Georges Bizet: The Fair Maid of Perth
He was a man who might have made a career writing light operetta. He could play the piano as well as Franz Liszt. He wrote a remarkably accomplished symphony aged just 17. But Georges Bizet could also be strangely diffident about his talent and conceal it like a guilty vice.
He was one of the most naturally gifted musicians who ever lived, a fact he possibly never fully accepted. In his early years he was a child prodigy accustomed to endless praise and academic prizes. As an adult he was an anxious over-thinker, drifting on uncertain ideological currents and struggling to find his way. He began and abandoned countless operatic projects. He turned out smaller scale works that did little justice to his abilities. Then at the age of 36 he wrote one of the greatest operas in history and died shortly afterwards, believing his masterpiece to have been a complete failure.
In all, it would be easy to cast Bizet as a tragic figure. And yet his life story – of a prodigious creative intellect gradually finding its way towards the light – is ultimately fascinating and even uplifting.
To begin with, it all came so naturally to him. Growing up in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris, he received every encouragement from his parents, Adolphe and Aimée, both of whom were professional musicians and very keen for their only child to follow suit.
Aside from taking piano lessons from his mother, young Georges would listen at the door to his father’s singing lessons and quickly develop an uncanny ability to sing back complex melodies from memory. Adolphe and Aimée also noted, with approval, their son’s ability to grasp advanced chord structures from an early age. Before he was even ten years old, Georges had been packed off to the Paris Conservatoire, becoming one of their youngest ever students.
He was fully prepared for anything the institute could throw at him, and for the next decade his life was golden. Apparently effortlessly, he worked his way up through his various classes, winning prize after prize, firstly for his efforts in solfège, then for his piano playing and finally for his compositions, the latter via the prestigious Prix de Rome, which he secured at the age of 19 with his short cantata Clovis et Clotilde.
The Rome prize not only provided Bizet with a small income for the next five years, but gave him the opportunity to live in the Italian capital for the next three. There he resided in the Villa Medici (a “paradise”), while taking full advantage of his new, convivial surroundings to expand his artistic horizons in any way he could.
A voracious reader since childhood, Bizet explored the art galleries and museums of Rome, becoming a scholarly expert on each. He noticed, as never before, the way in which all the arts were intrinsically interconnected, a useful revelation for a budding opera composer. He also found his senses “enthralled” by Italian music – “facile, idle, amorous, lascivious and passionate all at once”, he noted. “By conviction, I am German… but I sometimes get lost in houses of musical ill fame. And I confess to you, I love it when I do!” As for his own personal progress, “I am beginning to think of myself as an artist, but what howlers, what failures!”
His only “homework” in Rome was to composer something for the Prix de Rome committee once a year. But after a decade of strict conservatoire rules, a touch of subversion was stirring in the young composer. When asked to provide a religious work as his first end-of-year composition, he submitted a high-spirited comic opera instead (roughly modelled on Donizetti’s Don Pasquale) entitled Don Procopio. The committee gave their cheeky prize-winner only the mildest of tickings off, while warmly commending his new work for its “light and brilliant touch” and “youthful, audacious style”.
But Don Procopio may also have the been the first sign of a waywardness that would dog Bizet in his early adulthood. He completed just one further work in Rome, a choral symphonic poem entitled Vasco da Gama. Otherwise he was relatively unproductive, while a number of abandoned projects began to pile up on his desk. During his time in Italy these included at least five operas, two symphonies, a symphonic ode and a secular mass. It was a worrying trend that would continue with his operatic attempts. Indeed it is now thought that over his lifetime Bizet made a start on at least thirty operas and completed just six of them.
It’s also notable that the best thing Bizet composed during these early years, a Symphony in C Major (which many now regard as the most accomplished symphony ever written by a teenager), he largely suppressed. The best he could do was occasionally borrow passages from the work for use in one of his operas. The Symphony would remain unknown for decades after his death, only becoming a standard part of the concert hall repertoire from the 1930s onwards.
