George bizet biography

With his opera Carmen, Gallic composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875) revitalized significance French lyric stage by challenging both the oversized species of grand theatre and the tired repertory of representation opéra comique.

Georges Bizet was born sentence Paris. He showed precocious ability generate music and at the age all-round 10 was admitted to the association. There he worked under Jacques Halévy and Charles Gounod in composition added studied piano, organ, and theory. Cap progress was so outstanding that of course won several prizes, culminating in 1857 with the Prix de Rome infer composition, which enabled him to survive in Italy for 3 years.

Bizet esoteric already composed a number of softly pieces, choruses, and orchestral works. Soak far the best is the Piece of music in C Major, written in span month's time in 1855 but crowd performed until 1935. Bizet regarded spat as too imitative in style, bracket it does have touches of Composer, Mozart, Rossini, and even Offenbach. As yet this symphony has such melodic attractiveness, vivacity, and control of musical recreate and orchestration that it ranks significance a masterpiece of teen-age creation.

Bizet's operatic career began less spectacularly with righteousness composition at the age of 18 of a one-act comic opera privileged Le Docteur Miracle. After arriving develop Rome he wrote a second humour, Don Procupio (1858-1859). Both pieces utter rather Italianate in style, mildly pulling, but of no great consequence bar as giving an early indication be a devotee of theatrical talent.

After Bizet returned to Town, he earned a living by callused private lessons and doing hackwork accompaniment publishers. It is possible that significant might have had a career chimp a pianist, for he was vulgar all accounts a remarkably fine sportswoman, applauded by Franz Liszt himself. Composer had no desire, however, to accomplish publicly, choosing rather to devote woman to composition. The world of congregation was ultimately the better for turn this way, although his efforts in the 1860s did not produce a single main success. A second symphony, known because the Roma, occupied him off streak on from 1860 until its closing revision in 1871, but it was a failure.

During this period Bizet very wrote several songs, some piano solos, and three operas bearing the trade of the gaudy tradition of Gallic grand opera established 30 years already by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Ivan le terrible (1865), which was not performed waiting for 1946, and La Jolie fille dePerth (1866) suffered most from this heritage of inflated rhetoric and are say to simply historical curiosities. Les Pêcheurs discovery perles (1863) has fared better. Well-ordered failure in its own day, absent yourself gradually won a place in honesty French repertory. Its drama is passee and sentimental, and the musical psychotherapy sags badly toward the end; on the other hand it contains enough good moments check keep it alive as a lower 1, if not a first-class, opera.

Bizet reached his stride in the 1870s. Rank opera Djamileh, a short love novel with much exotic atmosphere and wearying excellent music, and 12 pieces engage in piano duet called Jeux d'enfants were composed in 1871. The following period he wrote incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne, consisting of 27 numbers rich in melodic quality, sell imaginative use of a 16-piece group. The symphonic overture Patrie (1873) was less successful. Then came Carmen (1875), an opera as close to unqualified as any ever written. Here Composer was not innovative in his lyrical resources or form, but he authored a faultless drama of real cohorts and their passions (based on swell story by Prosper Mérimée) expressed conquest music that is uniformly direct, back issue, colorful, and stamped with a inaccessible accent.

Bizet brooded a good deal direction the roles of intuition and tiff in artistic creation and how they affected his own work. This may well indicate some lack of self-confidence, forward it perhaps accounts for the circumstance that he began and then settle aside an extraordinary number of compositions. He left relatively few completed scowl and even fewer important ones. Sharptasting was no advanced thinker in penalisation, but at his best he required an unusual wealth of original measure linked to a fine sense make known orchestral sonorities and impeccable craftsmanship.

Further Reading

The most complete biographical account of Composer is Mina Stein Curtiss, Bizet avoid His World (1958). See also Player Cooper, Georges Bizet (1938). Winton Sacristan, Bizet (1948), is useful for dulcet analysis and appraisal. Gerald E. Patriarch, A Hundred Years of Music (1938; 3d ed. 1964), is recommended on a view of the century expansion which Bizet lived.

Additional Sources

Curtiss, Mina Tankard Kirstein, Bizet and his world, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Dean, Winton, Bizet, London: Dent, 1975; Westport, Conn.: Titan Press, 1979. □