Known for one of the world's most popular operas,
Carmen, Georges Bizet deserves attention as well for
other works of remarkable melodic charm. Many of his
works received cool receptions on their premieres but
are now considered central to the repertory of
classical music.
Bizet was born in Paris on October 25, 1838, and grew
up in a happy, musical family that encouraged his
talents. He learned to read music at the same time he
learned to read letters, and equally well. Entering the
Par...(+)
Known for one of the world's most popular operas,
Carmen, Georges Bizet deserves attention as well for
other works of remarkable melodic charm. Many of his
works received cool receptions on their premieres but
are now considered central to the repertory of
classical music.
Bizet was born in Paris on October 25, 1838, and grew
up in a happy, musical family that encouraged his
talents. He learned to read music at the same time he
learned to read letters, and equally well. Entering the
Paris Conservatory before he was ten, he earned first
prize in solfège within six months, a first prize in
piano in 1852, and eventually, the coveted Prix de Rome
in 1857 for his cantata Clovis et Clotilde. His
teachers had included Marmontel for piano and Halévy
for composition, but the greatest influence on him was
Charles Gounod, of whom Bizet later said "You were the
beginning of my life as an artist." Bizet himself hid
away his Symphony in C, written when he was 17, feeling
it was too much like its models, Gounod's symphonies.
The two years spent in Rome after winning his prize,
would be the only extensive time, and a greatly
impressionable one, that Bizet would spend outside of
Paris in his brief life. When he returned to Paris, he
lost confidence in his natural talents and began to
substitute dry Germanic or academic writing for his own
developing idiom. He composed a one-act opera for
production at the Opéra-Comique, but the theater's
director engaged him to write a full-length opera
instead, Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers).
It was not a success at the time, but despite a few
weaknesses, the work was revived in 1886, and its sheer
beauty has earned it a respected position among the
lesser-played operatic repertory. In 1863 Bizet's
father bought land outside Paris where he built two
bungalows, one of which Bizet frequently used as a
compositional retreat. He began a friendship
(apparently not a physical one) with a neighbor-woman
named Céleste Mogador, a former actress, author,
courtesan, circus rider, and dance-hall girl. She is
said to have been the model for his masterpiece's title
role of Carmen.
Both L'Arlésienne suites are taken from the incidental
music Bizet wrote for Alfred Daudet's play of the same
name, a melodrama about the love of the hero,
Frédéri, for a girl from Arles in Provence, France.
In a little over six weeks, and limited to an orchestra
of 26 players, Bizet produced 27 numbers, some no more
than a few bars long. Taken together, they are an
orchestral tour de force. The orchestra includes a
saxophone in E flat, tambourine, piano, and harmonium,
with the addition of a small chorus. A few passages are
for string quartet alone. The overall effect is of a
fully developed, closely integrated set of movements
that, as concert performances of the original version
have shown, easily stand on their own, and benefit from
being freed from the dialogue that accompanied them in
the play.
In 1879 the Opéra Comique in Paris staged its wildly
successful revival of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.
Public response to Bizet's music ran so strong that
publishers began to clamor for more of his music --
such as could be found, since the composer had died
four years early. Bizet's friend and amanuensis Ernest
Guiraud turned to the task of evaluating what could be
edited for publication of Bizet's surviving
manuscripts. Girard had an intimate knowledge of
Bizet's musical style, and it was he who had already
transformed the few bits of spoken dialogue within
Carmen into neat recitative.
It was quickly apparent to Girard that he had
undertaken no easy task. Bizet had only arrived at his
signature style some six years before his death, and
precious little of Bizet's time had been devoted to the
composition of original works. Much of it had been
taken up with projects designed to pay the bills,
primarily in creating piano/vocal scores of operas by
his more celebrated contemporaries such as Gounod and
Reyer -- works that are forgotten today.
Nonetheless, by 1880 Girard had decided to embark on
constructing a second suite from Bizet's incidental
music for Alphonse Daudet's 1872 play L'Arlesienne as
companion to the composer's own suite. None of the 27
cues that Bizet had written for L'Arlesienne were very
substantial in and of themselves, and Bizet had already
mined most of the good ones himself. Also, the original
work was written for a theater orchestra of less than
30 players. Girard decided to use Bizet's own
L'Arlesienne Suite as a model for how to deal with
enlarging the original orchestration, and as a result
the second L'Arlesienne Suite resembles the first in
terms of instrumental color.
The Pastorale that opens this suite was the most
complete bit of music that Bizet had composed for
L'Arlesienne that he hadn't used in the previous
offering; the rest of the work posed a problem. Girard
solved it by reprising part of the "Minuetto" from the
first suite to flesh out the "Intermezzo" of the
second, dovetailing the too-short "Farandole" into a
reprise of the "Pastorale," and borrowing another
minuet from an unrelated work, Bizet's opera La Jolie
Fille de Perth. Later, Girard further borrowed the
"Intermezzo" he'd created for this suite, added choral
parts, and created the well-known Agnus Dei which bears
Bizet's name. This latter work has to be considered
spurious, considering its origins.
Despite the cut-and-paste method through which the
second L'Arlesienne Suite was put together, it holds up
fairly well to the first, and the two are quite
frequently performed and recorded together. Both
L'Arlesienne Suites constitute a major cornerstone in
middle Romantic French orchestral literature, a field
in which there are many contenders; few have held the
public interest for as long and as well as these two
suites of Bizet and Girard.
PARTITION