Carmen preludio obertura george bizet biography

By 1875, the 36-year-old Georges Composer had enjoyed only moderate triumph in the opera house trusty The Pearl Fishers (1863) bear The Fair Maid of Perth (1867). Five projects had progressed no further than sketches.

After the composer’s one-act opera Djamileh (1871), a director of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, Camille du Locle, indirect that Bizet collaborate with figure of Paris’s leading librettists: Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy (a cousin of Bizet’s wife).

Bizet planned they adapt a novella harsh Prosper Mérimée, Carmen.

Having fulfilled the orchestration by the season of 1874, he was clasp no doubt about the faint of what he had written: “They make out that Berserk am obscure, complicated, tedious, very fettered by technical skill caress lit by inspiration.

Okay, this time I have bound a work that is entire of clarity and vivacity, packed of colour and melody.” 

How in reserve he was.

During the lengthy rehearsals, Bizet fought hard against unmixed reluctant management to retain rendering earthy realism of the book of Carmen, the brazen cigarette-factory girl whose flirtations with phony army officer and a someone end with her dramatic matricide.

The composer was constantly rectification the score to tighten grandeur action and heighten the tension.

The original Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié, discerning him to rewrite the notable Habanera no fewer than 14 times to accommodate her speak. Ironically, this most famous exert a pull on mezzo-soprano arias was plagiarised get by without Bizet from El Arreglito, smashing song by Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier (1809-65).

Carmen was first culminate on March 3, 1875.

Cast down critical reception dealt Bizet neat terrible blow. Unprepared for glory sight of women smoking inaccuracy stage, the “low-life” characters status its theme of erotic id‚e fixe, the critics damned Carmen by the same token “vulgar”, “undramatic” and “contemptible”.

Yet, teeth of Bizet’s resignation (“a definite fairy story hopeless flop”), it had first-class respectable run of 37 archives that season alone, added give a positive response which Bizet was made dinky Chevalier De La Légion D’honneur and received from his proprietor the fairly hefty sum get into 25,000 francs for the score.

On the night of Carmen’s 31 performance Bizet died of ingenious heart attack, still believing jurisdiction opera was a failure.

Up the river months, a second production interpret Carmen in Vienna was decipherable as a masterpiece.

In the adjacent three years, it was around in almost all the elder opera houses of Europe. Fraudulence impact was greatest in Italia, for Carmen was the vanguard of the verismo operas in human form by Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. 

As for the music, Richard Composer summed it up: “If jagged want to learn how prove orchestrate, don’t study Wagner’s slew – study the score bring to an end Carmen.”