Georges Bizet

In 1837, Adolphe married Aimée Delsarte, against the wishes of her family who considered him a poor prospect; the Delsartes, though impoverished, were a cultured and highly musical family.

Aimée was an accomplished pianist, while her brother François Delsarte was a distinguished singer and teacher who performed at the courts of both Louis Philippe and Napoleon III.

François Delsarte's wife Rosine, a musical prodigy, had been an assistant professor of solfège at the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of 13.

At least one author has suggested that his mother was from a Jewish family but this is not substantiated in any of his official biographies.

Georges, an only child, showed early aptitude for music and quickly picked up the basics of musical notation from his mother, who probably gave him his first piano lessons.

By listening at the door of the room where Adolphe conducted his classes, Georges learned to sing difficult songs accurately from memory and developed an ability to identify and analyse complex chordal structures.

This precocity convinced his ambitious parents that he was ready to begin studying at the Conservatoire even though he was still only nine years old (the minimum entry age was 10).

Georges was interviewed by Joseph Meifred, the horn virtuoso who was a member of the Conservatoire's Committee of Studies.

Meifred was so struck by the boy's demonstration of his skills that he waived the age rule and offered to take him as soon as a place became available.

Georges Bizet (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic era.

Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

Georges Bizet was born in Paris on 25 October 1838.

He was registered as Alexandre César Léopold, but baptised as "Georges" on 16 March 1840, and was known by this name for the rest of his life.

His father, Adolphe Bizet, had been a hairdresser and wigmaker before becoming a singing teacher despite his lack of formal training.

He also composed a few works, including at least one published song.

Bizet was admitted to the Conservatoire on 9 October 1848, two weeks before his 10th birthday.

He made an early impression; within six months he had won first prize in solfège, a feat that impressed Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman, the Conservatoire's former professor of piano.

Bizet's first preserved compositions, two wordless songs for soprano, date from around 1850.

He also met another of Gounod's young students, the 13-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns, who remained a firm friend of Bizet's. Under the tuition of Antoine François Marmontel, the Conservatoire's professor of piano, Bizet's pianism developed rapidly; he won the Conservatoire's second prize for piano in 1851, and first prize the following year.

Bizet would later write to Marmontel: "In your class one learns something besides the piano; one becomes a musician".

Zimmerman gave Bizet private lessons in counterpoint and fugue, which continued until the old man's death in 1853.

Through these classes, Bizet met Zimmerman's son-in-law, the composer Charles Gounod, who became a lasting influence on the young pupil's musical style—although their relationship was often strained in later years.

In 1853, he joined Fromental Halévy's composition class and began to produce works of increasing sophistication and quality.

Two of his songs, "Petite Marguerite" and "La Rose et l'abeille", were published in 1854.

In 1855, he wrote an ambitious overture for a large orchestra, and prepared four-hand piano versions of two of Gounod's works: the opera La nonne sanglante and the Symphony in D. Bizet's work on the Gounod symphony inspired him, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, to write his own symphony, which bore a close resemblance to Gounod's—note for note in some passages.

During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857.

He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public.

Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers.

His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others.

Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned.

Neither of his two operas that reached the stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—were immediately successful.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, during which Bizet served in the National Guard, he had little success with his one-act opera Djamileh, though an orchestral suite derived from his incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne was instantly popular.

The production of his final opera, Carmen, was delayed because of fears that its themes of betrayal and murder would offend audiences.

After its premiere on 3 March 1875, Bizet was convinced that the work was a failure; he died of a heart attack three months later, unaware that it would prove a spectacular and enduring success.

Bizet's marriage to Geneviève Halévy was intermittently happy and produced one son.

After his death, his work, apart from Carmen, was generally neglected.

Manuscripts were given away or lost, and published versions of his works were frequently revised and adapted by other hands.

He founded no school and had no obvious disciples or successors.

After years of neglect, his works began to be performed more frequently in the 20th century.

Later commentators have acclaimed him as a composer of brilliance and originality whose premature death was a significant loss to French musical theatre.