Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet was born in Paris in 1838. His father taught singing, and his mother was a pianist. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at nine, a year before the usual age, and he won prize after prize there. One of his teachers was Charles Gounod, twenty years older, who became a friend for life. Bizet later wrote to him, "You are the cause, I am the consequence." At 17 he wrote a symphony, and then he put it away. Nobody heard it for 80 years. It was found in a library in the 1930s, long after his death, and today it is one of his best-loved works. At 19 he won the Prix de Rome, the top prize in France for young composers. The prize paid for three years of study in Rome.

Back in Paris, one evening in 1861, he met Liszt at a friend's house. Liszt, then 49, played one of his own new pieces and said that only two pianists in Europe could play it. Bizet, 22, sat down and played it back from memory. It is said that Liszt told him, "I was wrong. There are three of us, and the youngest is the most brilliant." For years he earned his living by arranging other composers' music for the piano. His own operas had little success. In 1869, at 30, he married Geneviève, the daughter of one of his old teachers at the Conservatoire.

Six years later, on 3 March 1875, his opera Carmen opened at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The audience was shocked. The heroine smoked, and she took lovers and left them as she liked. In the end a man she had left killed her out of jealousy, on the stage. Most of the critics attacked the opera. Bizet believed that Carmen had failed. Three months later, on the night of its 33rd performance, he died at Bougival near Paris. He was only 36. He never knew what came next. Within a few years Carmen was a huge success in Vienna, and then all over the world. Tchaikovsky called it a masterpiece. He predicted that within ten years it would be the most popular opera in the world. Brahms went to see it again and again, some twenty times in all. Today Carmen is one of the most performed operas in the world. Its tunes, like the "Habanera" and the "Toreador Song," are known even to people who have never seen an opera.