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Updated: June 17, 2025
If Bizet has idealized the heroine of Prosper-Merimée's crude but strong little story, Sadie Cordova idealized in her turn the orthodox tempestuous, unhappy Carmen of the modern stage.
A publisher of music, Georges Hartmann, feeling the forces that were drawing together in French art, gathered about him the greater part of the talented men of the young school Franck, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Delibes, Lalo, A. de Castillon, Th. Dubois, Guiraud, Godard, Paladilhe, and Joncières and undertook to produce their works in public.
His wife, he said, was "marvellously well," and a happy result was expected and achieved, for in 1874 he sends Lacombe the greetings "des Bizet, père, mère, et enfant." He began an oratorio with the suggestive name of "Sainte Geneviève," which his death interrupted.
Schumann's seductiveness also left its mark upon him, and he has felt the influence of Gounod, Bizet, and Wagner. But a stronger influence was that of Berlioz, his friend and master, and, above all, that of Liszt. We must stop at this last name.
All the white-clad, ghostly spirits turn out to be clothes on the line. I suppose there's some equally natural explanation about your way on the piano the clear, limpid phrasing of that Bach the other day, and then the color of the Bizet afterwards.
Not that Debussy's art entirely represents French genius any more than Racine's does; for there is quite another side to it which is not represented there; and that side is heroic action, the intoxication of reason and laughter, the passion for light, the France of Rabelais, Molière, Diderot, and in music, we will say for want of better names the France of Berlioz and Bizet.
Three months after "Carmen's" first equivocal success, Bizet was dead, not of a broken heart, as legend tells, but of heart-disease. Six years before he had married Geneviève, the daughter of his teacher, the composer Halévy. In his letters to Lacombe he frequently mentions her, saying in May, 1872: "J'attends un baby dans deux ou trois semaines."
Georges Bizet was born at Paris, Oct. 25, 1838, and in an artistic atmosphere, as his father, an excellent teacher, was married to a sister of Mme. Delsarte, a talented pianist, and his uncle, a musician, was the founder of the famous Delsarte system. He studied successively with Marmontel and Benoist, and subsequently took lessons in composition from Halevy, whose daughter he afterwards married.
He had married Adele Élise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him three children, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter, married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father's disease at twenty. Bizet, like Hérold, died soon after his masterpiece was done.
Bizet played the piano admirably, but he never dared to play in public for fear of making his position worse. I suggested to Carvalho that I write a Macbeth for Madame Viardot. Naturally enough he preferred to put on Verdi's Macbeth. It was an utter failure and cost him thirty thousand francs. They tried to interest a certain princess, a patron of the arts, in my behalf.
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