1838–1875 · France · Romantic
Georges Bizet (1838–1875) was a French Romantic-era composer who wrote operas, orchestral works, songs and piano pieces; he is best known for the opera "Carmen", which became one of the most frequently performed works in the world's opera repertoire. The site holds Bizet's songs for voice and piano at various levels of difficulty, along with a few solo piano arrangements.
Georges Bizet was born on 25 October 1838 in Paris, on Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne. He was registered as Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, and on 16 March 1840 was baptised at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette under the name Georges, which he kept for the rest of his life. Adolphe Armand Bizet, his father, earned a living as a hairdresser and a maker of wigs before he turned to teaching singing in 1837, without any formal training in music. His mother, Aimée Delsarte, was a pianist and gave her son his first piano lessons; her brother François Delsarte, a singer and teacher, was known throughout Europe.
An only child, Bizet showed an early aptitude for music: listening at the door while his father gave singing lessons, he learned to sing complicated pieces accurately from memory and to make sense of complex chords. On 9 October 1848 he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, into Antoine Marmontel's piano class, and in 1852 he also entered François Benoist's organ class.
From 1853 Bizet studied in Fromental Halévy's composition class; he studied counterpoint and fugue with Zimmerman, on Marmontel's recommendation, and Zimmerman was sometimes substituted by Charles Gounod, who became a lasting creative influence on the young Bizet. At the Conservatoire, Bizet became friends with Camille Saint-Saëns, another of Gounod's pupils.
In 1857 Bizet shared the prize of an operetta competition organised by Jacques Offenbach with Charles Lecocq, for the opera "Le docteur Miracle"; after this success Bizet became a regular at Offenbach's Friday evening gatherings, where, among others, he met Gioachino Rossini, who gave him a signed photograph of himself. That same year, 1857, Bizet won the Prix de Rome for his cantata "Clovis et Clotilde", which entitled him to several years of study abroad.
The Prix de Rome grant was meant to cover two years in Rome, a further year in Germany, and two more back in Paris; Bizet chose instead to stay in Italy for three full years, obtaining leave to remain in Rome for a third year rather than moving on to Germany. He took up residence at the Villa Medici, home to the French Académie in Rome, calling it, in a letter sent home, a genuine paradise. The obligatory creative submissions (envois) he produced during these years were the opera buffa "Don Procopio", set to an Italian libretto, and the symphonic poem "Vasco da Gama".
Don Procopio remained unknown to the public until 1895, when the composer Malherbe published a description of it that he had found in the archive of the Conservatoire's late director, Auber; it was staged in 1906 in Monte Carlo, in Malherbe's edition. Back in Paris, thanks to the remainder of his prize money, Bizet could go for two more years without worrying about earning a living, but after that, like other young composers, he had to make ends meet by arranging other people's music for publishers. In 1863 an offer came to write the opera "Les pêcheurs de perles" for the Théâtre Lyrique company, with a text from Michel Carré and Eugène Cormon; it premiered on 30 September 1863, the reception was cool, and the opera closed after 18 performances, not returning to the stage until 1886.
In 1867 Bizet met Geneviève Halévy, daughter of his composition teacher Fromental Halévy, who had died five years earlier, and a first cousin of the librettist Ludovic Halévy. The family was initially opposed to the match, but by the summer of 1869 their objections had been overcome, and Bizet and Geneviève married on 3 June 1869. On 10 July 1872 their only child, a son named Jacques, was born; he later became one of Marcel Proust's close friends in his youth.
In 1866 Bizet signed a contract with the impresario Léon Carvalho for the opera "La jolie fille de Perth", based on the novel by Walter Scott; the premiere, delayed by more than a year over casting problems, was given by the Théâtre Lyrique company on 26 December 1867 — critics received it more warmly than Bizet's other operas, but because of Carvalho's financial troubles the opera ran for only 18 performances. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Bizet joined the National Guard; when Prussian troops surrounded Paris that autumn, he, unlike Gounod, who left for England, refused to leave the besieged city. During the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, Bizet judged the city unsafe and left, first for Compiègne and then for Le Vésinet, returning to Paris only after the Commune fell.
