Georges Bizet " Habanera " Opera Carmen' Maria Calas

Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer and pianist of the Romantic era. He is best known for the opera Carmen.
Carmen: Chanson du toréador

Pasquale Amato's 1911 rendition of the Toréador's song from Carmen
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Bizet was born at 28 rue de la Tour d'Auvergne in the 9th arrondissement of Paris in 1838. He was registered with the legal name Alexandre César Léopold Bizet[1], but he was baptised on 16 March 1840 with the first name Georges, and he was always known thereafter as Georges Bizet. His father Adolphe Armand Bizet (1810-86) was an amateur singer and composer, and his mother, Aimée Léopoldine Joséphine née Delsarte (1814-61), was the sister of the famous singing teacher François Delsarte.
He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1848, a fortnight before his tenth birthday. His teachers there were Pierre Zimmerman (fugue and counterpoint; often assisted by Charles Gounod, his son-in-law), Antoine François Marmontel (piano), François Benoist (organ) and, on Zimmerman's death, Fromental Halévy, whose daughter he himself later married.[2] He won first prizes for organ and fugue in 1855 and completed his earliest compositions.[3]
His first symphony, the Symphony in C, was written in November 1855, when he was seventeen, evidently as a student assignment. It was unknown to the world until 1933, when it was discovered in the archives of the Paris Conservatory library.[4] Upon its first performance in 1935, it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. The symphony bears a stylistic resemblance to the first symphony of Charles Gounod [5] first played earlier in the same year, and which Bizet had arranged for two pianos[6] although present-day listeners may discern a similarity to music of Franz Schubert, whose work was little known in France at the time the symphony was written[citation needed].
In 1857, a setting of the one-act operetta Le docteur Miracle won him a share in a prize offered by Jacques Offenbach. He also won the music composition scholarship of the Prix de Rome, the conditions of which required him to study in Rome for three years. There, his talent developed as he wrote such works as the opera buffa Don Procopio (1858-59). There he also composed his only major sacred work, Te Deum (1858), which he submitted to the Prix Rodrigues competition, a contest for Prix de Rome winners only. Bizet failed to win the Prix Rodrigues, and the Te Deum score remained unpublished until 1971. He made two attempts to write another symphony in 1859, but destroyed the manuscripts in December of that year. Apart from this period in Rome, Bizet lived in the Paris area all his life.
Shortly after leaving Rome in July 1860, but while still touring in Italy, he had the idea of writing a symphony in which each of the four movements would be a musical evocation of a different Italian city – Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples. On hearing of his mother's serious illness he cut short his Italian travels and returned to Paris in September 1860; she died a year later.[7] The Scherzo of the symphony was completed by November 1861, but it was not until 1866 that the first version of the whole symphony was written. He subjected it to a number of revisions through to 1871, but died before ever producing what he considered the definitive version. For this reason, the work is sometimes described as "unfinished", but this is an inaccurate description as it was fully scored. It was published in 1880 as the Roma Symphony.
In June 1862 the family maid, Mary Reiter, gave birth to a son, Jean. The boy was brought up to believe that his father was Adolphe Bizet, and that he was Georges's half-brother, but his mother later revealed that his true father was Georges Bizet.[8] His former teacher Halévy died in 1862, leaving his last opera Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but it was not performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death.
He composed the opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers), a drama of love and ritual in Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka) for the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863, which was initially a failure. In 1866 he was contracted to arrange two of Ambroise Thomas's operas for both solo and duo piano.[8] The works of his youth displayed his power of evoking exotic atmosphere such as La jolie fille de Perth (after Walter Scott's novel), which takes place in a romanticized Scotland (premiered also in the Théâtre Lyrique, in 1867), and a symphony titled Roma (1868). Although these operas were not overwhelmingly successful, they established Bizet's reputation as a composer to be reckoned with.
On 3 June 1869 he married Geneviève, the daughter of his late teacher Fromental Halévy. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July of 1870, Bizet joined the French National Guard, as did some other well-known composers. This delayed his progress on several works. The armistice of January 1871 was followed by a civil uprising, which resulted in a two-month period of bloodshed and unrest in Paris. Bizet and his wife fled to Le Vésinet near Paris, to escape the violence.[8] From November 1871 until his death Bizet was a member of the Conservatoire examination committees for composition, counterpoint and fugue, and for piano and harp.
Bizet wrote Jeux d'enfants (Children's games) for piano duet in 1871. The following year (22 May 1872) saw the production of the one-act opéra comique Djamileh, which is often seen as a precursor to Carmen. He wrote incidental music for a play L'Arlésienne by Alphonse Daudet, first performed on 1 October 1872. Bizet derived a L'Arlésienne Suite from the music (first performed 10 November 1872), and Ernest Guiraud later arranged a second suite; both contain considerable rewriting of the original score (many performances of the second suite omit any mention of Guiraud's contribution).[9] His overture Patrie was written in 1873 (it had no connection with Victorien Sardou's play Patrie!).


