Hugh Macdonald has made his second contribution to the venerable Master Musicians series, a volume on the life and works of Georges Bizet.Footnote ¹ The descriptive account articulates numerous challenges that Bizet, a talented musician and an accomplished composer with limited material resources, faced during his musical education and career in Paris, which spanned roughly the third quarter of the nineteenth century. With the goal of rehabilitating Bizet’s reputation beyond Carmen, Macdonald revises and enlarges received knowledge. He draws on biographies by Charles Pigot, Winton Dean, Mina Curtiss, Rémy Stricker and Hervé Lacombe, to name the most central, and incorporates recent documentary discoveries as well as research into Bizet’s music by a host of scholars, the most prominent among them Lesley Wright and Macdonald himself.Footnote ² Macdonald constructs a sympathetic account of Bizet’s life, and shows that despite his persistence, mastery of his craft and the wild posthumous success of Carmen, his oeuvre as a whole has experienced neglect. Accounts of Bizet as a person and a member of a larger musical community contrast with the sections dedicated to his music, which reflect on his taste for strong harmony, his ability to produce engaging melodies, the theatres and their specific conventions, the publishers and their marketplace and his selective taste (in general he did not admire the music of Adam or Verdi, and he owed his style more to Gounod than to Wagner, despite critics’ claims). While offering his own interpretation of how Bizet’s music might communicate his inner life or subjectivity, Macdonald also provides a firm foundation to any reader inspired to move in that direction, by providing a factual account of Bizet’s experiences next to a descriptive account of his musical practices.Footnote ³

The volume is richer than a glance through the table of contents suggests. The titles of the first nine chapters consist of a span of years followed by the name of a theatrical work Bizet composed during that period – the first being 1838–1857, Le Docteur Miracle, the ninth 1873–1875, Carmen. It would seem at first that Macdonald intended for the one work to stand for that period; yet, while the content is limited to the years indicated, it ranges well beyond the one work highlighted. The final chapter takes a different approach from the other nine. Spanning the period 1875 to 2014 and subtitled Life after Death, it focuses on the general scholarly lack of attention to Bizet’s works as a whole, and examines the individuals and institutions that promoted Bizet posthumously. Although this last chapter is constructed as a conclusion, one might read it first, as it explains Macdonald’s desire to address the neglect of Bizet’s music and see a complete scholarly edition of his works.

In general, Macdonald’s prose reflects the maturity of a scholar with the confidence to produce a narrative with few quotations from the many letters and other primary documents that contribute to its fabric, and an economy of citations. When Bizet’s voice breaks through Macdonald’s prose in select moments, it sounds sincere and intense, as in a poignant letter to the music publisher Choudens from 1862 that demonstrates his struggles to make a living. He wrote ‘I wish I was in a position not to have to raise these arguments about money, which I hate … The day will surely come, and come soon, when my courage and my talent will be rewarded, and then you will be able to depend on a conscientious composer and a good friend in everything that concerns your publishing business’. Bizet then listed the projects he might do in a year to justify a salary of 1800 francs, a sum that would allow him to pay his father room and board (p. 69). Another passage marked by sincerity of tone is found in an exchange between Bizet and Gounod, whose Roméo et Juliette Bizet supported as répetiteur in its revival at the Opéra-Comique in January 1873. As Bizet wrote to Gounod, ‘You were the beginning of my career as an artist. I am a product of you’ (p. 196). Not only did Bizet support the production of other composers’ works, he put countless hours into revision and orchestration, as for instance in the case of Halévy’s posthumously incomplete opera Noë (first performed in 1885, after Bizet’s death as well), and he made many anonymous arrangements of other composers’ successful operas for much-needed income. By the 1870s his words show he was confident of his style, even if financial success still eluded him. In response to the positive critical reception of Djamileh in 1872 he wrote to Galabert, ‘I have found my way; I know what I’m doing’ (p. 189).

Not only does Macdonald’s account provide the reader a sense of Bizet’s voice, it renders a sense of Bizet’s corporeality through image and word. Despite his sturdy build, he was a physically vulnerable human being. Chubby in his youth, solid in his adulthood, he costumed himself as a baby for a masked ball he attended in Italy while on the Prix de Rome. The unfashionably high collar and bow tie of Figure 6, a photograph from 1875 by Carjat reproduced as a painting on the dust jacket, may reflect the regular problems he had with his throat (p. 65).Footnote ⁴ Although it is difficult to know exactly why his heart stopped on June 3, 1875, he had a number of maladies over his lifetime, including recurrent tonsillitis, symptoms of rheumatic illness – pain and stiffness in his extremities – angina or heart problems and quinsy, as well as an abscess of the throat. At his death he could not hear in one ear.

