Georges Alexandre César Léopold Bizet (1838 - 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.
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 ou...(+)
Georges Alexandre César Léopold Bizet (1838 - 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.
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 Bizet's 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.
Jeux d'enfants ("Children's Games") Op. 22, is a suite
of twelve miniatures composed by Georges Bizet for
piano four hands in 1871. Originally there were ten
numbers, with the seventh and eighth added after the
first group; Trompette et tambour is adapted from a
march at the start of act 5 of his opera Ivan IV. Bizet
sold the work in both piano and orchestra form to
Durand in September 1871 for 600 francs. Bizet's
biographer Winton Dean considers it to be a forerunner
of similar childhood-related works by Debussy, Fauré
and Ravel. He goes to comment that each "evokes a facet
of childhood, but there is not a trace of triviality,
self-consciousness or false sentiment". Harman and
Mellers argue that, with the music Bizet wrote for the
stage production of L'Arlésienne, the Jeux d'Enfants
represents the rediscovery of his true musical nature,
exploring his melodic gifts, while the concentrated
form of short pieces allowed him to discover chromatic
and enharmonic subtleties both "simple and
single-minded", in contrast with the more romantic
nostalgia of Schumann in his childhood pieces. Bizet
orchestrated six of these; in addition to No. 8, Nos.
6, 3, 2, 11, 12 became his Petite Suit.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Bizet)
Although originally composed for Piano Duet (4 Hands),
I created this Interpretation of the "Peti mari, petite
femme" (Playing House) Duo from "Jeux d'enfants"
(Childrens Games Op. 22 No. 11) for Bb Clarinet &
Piano.