Tomb of Georges Bizet in Père Lachaise Cemetery
Carmen (1875) is Bizet's best-known work and is based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by Prosper Mérimée. Bizet composed the title role for a mezzo-soprano. It was substantially composed during the summer of 1873, but not finished until the end of 1874, during which time his marriage came under severe strain and he separated from his wife for two months.[8] Carmen premiered on 3 March 1875, and was not initially well-received, although it ran for 37 performances in the next three months, an average of three a week; it was Bizet's greatest success so far. Bizet had put every ounce of his genius into Carmen, and its lukewarm reception was a bitter disappointment. Praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky. Brahms attended over twenty performances of it, and considered it the greatest opera produced in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War. The views of these composers proved to be prophetic, as Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. Carmen contains two of Bizet's most famous songs, the "Habanera" and "The Toreador's Song", which compete for popularity with the tenor-baritone duet "In the depths of the temple" from The Pearl Fishers.
However, Bizet did not live to see Carmen's success. He died from a heart attack at the age of 37 in Bougival (Yvelines), about 10 miles west of Paris. His death occurred on his sixth wedding anniversary, exactly three months after Carmen's first performance. His death came just when he had found his mature style. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Carmen was then immediately dropped by the Opéra-Comique. Yet within three years, it had made its way to Vienna and Brussels, London and New York. Five years later, it returned to Paris, where it was received rapturously and launched on its fabulously successful career. Today it is one of the world's best-loved operas.
His widow Geneviève later had an alliance with Élie-Miriam Delaborde, generally believed to have been the illegitimate son of Charles-Valentin Alkan. However, she married Émile Straus, a banker with Rothschild family connections, and became a noted society hostess. Marcel Proust used her as a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his roman fleuve À la recherche du temps perdu. The Bizets' son Jacques (1872-1922), a writer, had been a school-friend of Proust.
Bizet's music has been used in the twentieth century as the basis for several important ballets. The Soviet-era Carmen Suite (1967), set to music drawn from Carmen arranged by Rodion Shchedrin, gave the Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya one of her signature roles; it was choreographed by Alberto Alonso. In the West the L'Arlesienne of Roland Petit is well-regarded, and the Symphony in C by George Balanchine is considered to be one of the great ballets of the twentieth century. It was first presented as Le Palais de Crystal by the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947, and has been in the repertory there ever since. The ballet has no story; it simply fits the music: each movement of the symphony has its own ballerina, cavalier, and corps de ballet, all of whom dance together in the finale.
Bizet's work as a composer has overshadowed how fine a pianist he was. He could easily have had a career as a concert pianist had he so wished. On 26 May 1861, at a dinner party at the Halévys at which Franz Liszt was present, Bizet gave a faultless performance of an elaborate work of Liszt's, reading at sight from the unpublished manuscript. Liszt proclaimed that Bizet was one of the three finest pianists in Europe. Bizet's pianistic skill was also praised by Hector Berlioz, his teacher Marmontel, and many others.[2]
[edit]List of works

[edit]Dramatic works[10]


