A fanfare of sorts followed by a scampering of strings. Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C is under way. It’s about half an hour of one melodic delight after another, hinting at the talent that would deliver an absolute abundance of them in one of the most popular productions ever to hit the operatic stage — his Carmen.
It was most likely a student assignment, as Bizet did nothing with it. He went on to graduate as the winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome, a French government-sponsored competition for a scholarship to study in the Italian capital.
He did have a go at writing another symphony but that project took 11 years. It was opera that really attracted him.
He had a modest hit with Les Pêcheurs de Perles, remembered now for the tenor-and-baritone Pearl Fishers’ Duet which has claimed a place as one of the musical stage’s most popular songs.
But it was Carmen, of course, that was his greatest success. The love triangle — the tale of the foxy heroine from the cigarette factory who ditches the soldier to take up with the bullfighter and ends up the victim of jealous rage — was an instant winner.
Sadly, Bizet didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labours. Three months after Carmen’s premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 3, 1875 the composer suffered a fatal heart attack. He was just 36.
The symphony he wrote as a teenager had never been performed, and few people knew anything about it. His widow Geneviève ran a fashionable Parisian salon that attracted the cream of literary society, among them the revered novelist Marcel Proust. His friend and lover Reynaldo Hahn was a composer born in Venezuela the year Georges Bizet died. Through this connection, Bizet’s manuscripts ended up with Hahn.
He in turn passed them on to the library of the Paris Conservatoire and, going through them, they discovered the forgotten symphony. It was first performed in Basel in Switzerland in 1935, and the following year got its US premiere in upstate New York with an Irishman on the podium, Hamilton Harty from Hillsborough, Co Down.
It shines a light on what might have been had things worked out differently for Bizet. It’s music that’s full of the youthful exuberance of a Mozart, a Schubert or a Mendelssohn. Mozart and Mendelssohn he would have been familiar with, but Schubert’s orchestral tours de force, like Bizet’s own symphony, lay unplayed for many years after his death.
The influence of Charles Gounod is evident. Gounod was like a father-figure to Bizet, offering him extracurricular assistance and guidance. Bizet quotes Gounod, sometimes note for note, right through the symphony.
There is an energy, a freshness, coupled with a classical kind of elegance, about the music, qualities that would translate into the sumptuous tunes that Carmen is famous for. And all of it produced by a young man who didn’t appear to have to try too hard to produce a masterpiece.
George Hamilton presents ‘The Hamilton Scores’ on RTÉ lyric fm from 10am each Saturday and Sunday.