Georges Bizet

Bizet entered the Paris Conservatoire before he was ten and won the Prix de Rome in 1857; the Symphony in C, written in 1855, lay unheard until 1935. He studied with Jacques-Fromental Halévy and later married Halévy's daughter Geneviève. His works include Les pêcheurs de perles and the incidental music for L'Arlésienne. Carmen was first given at the Opéra-Comique in March 1875. The first audiences were divided. Bizet died three months later, aged thirty-six, before the opera's later international success. He was born in Paris on 25 October 1838 into a family of musicians and had his first piano lessons from his mother, and the competition for an operetta announced by Offenbach he won with Le Docteur Miracle. The cantata Clovis et Clotilde carried the Prix de Rome in 1857, and the Italian years that followed brought, among other things, Vasco da Gama; back in Paris he supported himself by private teaching and by arranging and orchestrating the music of others. He died of a heart attack on 3 June 1875.