Georges Bizet

People know French composer Alexandre César Léopold Bizet as Georges for his opera

Carmen

in 1875.

This musical prodigy entered the Paris conservatoire at nine years of age in 1847. Over the next decade, Bizet won virtually every available prize, including the Prix de Rome. Bizet refused a career as a concert pianist. He wrote thirty not particularly successful operas until one, based on book of Prosper Mérimée about a Spanish gypsy girl. The audience ably understood this controversial humble subject matter and passionate sweep of the libretto, scandalously written in French for the fact. After a brief run, criticism and a lukewarm reception closed the praised play. Thus dejected, he suffered from ill health, three months later, died of a heart attack at the age of 36 years, and never knew his best-loved and most produced opera in history. Bizet also wrote "Jeux d'Enfants," 12 charming piano duets. Bizet was a rationalist. Academy asked him a young man, struggling with his religious and philosophical views, to write a Mass. Preferring to write a comedy, he replied: "I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste."

Music critic Harold C. Schonberg surmises that had Bizet lived, he might have revolutionised French opera.

Macdonald writes that Bizet's legacy is limited by the shortness of his life and by the false starts and lack of focus that persisted until his final five years. "The spectacle of great works unwritten either because Bizet had other distractions, or because no one asked him to write them, or because of his premature death, is infinitely dispiriting, yet the brilliance and the individuality of his best music is unmistakable. It has greatly enriched a period of French music already rich in composers of talent and distinction". D. 1875.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_...

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Bize...

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://www.classiccat.net/bizet_g/bio...

http://www.last.fm/music/Georges+Bizet

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/educati...