A poster for a c. 1896 American production of Carmen, starring Rosabel Morrison
La maison du docteur, opéra comique, 1 act, (H. Boisseaux; composed eitner in 1852 or 1855; unperformed)
Le docteur Miracle, opérette, 1 act, (L. Battu & L. Halévy, after R.B. Sheridan; composed 1856; f.p. Paris, Bouffes-Parisiens, 9 April 1857)
Don Procopio, opéra bouffe, 2 acts, (C. Cambiaggio, after L. Prividali; composed 1858-59; f.p. Monte Carlo, 10 March 1906)
La prêtresse, opérette, 1 act, (P. Gille; composed ca. 1861; unperformed)
La guzla de l'émir, opéra comique, (J. Barbier & M. Carré; composed ca. 1862; unperformed)
Ivan IV, opéra, 5 acts, (F.-H. Leroy & H. Trianon; composed ca. 1862-65; f.p. Württemberg, Mühringen Castle, 1946)
Les pêcheurs de perles, opéra, 3 acts, (E. Cormon & M. Carré; composed 1863; f.p. Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 30 September 1863)
La jolie fille de Perth, opéra, 4 acts, (J.-H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges & J. Adenis, after W. Scott); composed 1866; f.p. Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 26 December 1867)
Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre, opérette, 4 acts, (P. Siraudin & W. Busnach; composed 1867, Act I only, lost; f.p. Paris, Théâtre Athénée, 13 December 1867; the title was taken from the popular song "Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre")
La coupe du roi de Thulé, opéra, 3 acts, (L. Gallet & E. Blau; composed 1868-69, after his death the autograph full score was mutilated by various hands[11] and only fragments remain; f.p. (excerpts) BBC Radio, 12 July 1955)
Clarisse Harlowe, opéra comique, 3 acts, (Gille & A. Jaime, after S. Richardson; composed 1870-71, incomplete; unperformed)
Grisélidis, opéra comique, 1 act, (V. Sardou; composed 1870-71, incomplete; unperformed)
Djamileh, opéra comique, 1 act, (Gallet, after A. de Musset; composed 1871; f.p. Paris, Opéra-Comique (Favart), 22 May 1872)
L'Arlésienne, incidental music, 3 acts (A. Daudet; composed 1872; f.p. Paris, Théâtre Vaudeville, 1 October 1872)
Don Rodrigue, opéra, 5 acts, (Gallet & Blau, after G. de Castro y Bellvis; composed 1872, incomplete draft; unperformed)
Carmen, opéra, 4 acts, (H. Meilhac & L. Halévy, after P. Mérimée; composed 1873-74; f.p. Paris, Opéra-Comique (Favart), 3 March 1875)
[edit]Songs
(words by / year composed)
L’âme triste est pareille au doux ciel (Lamartine)
Petite Marguerite (Rolland, 1854)
La Rose et l’abeille (Rolland, 1854)
La Foi, l’Esperance et la Charité (de Lagrave, 1854))
Vieille chanson (Millevoye, 1865)
Adieux de l'hôtesse arabe (Hugo, 1866)
Apres l’Hiver (Hugo, 1866)
Douce mer (Lamartine, 1866)
Chanson d'avril (Bouilhet, 1866)
Feuilles d'album (1866): À une fleur (de Musset), Adieux à Suzon (de Musset), Sonnet (Ronsard), Guitare (Hugo), Rose d'amour (Millevoye), Le grillon (Lamartine)
Pastorale (Regnard, 1868)
Rêve de la bien-aimée (de Courmont, 1868)
Ma vie a son secret (Arvers, 1868)
Berceuse (Desbordes-Valmore, 1868)
La chanson du fou (Hugo, 1868)
La coccinelle (Hugo, 1868)
La sirène (Mendès, 1868)
Le Doute (Ferrier, 1868)
L’Esprit Saint
Absence (Gautier)
Chant d’amour (Lamartine)
Tarentelle (Pailleron)
Vous ne priez pas (Delevigne)
Le Colibri (Flan, 1868)
Sérénade ‘Oh, quand je dors’ (Hugo)
Vœu (Hugo, 1868)
Voyage, Aubade, La Nuit, Conte, Aimons, rêvons!, La chanson de la rose, Le Gascon, N’oublions pas!, Si vous aimez!, Pastel, l'abandonnée (these songs are from unidentified unfinished dramatic works)
[edit]Works for solo piano
Nocturne in F major
Variation chromatiques de concert (orchestrated by Felix Weingartner in 1933)
Caprice in C# minor
Caprice in C major
Chasse Fantastique
Romance sans paroles in C major
Thème brilliant in C
Valse in C major
Trois Esquisses Musicales
Grande Valse de Concert in E flat
Marine
Nocturne in D major
Chants du Rhin
Four Préludes
Jeux d'enfants (Children's Games) 12 pieces for piano duet.
L'escarpolette (Rêverie), La Toupie (Impromptu), La Poupée (Berceuse), Les Chevaux de bois (Scherzo), Le volant (Fantaisie), Trompette et tambour (Marche), Les Bulles de Savon (Rondino), Les quatre coins (Esquisse), Colin-maillard (Nocturne), Saute-mouton (Caprice), Petit mari, petite femme (Duo), Le Bal (Galop)
[edit]Other works
Overture in A
Symphony in C major, 1855
Symphony in C major "Roma", 1860-71
Petite Suite (five movements orchestrated from Jeux d'Enfants)
Overture Patrie
Ode Symphony Vasco de Gama
Te Deum
He compiled an orchestral suite using some pieces from his incidental music for L'Arlesienne. After his death, Ernest Guiraud put together a second such suite.
[edit]Completions of others' works
Fromental Halévy - Noé, opéra, 3 acts (Saint-Georges; composed 1858-62 and left unfinished at Halévy's death; completed by Bizet; first performance Karlsruhe, 5 April 1885)
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