COMPILER'S PREFACE

The need for a comprehensive catalogue of Georges Bizet’s music, in parallel with catalogues of virtually all great composers and a great number of lesser ones that already grace the shelves of reference libraries, has long been recognized if only because of the disorder that overtook his music after his premature death in 1875. It has, ironically, been that very disorder that has discouraged others from attempting the task until now. An appendix to the 1965 edition of Winton Dean’s biography of Bizet, entitled ‘The Cult of the Masters in France’, is a damning review of the distortions and adulterations that nearly all Bizet’s works suffered after his death, a survey echoed in Michel Poupet’s article ‘Les infidélités posthumes de partitions lyriques de Georges Bizet’ in the Revue de musicologie in the same year. Although reliable vocal scores of his three operas, Les Pêcheurs de perles, La Jolie Fille de Perth and Carmen were published in his lifetime, all three operas were later subjected to a steady process of alteration and misrepresentation in print and in performance. The three operas first published in the twentieth century, Le Docteur Miracle, Don Procopio and Ivan IV, were all seriously distorted in their printed texts. All full scores of the operas published by Choudens depart substantially from Bizet’s originals. Of the many suites which were drawn from his work, only the first Arlésienne Suite has Bizet’s authority. The second Arlésienne suite and the two Carmen suites are not his, and the suite based on La Jolie Fille de Perth, which he did plan himself under the title Scènes bohémiennes, was later published in a blatantly incorrect form. The suite Roma is in fact his Second Symphony under a false disguise.

The success of Carmen, rapidly attaining worldwide popularity in the 1880s, spurred the publishers Choudens to issue whatever they could find that bore Bizet’s name. In the last fiteen years of the century Bizet’s music was widely performed in many countries, although there was little attempt to honour his integrity as a composer, and it appears that his widow and his friends were more concerned to see his renown spread than to care for the authenticity of his works. In any case, the publisher’s responsibility, as Choudens saw it, was to his customers, not to his composer; anyone who bought a vocal score of a Bizet opera in the later decades of the nineteenth century would receive the version that was current in the theatre, not a version that had long been supplanted, and not what the composer himself had once devised.

An obstacle to forming a complete picture of Bizet’s creative life is the incompleteness of the published correspondence. Since he rarely dated letters, addressed most of his friends as ‘Cher ami’ without identifying them, and had atrocious handwriting, the task of compiling a Correspondance générale, undertaken by Thierry Bodin and Hervé Lacombe, will be formidable. The collections edited by Ganderax, Galabert, Imbert, Curtiss and Wright nevertheless provide a substantial selection on which a biographical framework can be constructed, and the biographies by Pigot, Dean, Curtiss, Stricker and Lacombe have step by step amplified our knowledge of the world in which Bizet worked. My own biography of Bizet has been published in 2014 in parallel with this Catalogue.

Thanks to bequests from Charles Malherbe and from Bizet’s widow and her second husband, along with the executor of their estate, most of Bizet’s manuscripts eventually reached the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire, that treasure-house of French music which was transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1964 and is now housed in the Rue Louvois in Paris. In 1933 Reynaldo Hahn, a friend of Bizet’s son Jacques, gave an important group of early autographs, and further gifts by Mina Curtiss have enlarged this collection. An important group of Bizet manuscripts was collected between the wars by Rudolf Nydahl and is now held by the Stiftelsen Musikkulturens Främjande in Stockholm.

Much more manuscript material, long thought to be lost, has recently surfaced in private hands, so that the Catalogue is more complete than it could have been just a few years ago. Gaps remain, of course, and it is my hope that the publication of this Catalogue may lead to the uncovering of new sources and documents which I have missed. I am conscious that there are many libraries and collections worldwide which I have not been able to visit or contact. A striking number of Bizet’s published works exist as unique copies (as far as I am aware); if more copies exist, or other works are known, that information will be gratefully inserted in the Catalogue in its due place.

This Catalogue is provisional, as all such catalogues always are, and although it advances our knowledge of Bizet’s life and works in a number of important particulars, there will always be more information that can be accommodated in the on-line format.

My aim in the Catalogue is to provide the essential factual information about all Bizet’s musical works. I attempt to show the date and circumstances of each work’s composition, the origin of the text (in the case of vocal works), the location of its autograph and other manuscripts, and the history of the work in print, in performance, and on disk. Lists of Bizet’s works are found in the main dictionaries and biographies, but nothing as comprehensive as this has hitherto been attempted, nor have the multitudinous variations in the printed text of the stage works been subjected to such scrutiny. Wright’s work on La Jolie Fille de Perth and Lacombe’s on Les Pêcheurs de perles settled a number of vexing questions, and Carmen has now finally been re-published in a form that matches Bizet’s own design. I have been able to add some details to these areas of the study, and also identify most of the songs in the posthumous collection Seize Mélodies, issued by Choudens in 1885 in a volume that gave no hint of its corrupt presentation of Bizet’s legacy.

