Artists

Bizet, Georges

image of Bizet, Georges The Creator of the Opera"Carmen"

Georges Bizet (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer and pianist of the Romantic era. He is best known for the opera Carmen.His father was an amateur singer and composer, and his mother was the sister of the famous singing teacher François Delsarte. He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1848, a fortnight before his tenth birthday.
His first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, was written in November 1855, when he was just seventeen, evidently as a student assignment. It was unknown to the world until 1933, when it was discovered in the archives of the Paris Conservatory library.[2] Upon its first performance in 1935, it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. The symphony is noteworthy for bearing an amazing stylistic resemblance to the first symphony of Charles Gounod [3] first played earlier in the same year, and which Bizet had arranged for two pianos[4] although present-day listeners may discern a similarity to music of Franz Schubert, whose work was little known in France at the time the symphony was written.
At the Conservatoire Bizet studied under Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Geneviève he married in 1869. Halévy died in 1862, leaving his last opera Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but it was not performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death.Carmen (1875) 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 Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky.