatre orchestra that included a saxophone, cor anglais, strings, piano and percussion. He took four movements from the score to make a concert suite, which was a success that November.

CarmenCarmen at the Opéra-⁠Comique

The Opéra-⁠Comique commission that became Carmen dated from 1872. Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy made the libretto from Prosper Mérimée’s novella; Bizet worked on the music in 1873–⁠74 and orchestrated it at Bougival beside the Seine. He had never visited Spain. His Seville was drawn from reading, theatrical invention and selected musical borrowings, including Sebastián Iradier’s El arreglito. From that song he made the Habanera, giving Carmen a chromatically descending melody above a repeated dance bass. He wrote its words himself.

1875Carmen, première and reception

The première met hostility and incomprehension as well as admiration. Carmen received forty-five performances in 1875 and three more in 1876. Shortly before his death Bizet was planning sung recitatives for a Vienna production. He died at Bougival on 3 June 1875, following illness. Vienna staged the work that October. Its continuing success brought revisions and rival editions.

Bizet kept the festivities going through the murder. The crowd goes on celebrating, and the refrain heard earlier returns during the killing.