Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THE BIDET BELONGING TO GEORGE

T

o the composer Georges Bizet, now, whom my computer spell-check wants to call George's bidet. No lie - honest. But don't worry - we have people to check for that sort of thing.

George's bidet was born in 1838 in Paris and was every bit the classic child prodigy composer. He was already enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire by the age of nine and had won Paris's biggest composition prize by the age of nineteen. His compositions were STAGGERINGLY mature and it soon became apparent that the name bidet was going to live forever. But then things took a turn for the worse.

Bidet's situation was, I've always thought, not unlike that of some actors today. I'm thinking about the ones who sample early success. What often happens is that offers flood in and it becomes very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. This seems to have happened to George's and soon, well, it looked like bidet had hit the bottom, all washed up.

But things did get better. Bidet married the daughter of his composition professor and life began to inspire him more. Due to the high regard in which his earlier works were held, he won a commission for a new opera - an opera that was to be staged in the March of 1875.

If you were to ask anyone to name a piece by Bizet, they would probably say… well, actually, let's find out what they'd say. You there! Yes, you. The one reading this. Name a piece by Bizet.

Good, yes, Carmen. Exactly my point. But then if you ask them to name any other piece by Bizet, you're likely to get no answer, becau-

Right. OK. The Pearl Fishers, yes, that's true. Well done. OK. Well, ask them to name another after that and you really get an embarrassing si-

Yes, all right, all right, LArlesienne, yes. Look, no one likes a smart arse. UArlesienne, yes. But ask anyone to name a fourth and-

OK, OK, The Fair Maid of Perth. But ask absolutely anyone to name a fifth-

…?

HAH! THOUGHT SO! RIGHT. Good. Right, let me start that again. Ask anybody to name just FIVE pieces by Bizet, and you'd probably draw a blank. And, well, it might come as a bit of a shock, then -although not to some of you bloody clever clogs - that he actually wrote, what, 150 piano pieces, alone. He'd won the coveted Prix de Rome composition prize in 1857 - but was never, as far as I can gather, tempted to dress up as a French maid and run after a soprano - and then went on, over the next few years, to write suites, overtures, even the odd symphony. But it was OPERA that he really wanted to crack.

Bizet was said to have a fantastic ear for a tune and an awful eye for a libretto. Take The Pearl Fishers - despite its famous 'Au fond du temple saint' (literally 'Vmfond of Simon????1??'? it's pretty ropey as far as the words go. With his 1866 attempt, The Fair Maid of Perth (literally, 'the fair maid of Perth') well, he would have probably been better setting the original book by Sir Walter Scott, so bad was the adaptation. BUT THEN… THEN, IN 1872, HE WROTE THE OPERA DJAMILEm

This, too, was an unmitigated pile of pants. Well, actually, that's not totally fair - there were some great tunes in it. I forget their names, now, but, well, Mahler liked it. Having said that, Mahler was only twelve, so he was probably very easily pleased at the time. Anyhow, some three years later - 1875 - he had a minor triumph with The Old Woman of Aries. That's not a bit of gossip, it's the title of the opera - The Old Woman of Aries, or LArlesienne, as he, himself, would have said.

Buoyed somewhat by this, he set to work on a new commission from the Paris 'Opera-Comique'. He chose a book by Prosper Merimee (you'd think someone with his track record in librettos would stay well away from someone with a name like that, wouldn't you?). It was a story of depraved young girls, gypsies, thieves and cigarette makers - I think there's even the odd estate agent. Sadly, Paris opera-goers found it all a little hard to take, and, on the night of the thirty-first performance, having himself pronounced it a failure, Bizet died of cancer of the throat, at the age of thirty-six. If he had lasted just a few performances more? Well, he would have lived to see his new work declared a masterpiece, and hailed as a total work of genius. Nowadays? Well, nowadays, it's probably the most famous, most popular opera EVER. It is, of course, Carmen.

For the life of me, I can't see how it wasn't an immediate success. It has fantastic, immediate tunes; gripping, almost '3D' scoring, and it just grabs you between the earlobes and shouts 'LOVE ME!' Er, as it were. And yet they didn't like it. Well, at first. Poor George. Poor 'his bidet'.

Still, life must go on, though, as artists say, so let's forge ahead. And if Bruckner was the 'sleeping giant' of the 1860s, prepare to meet the 'sleeping giant' of the 1870s.