Many ideas and projects passed through Bizet’s mind without getting very far, many without being committed to paper in any form. Winton Dean’s list of stage works includes thirty-one titles, very few of which exist in a performable condition. Some were not even started, some – such as La Coupe du roi de Thulé, Clarisse Harlowe, Grisélidis and Don Rodrigue – survive in tantalisingly incomplete form. We read for example a mention of 'notre Borgia' in a letter to Philippe Gille, but we have no idea if that was a project that was never followed up. Some works were completed and performed but are now lost, perhaps destroyed. Charles Malherbe claimed that shortly before his death Bizet burned much of his music which he found mediocre.

Bizet was a formidably gifted musician, famous for his ability to sight-read anything on the piano, to improvise, transpose, parody other composers, whatever came his way. His record as pianist and composer at the Conservatoire was distinguished, but he had no desire to pursue a virtuoso’s career, he scarcely ever performed in public, and did little teaching. He was active in Paris as a rehearsal pianist, assisting Berlioz, Gounod and others, and although he was always anxious to make his name as a composer he devoted an alarmingly high proportion of his short life to arranging other people’s music. The Catalogue's list of transcriptions of other composers' music, much more complete than any previous list, reveals the huge variety of arrangements he made for the publishers Choudens, Hartmann and Heugel. He was responsible for close to 6000 printed pages of arranged music, not including his own piano arrangements of Les Pêcheurs de perles, Djamileh, l’Arlésienne, Patrie and Carmen, while barely 1500 pages of his own music appeared in print in his lifetime. In addition he orchestrated the whole of Halévy’s opera Noé (473 pages) and contributed sixty pages of orchestration to Nicolai’s Joyeuses Commères de Windsor. Not all arrangements at this time were attributed. I have been able to attribute to Bizet a handful of arrangements that were printed without the arranger's name being given, but there must be many more which have escaped detection. His view of the nature of this work is found in a letter to Galabert of September 1866: 'If, like me, you had just orchestrated a worthless waltz for X..., you would bless your country pursuits. Believe me, it's maddening to have to interrupt my adored work for two days to write solos for the piss-tone cornet. I've made this orchestration more rowdy than normal. The cornet screams like in a low-class dive. The ophicleide and bass drum strike the first beat of every bar with the bass trombone and the cellos and basses, while the second and third beats are slaughtered by the horns, the violas, the second violins, the first two trombones and the side drum! Yes, the side drum!' It is no surprise that throughout his short life he suffered from physical and mental exhaustion, exacerbated by the ordeals of the Siege and Commune in 1870-71 and by the vexatious demands of his wife and mother-in-law.

The following guidelines in the presentation of works have been followed:

Works:

All authentic works by Bizet receive an entry. The large collection of student exercises contained under the call number MS 479 at the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, are not separately listed, and two manuscripts MS 453 and MS 466, attributed to Bizet in that library's catalogue, have been omitted on the grounds that the attribution is almost certainly wrong.

Language:

The language of the Catalogue is English, although French is freely used whenever there is no clear English equivalent, and for quoting documentary sources.

Dates of works:

A few autographs are dated, but normally the dating of works relies on dates of publication or performance, or on mentions in correspondence. There remain a number of works for which no date of composition can be established. Dates of printed editions of the music are derived from dated copies, publishers' plate numbers, correspondence, and announcements in the press.

Titles:

A few finished works, such as the two Duos composed in 1874, lack a title, and several unidentified fragments have been classified with titles such as [Unidentified cantata]. Subtitles are entered in accordance with the sources. Some works, which have become well known in posthumous arrangements under titles such as Ave Maria, Agnus Dei, Venise, etc., are not given separate entries, but are catalogued under the work from which they are derived. The alphabetical list of titles provides the necessary cross-references. The opus number is given for those few works that were assigned opus numbers. The curiously incomplete list of opus numbers is given in LISTS.

Contents:

The list of movements or scenes within each work, with incipits and barcounts, is based on the most reliable sources: in the case of the three operas Les Pêcheurs de perles, La Jolie Fille de Perth, and Carmen, these are the vocal scores published by Choudens in Bizet's lifetime.

Incipits:

Incipits are given for songs and shorter works only. They do not always present the opening bars of the work; in the case of vocal music the first few bars of the sung music are given in order to help with identification. In cases where the original key of the music is not known, one key has been selected.

Forces:

For operas and larger vocal works the personnages are listed as in the scores, identified by voice. These are followed by the full choral forces and orchestration required, including off-stage instruments, identified as ‘coulisse’.

Texts:

The texts of librettos, poems and other literary texts are identified by author, with the published source of the text given, where known. A full list of authors of texts is given in LISTS.

Composition:

The date and history of the work’s composition are given, so far as they are known.

