Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) first work was a symphony,
written when he was 17 and immediately popular. But he
is far better known for his operas, particularly
Carmen. Carmen was not initially well-received but
praise for it eventually came from well-known
contemporaries including Claude Debussy, Camille
Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Bizet did not live
to see its success, as he died from angina at the age
of 36 a few months after its first few performances, on
his third wedding anniversary....(+)
Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) first work was a symphony,
written when he was 17 and immediately popular. But he
is far better known for his operas, particularly
Carmen. Carmen was not initially well-received but
praise for it eventually came from well-known
contemporaries including Claude Debussy, Camille
Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Bizet did not live
to see its success, as he died from angina at the age
of 36 a few months after its first few performances, on
his third wedding anniversary. He was buried in the
Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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 republican political sympathies are covertly
emphasized by his decision to lavish his musical powers
on a lyric by the most famous exile from the corrupt
France of Napoléon III. It is without question the
composer’s greatest song. The piano’s seductively
writhing ostinato cradles a vocal line which swoons and
sways on the desert sands in the most sultry fashion.
Despite the fact that it is set in French-speaking
North Africa, this is perhaps the most effective of all
the ‘oriental’ evocations in the mélodie
repertoire, Ravel’s orchestra-accompanied
Shéhérazade excepted. It abandons the rigid strophic
form of the stultifying and unvarying couplet
tradition, and the composer’s utter originality seems
to have been genuinely inspired by the words – like
the young Schubert led to higher expression by Goethe.
The song contains the louche sexual promise of the
colonies set against a background of monotonous heat
and lassitude. The lower pedal (also typical of Gounod)
enables the vocal line to undulate mesmerically, as if
we were watching (or hearing) a slow belly dance. A
composer as different as Francis Poulenc expressed his
admiration for this Arab hostess in his Journal de mes
mélodies: Bizet ‘knew how to vary a strophic song in
detail. That is often what is missing in Gounod’.
Certainly the older composer never dared to compose a
piece so explicitly sexual, for we sense that there is
nothing that this girl would not do in order to keep
the young Frenchman; indeed, we are musically invited
to imagine the sensual implications of the girl’s
pleading. It also emphasizes Winton Dean’s
observation that Bizet was not at his best with
conventional love music but always more inspired by
what might be termed the ‘forbidden’, or the
unusual, in relationships between men and women.
(Carmen is the ultimate case in point, and Dean also
tells us that Bizet had a great enthusiasm for
prostitutes.) Although the composer ruthlessly cut four
of Hugo’s strophes, and adapted some of the
remainder, we have here a hauntingly hypnotic
masterpiece, a true collaboration between a great poet
and a great musician despite the fact they never met.
The direction on the last page which instructs the
singer to use a voice ‘broken by sobs’ gives us a
glimpse of the musical manners of another epoch,
impossible to reproduce in our own without raising an
eyebrow, or even a laugh.
I created this transcription for Oboe and Strings (2
Violins, Viola & Cello) from an arrangement by Jenne
Van Antwerpen for Oboe & Piano.
SHEET MUSIC