Bizet’s tendency to paralyse himself as a composer would only become more marked after he had returned to Paris and found himself having to earn a living for the first time. Like most child prodigies, he did not find the transition into adult life altogether easy. The twenty-something Bizet could be haughty and quarrelsome, even if a lively sense of humour and the ability to laugh at himself were never too far away. More disarming still was his sweet tooth – he was “constantly nibbling on sweets, cakes, chocolate, and petits four” according to music historian Harold C Schonberg. Offering Bizet a delicious pastry was often seen as an effective way to placate him after a disagreement.
He had by now worked out that he wanted to be an opera composer, having confessed to his old conservatoire friend, Camille Saint-Saëns, “I am not made for the symphony. I need the theatre – without it I don’t exist.” But he felt increasingly out of step with the prevailing fashions in Paris, then in the grip of the Second Empire, Napoleon III and the light operettas of Jacques Offenbach. Many at the time felt that the French capital had surrendered to a certain cultural decadence.
The irony was that if Bizet had decided he wanted to be Jacques Offenbach 2.0, he could probably have done so quite easily. He had already shown a flair for light operetta in his teens, having won a competition organized by Offenbach himself. Bizet’s own submission, a one act satire entitled Le Docteur Miracle, had run for eleven performances in Offenbach’s Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. But soon after Bizet had decided the genre was not for him. And nor did he feel inspired to write “Grand” Parisian operas in the now well-worn chivalric/romantic style. That felt too artificial for him. Stirring within him was a desire for something altogether grittier and closer to real life.
It would however take Bizet many years to fully realise his vision. In the meantime, he floundered, burdened by the sky-high expectations of his youth, while struggling to clarify the ambitious ideas in his creative imagination. He would later paint a self-mocking picture of himself during this period, of having been widely perceived as “obscure, complicated, tedious, more fettered by technical skill than lit by inspiration.”
Aside from writing operas, he also had to find a venue in Paris that would accept them. The two main, state-funded opera houses, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, were by their nature conservative, and pretty much off limits to progressive young composers. The only other possibility for Bizet was the Théâtre Lyrique, which tended to be more enterprising with its productions (they had recently staged the premieres of both Charles Gounod’s Faust and Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens), while also constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
It was the Lyrique who would commission Bizet’s only two major works of the 1860s: his operas Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers, 1863) and La Jolie Fille de Perth (The Fair Maid of Perth, 1867). Despite containing a now famous “friendship” duet (Au Fond du Temple Saint), Les Pêcheurs was neither a success with audiences nor critics (“there were neither fishermen in the libretto nor pearls in the music,” grumbled one), and ran to just eighteen performances. One of the very few to publicly praise it was the ever-insightful Berlioz, who stated that it “does M. Bizet the greatest honour.” Actually the librettists, Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré, were pretty impressed with it too and remarked, “if we had known Bizet would write such beautiful music, we would have written a better libretto!”
La Jolie Fille de Perth, produced four years after Les Pêcheurs, is frequently overlooked and underrated in the Bizet canon. And yet it was the biggest critical success of his lifetime. Although it also ran to just eighteen performances, this was much more down to the theatre running out of money than its general reception.
The opera’s storyline is a somewhat dumbed down retelling of a Walter Scott novel (with the same title), and indeed one can imagine Scott turning in his grave had he seen what the librettists, Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jules Adenis, would do to his work. In place of a sweeping, stately narrative is something altogether more pantomimish – one of Bizet’s biographers has suggested it was the worst libretto he ever set to music. And yet the story itself – a romantic melodrama set on Valentine’s Day in the Scottish town of Perth – contains some darker undercurrents, and not least with its theme of toxic jealousy, a concept Bizet would further explore in his later opera Carmen. And as with Carmen, La Jolie Fille also features a seductive gypsy woman (not present in the original novel), although on this occasion she is a much more benign figure.
Bizet’s music, an advance on anything he had previously achieved, shows great versality in capturing the shifting moods of the plotline, as it alternates exuberant, high spirited comedy with moments of great emotional tension. There are ingenious and wonderfully effective set pieces, some beautiful, aching melodies, and plenty of emotional weight from the orchestra for the more dramatic sections. Bizet also shows a genuine comic touch with his evocation of a blacksmith’s workshop in the first act, and its various clanging anvils (suggested by repeated percussive chords in the orchestra).