The prose often articulates a wistful attitude towards Bizet’s difficulties in having his works performed and his early death, a sense of promise unfulfilled. The composer at 36 was taken too soon, his potential unrealized. He worked too much on other composers’ work, wasting energy that could have been committed to his own creative expression. He could have been a great composer of chamber music. And yet Bizet’s ambition remained focused on the operatic stage with all its concomitant frustrations and obstacles to success.

The narrative has the potential to serve as a blueprint to a scholarly edition of Bizet’s complete works, and that well may be Macdonald’s most important contribution to Bizet scholarship. He sees Bizet’s oeuvre as deserving in part because many lesser composers have been so affirmed, but also because many of Bizet’s compositions, especially those published after his death, have taken on unexpected additions and deletions not intended by the composer. Any such edition would include what Macdonald discusses as Bizet’s body of mature work: Djamileh (Opéra-Comique, 1872), Jeux d’enfants (piano duets and orchestral suite, 1871), L’Arlésienne (incidental music and orchestral suite, 1871) and Carmen (Opéra-Comique, 1875 (p. 177). Despite the high quality of his production in the last four years of his life, all but Carmen have escaped critical scrutiny as objects of scholarly editions; however, one might argue that many other important works by French composers of the nineteenth century have also escaped such editorial treatment, including many by Felicien David, Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, Leo Delibes and even Jules Massenet. Although musicologists like Steven Huebner and Carlo Caballero have championed Gounod and Fauré respectively and provided critical studies of their work, there are many works developed in Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century deserving of the critical attention for which Macdonald advocates.Footnote ⁵ Bizet is not alone.

In addition to providing details on which to build further studies of Bizet, the book suggests further approaches to music in Paris during the nineteenth century, especially Parisian opera. Macdonald mentions almost in passing the deregulation of Parisian theatres in 1864, when Napoleon III removed restrictions that the first Napoleon had invoked in 1806 to limit competition. Such changes in convention, one might argue, made a work like Carmen possible, with its shockingly murderous finale. Could deregulation have served as an invitation to rethink creative possibilities?

The biography also expands upon the importance of supporters and teachers of Bizet, many of whom are not well known, but important in some circles. One such character is François Delsarte, Bizet’s uncle on his mother’s side. In France he was known for his pedagogy of voice and stage action for operatic singers, his revivals of French stage works by Gluck, and his religious conservatism. Macdonald describes how Delsarte’s career as a teacher began after he suffered the loss of his voice, and found a way to recover its use. Based on his self-rehabilitation, he abandoned performance in favour of teaching other singers how to preserve their instrument, serving as a teacher and a coach to the likes of Adolphe Nourrit. With a conservative streak, he also participated in the revival of Gregorian chant as well as theatrical works and vocal music by Lully, Rameau, Campra and Gluck, an enthusiasm for the past superficially resembling that of Berlioz. Delsarte’s lasting fame came not from his association with Bizet, but from the movement of his technique from Paris to Boston through American pupils such as Steele MacKaye, who resided in Paris in the 1860s to learn Delsarte’s technique. Interpreted as a language of expression, Delsarte technique became something new in the United States, providing a foundational vocabulary of gesture for the many women who practiced elocution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Class comes through as an important category of consideration as well, a potential subject of deeper enquiry. Although Macdonald’s narrative represents Bizet as in constant financial hardship, the issue of his socioeconomic status is implicit rather than explicit. Bizet’s constant need for money drove him to work on a broad array of musical projects that furthered the careers and reputations of many of his contemporaries (Gounod, Hálevy) at the expense of his own. If Bizet had been born with the wealth of a Meyerbeer, the family connections of an Halévy, the orientation to the public of an Offenbach or an Auber, he might have experienced greater success during his lifetime, less stress to aggravate his angina and his infected tonsils. One wonders how many stories of artistic life on the edge of success like Bizet’s might be told. The narrative suggests the serendipity of a career as an opera composer in Paris despite impeccable skill and education, hard work, and mentors with influence. It emphasizes the difficulties of day-to-day existence for a musician in a mid-nineteenth-century urban milieu, the obstacles to creative expression for a person of marginal means.

As a result, Bizet emerges not only as an ambitious composer with limited success until the last four years of his life, but also as a sometimes anonymous cog in the machinery of the Parisian operatic and music publishing industries. The account contributes to a deeper understanding not only of Bizet, but of the Parisian musical institutions in which he participated, and which shaped his music and its reception. Although the newcomer to nineteenth-century Parisian operatic culture might find the detail overwhelming, the account serves the initiated well not only for its portrait of Bizet and the description of his music, but for the musical landscape of Paris that it traces.