Bizet was born in Paris, France at 28 rue de la Tour d'Auvergne.
He was registered with the legal name
Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, but was baptized
Georges Bizet and was always known by the latter name. He entered the
Paris Conservatory of Music a
fortnight before his tenth birthday.
His first symphony, the
Symphony in C Major, was written there when he was seventeen, evidently as a student assignment. It seems that Bizet completely forgot about it himself, and it was not discovered again until 1935, in the archives of the Conservatory library. Upon its first performance, it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. A delightful work (and a prodigious one, from a seventeen-year-old boy), the symphony is noteworthy for bearing an amazing stylistic resemblance to the music of
Franz Schubert, whose work was virtually unknown in Paris at that time (with the possible exception of a few of his songs). A second symphony, "Roman" was not completed.
At the Conservatoire Bizet studied under
Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Genéviève he later married. On Halévy's death in 1864 Bizet made a completion of his last, unfinished, opera
Noé, but in the event this was not performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death. Bizet's son by Genéviève, Jacques Bizet, became a school-friend of
Marcel Proust, who used Genéviève (who became a noted society hostess in her second marriage) as a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his roman fleuve
A la recherche du temps perdu.
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
Don Procopio. Apart from this period in Rome, Bizet lived in the
Paris area all his life.
His mother died shortly after his return to Paris. He composed the
opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) for the Theatre-Lyrique in 1863, which was an initial failure. He followed it with
La jolie fille de Perth (1867),and
Jeux d'enfants (
Children's games) for the piano.
The popular
L'arlésienne were originally produced as incidental music for a
play by
Alphonse Daudet, first performed in 1872. He also composed a romantic opera,
Djamileh, which is often seen as a precursor to
Carmen,
1875. This latter opera 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.
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. Their views proved to be prophetic, as
Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. However 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.
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