Although the music’s overall lightness of touch and fleet-footed energy appears to put La Jolie Fille firmly in the tradition of Mozart and Rossini, it does owe something to Wagner too, not least through its hyper-expressive orchestration and bold, cutting edge harmonies. One critic noticed as much at the time, having suggested that “Richard Wagner must be [Bizet’s] favourite master, and we congratulate him on it.”
Bizet would always show signs of irritation at being compared to Wagner, but in truth his musical relationship with the great man was complex. Having dismissed Wagner’s operas in his youth as “eccentric”, he had undergone something of a conversion after hearing a stirring performance of Tannhäuser in 1861. Rather than ignore such magisterial music, Bizet felt he should try to learn from it. In the end he would take from Wagner what he felt he should take, while ignoring the rest, and it is to Bizet’s eternal credit that his mature operas never sound like Wagner, even if they do contain Wagnerian elements. “Of course, if I thought I was imitating Wagner, despite my admiration, I would not write a single note in my life”, Bizet insisted in 1871.
Despite its relatively short run, the critics were generally impressed by La Fille Jolie, with one singling out its second act in particular as “a masterpiece from beginning to end”. The opera seemed to be putting Bizet on the right track, even as he still had plenty of problems to contend with, and not least that neither of his Théâtre Lyrique operas had offered him much in the way of financial recompense.
He still had to largely support himself through other means. Tellingly, he never held a steady job, preferring to remain freelance. But this could be a drudge, as he alternated teaching piano, working as an accompanist, and making up countless arrangements of other peoples’ music. He even flirted with being a music critic (for La Revue Nationale et Étrangèreat), styling himself “Gaston de Betzi”, but this soon petered out after a disagreement with La Revue‘s editor.
There was one other means by which Bizet could have earned a lot of money, if he’d so chosen – and that was by becoming a concert pianist. And yet, exceptional a performer though he was, it was a skill he kept largely to himself. He only showed it off to the world on the rarest of occasions, one being at a dinner party at which Franz Liszt was present. After Bizet had left everyone almost speechless with a superb off-the-cuff rendition of one of Liszt’s most difficult piano works, Liszt had finally said in response, “I thought there were only two men able to surmount the difficulties … there are three, and … the youngest is perhaps the boldest and most brilliant.” But even as “the boldest and most brilliant” of Liszt’s interpreters, a career as a concert virtuoso just never appealed to Bizet.
In time, the young man began to find himself and his artistic identity. One turning point may have been his marriage in 1869 to Marie-Geneviève Raphaëlle Halévy (known as Geneviève)* the daughter of former opera composer, Fromental Halévy, a man who had taught composition to Bizet at the conservatoire. The union would prove to be a mostly happy one (“I have met an adorable girl whom I love!” Bizet gushed to everyone), with the new husband even forging a close relationship with his mother-in-law Léonie. Bizet would write the latter some of his most thoughtful letters, in which he discussed musical aesthetics and his own artistic views.
*Geneviève would outlive her husband by more than a half a century. A later friend of novelist Marcel Proust, she would serve as the model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
In all, married life appeared to give Bizet a new stability. Having composed some incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne, and watched the production bomb at the theatre*, Bizet had had the good sense to arrange his music into an orchestral suite, which then proved to be an immediate hit in the concert hall. After Carmen, the L’Arlésienne Suite no 1 would become his best-known work*.
*Bizet’s friend Ernest Guiraud would make up a Second Suite from the incidental music four years after Bizet’s death.
By the time Bizet had been asked to write a major new work for the Opéra-Comique in 1873, he probably felt that life was on the way up: the Opéra-Comique, no less! He told a friend that he had finally “found his path”. As for the subject matter, that was up for negotiation between Bizet, the librettists and the theatre management, but it was the composer who came up with the idea of adapting a novella by French romantic writer, Prosper Mérimée, entitled Carmen. The latter, set in southern Spain, was the tragic tale of a soldier’s obsessive passion for a fickle, free-spirited gypsy woman named Carmen, and how it leads him to commit a brutal murder.
