Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet, born Alexandre César Léopold Bizet in Paris, France on 25 October 1838, was a French composer of the Romantic era whose works include several productions recognized on Broadway, among them Carmen, Carmen Jones, La Tragedie de Carmen, Les Forains, and Pas d'Action. Baptized as Georges on 16 March 1840, he carried that name throughout his life. He died on 3 June 1875 at the age of 36.

Bizet's parents shaped his early musical development considerably. His father, Adolphe Bizet, had transitioned from work as a hairdresser and wigmaker to teaching singing, and also composed at least one published song. His mother, Aimée Delsarte, was an accomplished pianist who likely gave Bizet his first lessons. Her brother, François Delsarte, was a distinguished singer and teacher who performed at the courts of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. Bizet's aptitude for music was evident from childhood; by listening outside the room where his father taught, he learned to sing complex songs from memory and developed the ability to identify and analyze intricate chordal structures.

His parents, recognizing his gifts, sought to enroll him at the Conservatoire de Paris before he had reached the minimum entry age of ten. Horn virtuoso Joseph Meifred, a member of the Conservatoire's Committee of Studies, was sufficiently impressed by the boy's abilities during an interview that he waived the age requirement. Bizet was formally admitted on 9 October 1848, two weeks before his tenth birthday. Within six months he had won first prize in solfège, which drew the attention of Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman, the Conservatoire's former professor of piano. Zimmerman provided Bizet with private instruction in counterpoint and fugue until Zimmerman's death in 1853, and through these lessons Bizet came to know Zimmerman's son-in-law, composer Charles Gounod, who became a lasting influence on his musical development. He also met the thirteen-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns during this period, and the two remained close friends. Under piano professor Antoine François Marmontel, Bizet won the Conservatoire's second prize for piano in 1851 and first prize the following year.

Bizet's earliest preserved compositions, two wordless songs for soprano, date from around 1850. In 1853 he joined Fromental Halévy's composition class, and by 1854 two of his songs, Petite Marguerite and La Rose et l'abeille, had been published. In 1855 he prepared four-hand piano arrangements of two of Gounod's works and, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, composed his own symphony. The symphony bore a close resemblance to Gounod's Symphony in D and was never published by Bizet; it resurfaced only in 1933 and received its first performance in 1935.

In 1856, Bizet competed for the Prix de Rome but the prize was not awarded to any entrant that year. He subsequently entered an opera competition organized by Jacques Offenbach for young composers, with a prize of 1,200 francs, requiring a setting of the one-act libretto Le docteur Miracle by Léon Battu and Ludovic Halévy. The prize was awarded jointly to Bizet and Charles Lecocq. Through this success, Bizet became a regular attendee at Offenbach's Friday evening gatherings, where he met Gioachino Rossini, who gave him a signed photograph. In 1857, Bizet entered the Prix de Rome again, setting the cantata Clovis et Clotilde by Amédée Burion. Following a ballot of the Académie des Beaux-Arts members that overturned the judges' initial decision, Bizet was awarded the prize. The terms provided a five-year financial grant, with the first two years to be spent in Rome, the third in Germany, and the final two in Paris, along with a requirement to submit an original work annually to the Académie.

After returning to Paris from Italy, Bizet found that the major Parisian opera theatres favored established repertoire over new works. His orchestral and keyboard compositions attracted little attention, and he supported himself largely by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Throughout the 1860s he initiated numerous theatrical projects, most of which were abandoned. Two operas that did reach the stage during this period, Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth, did not achieve immediate success. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, Bizet served in the National Guard. His one-act opera Djamileh met with little success afterward, though an orchestral suite drawn from his incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne was received with immediate popularity.

Bizet's final opera, Carmen, faced delays before its premiere on 3 March 1875 due to concerns that its themes of betrayal and murder would prove offensive to audiences. Bizet believed the work had failed following its opening. Three months later, on 3 June 1875, he died of a heart attack, unaware that Carmen would become one of the most frequently performed works in the opera repertoire. His marriage to Geneviève Halévy produced one son. Following his death, much of his work outside of Carmen fell into neglect; manuscripts were lost or given away, and published versions of his compositions were often revised by other hands. His works began to receive more frequent performance in the twentieth century. As a Broadway composer and book writer, his legacy endures through productions including Carmen, Carmen Jones, La Tragedie de Carmen, Les Forains, and Pas d'Action.