A Brief History of its Rediscovery
Even as a budding composer Bizet yearned to write for the opera house, and there is about the opening of his youthful symphony a Rossini-like bravura, the music bustling with mock-heroic flourishes and comic asides, the whole imbued with an irrepressible wit and verve – it is as charming and fetching as any aria, as befits the man who would later pen Carmen.
Continuing in an operatic vein, the Second Movement Adagio boasts a starry turn from the oboe, in plaintive song, floating above pizzicato strings. Indeed, theirs is a duet, and with the violins’ ecstatic cantilena afterwards there is a surging like the swell of the heart. Happily, the Third and Fourth Movements suffer no flagging of inspiration, Bizet’s invention rising from strength to strength to a brilliant finish. Although Bizet would reach full artistic maturity much later, his achievement here remains dazzling; very few – Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Rossini – have written with such exuberance, and such mastery, at such a young age. Bizet had just turned 17.
“I am not made for the symphony; I need the theater, I can do nothing without it.”
Georges Bizet, quoted in Dean (Georges Bizet: His Life and Work)
There is both debt and homage to his teacher Charles Gounod, whose own Symphony No. 1 in D major had enjoyed a successful premiere in Paris on 4 March 1855 by conductor and violinist François Seghers and la Société Sainte-Cécile on the Rue Chaussée-d’Antin. Bizet’s is the far better work – did he realize this? – in any case, he held it back and it remained unheard, unknown and in manuscript for the next 80 years.
The Symphony’s path from oblivion to the standard repertoire was circuitous, its preservation during the intervening years haphazard, its fate largely a matter of chance save for the intervention of two men, French musicologist Jean Chantavoine (1877-1952) and Scottish writer Douglas Charles (D.C.) Parker (1885-1978).
In the wake of Bizet untimely death on 3 June 1875, at mere 36 years of age, some of his papers remained with his father Adolphe Bizet (1810-1886), others with his widow, Geneviève Bizet (1849-1926). Though out-living him by a half century, she remained a passive caretaker of his legacy and did nothing to promote his music. In possession of numerous manuscripts, she never deigned to organize them nor strove to see them published. On the other hand, she did not destroy or lose them. Some of these scores, including the symphony, she gave to her close friend, the composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947). Composer, conductor, pianist, baritone, the prodigiously talented Hahn thought much of Bizet the man, little of Bizet the composer, and was at a loss as to how any informed musician could rank the composer of Carmen above Thomas, Gounod or Saint-Saëns.