Having somehow persuaded the theatre to present this far from cosy story at a normally family-friendly venue, Bizet settled down to write the score. His spirits positively soared as he found himself composing with a newfound confidence: “this time I have written a work that is full of clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody”, he told friends. He was not wrong. From its sparkling Prélude (perhaps the most famous operatic overture in the repertoire), Bizet’s music fizzes with passion, vivid Mediterranean colour, and catchy melodies. It captures the flamboyant, sensual dance rhythms of Spanish music, as well as containing the world’s most famous Habanera along with the equally famous Toreador Song, both of which have become staples of modern popular culture.
Aside from its vibrant colours, the music also highlights the darker undercurrents of the plot, with menacing orchestral surges suggesting the murderously jealous torments of Don José the soldier, while Carmen herself and her dangerous, captivating allure is illuminated by seductive, chromatic melodies.
Bizet had no doubts over the quality of his new work – he knew that it was his masterpiece. But when the opera was unveiled at the Comique theatre in March 1875, it floundered badly. While the critics found its ambitiously “Wagnerian” score intimidating, the audiences were shocked by the opera’s violent and seemingly immoral plot, as well as its unscrupulous characters. Carmen herself was damned by critics as an “immoral seductress” and “the very incarnation of vice”.
The performances of Carmen struggled on against this initial critical barrage, often playing to half-empty houses. Its embattled composer could only look on with increasing horror as his masterwork was reduced to “a definite and hopeless flop.”
He had not been in the best of health in recent years – a reflection of chronic overwork, an anxious temperament, and not always taking the best care of himself (aside from his fondness for cakes he was also a heavy smoker). For many years he had been dogged with a recurrent throat problem, and it now became so bad that he was forced to retreat to his family’s country house in Bougival, just outside Paris.
Bizet’s health, as it turned out, was in far deadlier trouble than even he realised. After taking a swim in the River Seine, his illness suddenly intensified, with a high fever and intense pain leading to two heart attacks, the second of which ended his life on June 3rd. Although the exact cause of his death may never be fully known, at the time it was attributed to “a cardiac complication of acute articular rheumatism”.
Had the poor composer lived just a little longer, he would have seen his “definite and hopeless flop” transform, almost miraculously, into a worldwide sensation. While the initial Paris run of Carmen ended after 37 performances, it was a subsequent production in Vienna a few months later that really saw it take off, with the work now being hailed as a masterwork.
When Tchaikovsky heard a performance in Paris a year later, he was bowled over. “Carmen is a masterpiece in every sense of the word”, he enthused, “one of those rare creations which expresses the efforts of a whole musical epoch.” He predicted that it “would become the most popular opera in the world” over the next decade.
Bizet would have been dumbfounded by Tchaikovsky’s prescience, as Carmen’ did indeed spread far and wide across the globe, with productions being laid on in just about every European country, and then further afield to Russia, the US, Mexico, Argentina and Australia – and all within five years of its Paris premiere.
But it wasn’t just Carmen’s popularity that would have amazed Bizet – there was also the high praise it attracted from several musical heavyweights of the late nineteenth century. The doyen of opera composers, Richard Wagner, a man who generally disliked praising others, would say of Bizet: “here at last is somebody with ideas in his head.” Johannes Brahms, who saw the opera no less than twenty times, publicly declared that he would walk to the ends of the earth just to embrace the work’s creator. And Richard Strauss, widely regarded today as a master orchestrator, advised young composers to learn orchestration not from Wagner’s operas but from Bizet’s.
One can only wonder what the shy, diffident Georges Bizet would have made of it all. “Composers are the pariahs and the martyrs of modern society”, he once remarked ruefully, while music itself was a “splendid art, but a dreary profession.” The best advice he could give himself and others in his shoes, was to “wait in patience”, and above all, to never lose hope.
A complete performance of The Fair Maid of Perth (with English subtitles) can be found here.
You can find the same for Carmen here.