Hartford Symphony Orchestra - Beethoven’s Violin Concerto - Georges Bizet (Born October 25, 1838 in Paris Died June 3, 1875 in Bougival, near Paris)

Georges Bizet (Born October 25, 1838 in Paris Died June 3, 1875 in Bougival, near Paris)

Symphony No. 1 in C major (1855)

World Premiere: February 26, 1935
Last HSO Performance: May 9, 1973
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Duration: 27 minutes

Georges Bizet lived for only three dozen years, and each of those dozens marked an important phase of his short life. During the first twelve years, only little time was devoted to the usual activities of childhood, since Georges, the offspring of two talented musicians, was breathtakingly precocious in musical matters. He was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine and was winning prizes there within a year. He produced his earliest known works, two vocalises for soprano, at twelve.

The second dozen years of Bizet’s life were the happiest he was to know. He studied at the Conservatoire until he was nineteen, garnering awards for piano, organ, fugue and solfeggio, and composing a va¬riety of works, one of which was a prize-winning operetta in a competition sponsored by Jacques Offenbach. At nineteen, he won the Prix de Rome, which supplied him with a five-year stipend, a residency in Italy and France, and the opportunity to devote himself to composition. He did complete several works during this time, but he projected far more that came to nothing. Despite developing a throat ailment that plagued him all his life, Bizet was active enough during these years to establish a modest reputation as a composer and an excellent one as a pianist. The years of planning, composing and travel came to an end when his prize stipend expired. At the age of 24 he was faced with the perplexing reality of providing his own living.

After 1863, Bizet gave much of his time to all manner of musical hackwork: private teacher, rehearsal accompanist, music critic, but mostly to transcribing the popular pieces of the day for a variety of instruments. “It is maddening to interrupt the work I love for two days in order to write cornet solos. Still, one must live!” he lamented. He continued to plan many works for both opera house and concert hall, but had to abandon most of those because of lack of time. From these later years date the works for which he is mainly remembered: The Pearl Fishers, Jeux d’enfants, the incidental music to L’Arlésienne and Carmen. None of these pieces provided him the success he worked so hard to achieve, however, and he lived in a state of continual frustration that Winton Dean described as “settled melancholy.” “We often sensed tears in his voice,” a friend wrote. Bizet died before he knew that Carmen would make his name famous around the world.

Bizet’s Symphony in C, written in his seventeenth year, is a marvel of early musical maturation that rivals the precocity of Mozart and Mendelssohn. It is a work in which the composer exhibited his careful study of, among others, Haydn, Rossini and Gounod (Gounod was Bizet’s counterpoint teacher whose own First Symphony appeared only a year earlier), and vitalized it with his own ebullient, youthful spirit and characteristic touches of melody, harmony and orchestration. Curiously, the work seems not to have been performed during Bizet’s lifetime. The manuscript became part of his estate after his death and passed into the possession of his wife, who did not fully appreciate her husband’s genius. She bequeathed it to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, and he to the Paris Conservatoire Library, where it gathered dust until Bizet’s first English biographer, D.C. Parker, unearthed it in 1933. It was finally premiered on February 26, 1935 in Basle, Switzerland by Felix Weingartner.

The Symphony in C opens with a movement in traditional sonata-allegro form, with a bubbling main theme outlining chordal patterns and a contrasting legato second theme, introduced by the oboe, in longer notes. The slow second movement contains a haunting, bittersweet serenade for oboe followed by a soaring melody for strings. The movement is rounded out by the return of the oboe theme. The concluding two movements are a sprightly scherzo with a rustic trio, and a vivacious finale, cast, like the first movement, in sonata form.