The one-act opera "Djamileh" opened at the Opéra-Comique in May 1872, but was poorly staged and weakly sung — during the performance one of the soloists missed 32 bars of music — and closed after 11 performances. That same year, 1872, Bizet wrote incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play "L'Arlésienne"; it premiered in October 1872 at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, and critics judged the music too complex for popular taste. However, the orchestral suite drawn from it, performed under Jules Pasdeloup in November 1872, was received with enthusiasm.
In June 1872 Bizet told his friend Edmond Galabert that he had been commissioned to write three acts for the Opéra-Comique: the libretto was to be written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, and the subject chosen was Prosper Mérimée's novella "Carmen". Bizet started composing the score during the summer of 1873, but the theatre's management doubted that such a risky story suited a house that usually staged wholesome productions, and the work was suspended. It was only in early 1874, when Adolphe de Leuven, the Opéra-Comique's co-director who objected to "Carmen" most strongly, resigned, that the main obstacle to staging it was removed.
Bizet finished the score of "Carmen" in the summer of 1874 and was pleased with the result; the title role was sung by the renowned mezzo-soprano Célestine Galli-Marié. In the autumn of 1874, at rehearsals, the orchestra found part of the score unplayable, the chorus, unused to portraying living people on stage rather than simply standing in line, also grumbled, and the theatre's management kept pressing for the story to be softened; only after the two lead singers threatened to pull out of the show did management finally relent. The premiere of "Carmen" at the Opéra-Comique took place on 3 March 1875 — that same morning it became known that Bizet had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
The opera's reception was unsuccessful: the public received it coolly, and Bizet himself, after the premiere, was convinced the work had failed. He died three months later, never knowing that "Carmen" would become one of the most frequently performed works in the opera repertoire.
For most of his life Bizet suffered periodically from a throat complaint; at the end of May 1875 he went to his country house at Bougival and went swimming in the Seine, and the next day he came down with a high fever and an acute attack of rheumatism. A heart attack followed; he seemed briefly to recover, but on the night of 3 June 1875, his wedding anniversary, a second attack proved fatal — Bizet was 36 years old.
The funeral service was held on 5 June at the church of Sainte-Trinité in Paris, attended by more than four thousand people, including Charles Gounod and Thomas; Bizet was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. That same evening "Carmen" was specially performed at the Opéra-Comique, and the press, which three months earlier had almost unanimously condemned the opera, now called Bizet a master.
Bizet entered music history above all as a composer of operas — from early works that barely stayed on stage in his lifetime ("Don Procopio", "Les pêcheurs de perles", "La jolie fille de Perth", "Djamileh") to "Carmen", which became one of the most frequently performed works in the world's opera repertoire. Besides operas, Bizet wrote music for orchestra — including a Symphony in C written at the age of seventeen, the overture "Patrie", and suites drawn from the music for "L'Arlésienne" — as well as piano pieces, including the cycle "Jeux d'enfants", and songs for voice and piano. He also wrote for solo piano — for instance, the "Chasse fantastique" and the song cycle "Chant du Rhin" — and complete song cycles for voice and piano, among them "Feuilles d'album" and the "Chants des Pyrénées", based on folk tunes. Bizet also wrote sacred music: while in Rome, for the Rodrigues Prize competition, he wrote a Te Deum for soloists, chorus and orchestra, and later an Ave Maria to words by Ch. Grandmougin. Bizet had no time to found a school of his own and left no obvious disciples, but later critics already called him a composer of brilliance and originality whose early death was a significant loss to musical theatre.
The site holds 20 sheet-music editions of Bizet's works — one for each of 20 different pieces. The great majority, 18 editions, are songs for voice and piano; two more are solo piano arrangements: the "Entr'acte" and the "Carmen" prelude. By level, one piece is marked intermediate, five upper intermediate, and fourteen advanced; there are no elementary-level editions on the site.
A first acquaintance with Bizet's sheet music on the site can start with the song "Douce mer" at intermediate level; the next step is a few upper-intermediate pieces: the solo-piano arrangement of the Entr'acte and the songs "Vieille chanson" and "À une Fleur"; for those who have mastered them, the advanced-level solo-piano arrangement of the "Carmen" prelude is a good fit.