Georges Bizet died believing Carmen had flopped
Georges Bizet left the premiere of Carmen in March 1875 convinced he had written a failure. Three months later he died of a heart attack at 36. He never learned that the opera would become one of the most performed in the entire repertoire, eclipsing nearly everything else he composed.
Bizet was born in Paris in 1838, registered as Alexandre César Léopold but baptised Georges. His father, a former wigmaker turned singing teacher, held lessons at home, and the boy learned difficult songs by listening at the door. That precocity got him into the Paris Conservatoire two weeks before his tenth birthday, after an examiner waived the minimum age. Within six months he had a first prize in solfège. Private lessons brought him into the orbit of Charles Gounod and a lifelong friendship with the young Camille Saint-Saëns.
At 17 he wrote a symphony so close to one of Gounod's that some passages match note for note. He never published it; it resurfaced only in 1933 and was first performed in 1935. In 1857 he won the Prix de Rome, after members of the Académie overturned the judges' preference for an oboist, and spent time at the Villa Medici, which he called paradise. There he started and dropped a string of projects and, stung when a Te Deum lost a competition with just one other entrant, vowed never to write religious music again.
Back in Paris the leading opera houses favoured established works over newcomers, and he survived largely by arranging other composers' music. The Pearl Fishers and The Fair Maid of Perth made little immediate impression, and the one-act Djamileh fared no better, although his suite from the incidental music for Daudet's L'Arlésienne caught on at once. He served in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War.
Even Carmen's staging was delayed by worries that betrayal and murder would upset audiences. After his death much of his work was neglected, manuscripts were lost or given away, and others revised what survived. Only in the 20th century did performances of his wider output pick up again.
Source: Georges Bizet