Autograph score:

This entry gives the location and provenance of autographs, followed by a summary description, transcription of title pages, and other information provided by the documents. In his larger works, Bizet composed separate numbers on separate fascicles of paper, separately numbered, creating in effect a series of separate manuscripts. Most of Bizet’s autograph scores are written on standard 30-stave paper measuring approximately 350 x 270 mm. In the last three or four years of his life (from L’Arlésienne on) he preferred 32-stave paper. The most extensive surviving sketches are on 26-stave paper, and he used 12- or 16-stave paper for preparing choral or orchestral parts. The piano music is usually on 12-stave paper, which he also used for preparing a series of songs which were eventually published in the collection Seize Mélodies in 1883. For a study of Bizet's manuscripts and working procedures, see Lesley Wright, Bizet Before Carmen, chapters II and III.

Published scores:

This is in most cases the most extended section, since works were often published in many forms: full score, orchestral parts, vocal score, libretto, arrangements for different combinations of voices and instruments, and so on. Subdivided in this way, the entries give published scores in order of publication, so that a vocal score and other arrangements of an opera will normally precede the full score. For first publications the title-page is transcribed in full (sometimes shown in facsimile), followed by a listing of the plate number, the collation of pages, the date of publication, announcements in the press, and a list of copies held. Copies held in Paris libraries head the list, followed by those in other countries, using standard library sigla . The location of copies of printed scores are given for first editions but somewhat randomly in the case of subsequent editions, especially when a great number of copies survive.

For later publications, the entry gives the publisher (with address in some cases), city of publication (when other than Paris), the plate number, the number of pages, date of publication, language of the text (when other than French), and the arranger or editor where appropriate.

Online resources:

The Catalogue records manuscript and printed sources that may be accessed online either through the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s ‘Gallica’ site (http://gallica.bnf.fr) or through the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org). The entry ‘Gallica’ or ‘IMSLP’ indicates the sources that are available on those sites.

Dedicatee:

Most published works were dedicated to individual friends or colleagues. Some dedicatees have been difficult or impossible to identify, especially those ladies entered under their husbands’ names. A full list of dedicatees and recipients of copies inscribed by Bizet is given in LISTS.

Letters:

Passages from letters from Bizet which refer to the work are quoted here. Many of them are not dated with precision. Occasional letters from other writers are included. Letters first published by Mina Curtiss in her 1959 biography in English are given in French, as in the French edition of 1961. The main sources of letters are abbreviated as:

Imbert Hugues Imbert, Portraits et études, Paris: Fischbacher, 1894
Ganderax Lettres de Georges Bizet: Impressions de Rome (1857-1860), ed. Ganderax, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1907
Galabert Lettres à un ami, 1865-1872, ed. Galabert, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1909
Wright Letters in the Nydahl Collection, ed. Lesley A. Wright, Stockholm: Musikaliska Akademien, 1988

Documents:

Reminiscences, reports and official documents that have a bearing on the history of the work are included here.

Performances:

This entry gives the date, place and artists of the first performance, where known. The location is presumed to be Paris unless stated otherwise. Reviews of first and early performances follow here. For later performances, the date and city are given wherever possible, occasionally with extra details such as the conductor or the theatre or the language. Performances in France are presumed to be in French. In the case of Carmen and the Arlésienne suites only performances before 1900 are given, the later list being far too extensive to cover. Performances of Les Pêcheurs de perles since 1945 are listed by year only.

Discography:

This makes no claim to completeness, being intended merely as a guide to the popularity of certain works in the recording age. Dates indicate the dates of recording rather than of issue. Only basic details are given. Recordings on 78-rpm records, being hard to date, are indicated with ‘(78)’. Later recordings of operas and orchestral works are indicated by the orchestra and conductor only. Recordings of Carmen also give the singer of the title role. Recorded extracts from larger works are not given. Recordings of songs usually give the name of the singer followed by that of the accompanist. In this section the following abbreviations are used:

Bibliography:

The first six listings give page references to the five main studies of Bizet's life and works, as follows:

Pigot (1) Charles Pigot, Georges Bizet et son œuvre, Paris: Dentu, 1886, ix + 345 p.
Pigot (2) Charles Pigot, Georges Bizet et son œuvre, Paris: Delagrave, 1911, vii + 307 p.
Curtiss Mina Curtiss, Bizet and his World, New York: Knopf, 1958, xvi + 477 + xvii p.
Dean Winton Dean, Bizet, London: Dent, 3rd ed., 1975, x + 306 p.
Wright Lesley A. Wright, Bizet Before Carmen, Ann Arbor: UMI, 1981, xiii + 436 p.
Lacombe Hervé Lacombe, Georges Bizet, Paris: Fayard, 2000, 863 p.

There follows a selected listing of later articles and references. In the case of Carmen only the most significant articles and reviews are listed.

Publishers:

A list of publishers who have issued Bizet's works is given in LISTS, with plate numbers and dates for the leading publishers.

Acknowledgements:

The compilation of a catalogue such as this inevitably incurs a great number of debts, especially to librarians and custodians of manuscript and printed material. I am particularly grateful to the owners of Bizet material who have allowed me access to their collections and whose anonymity I fully respect. In addition I have called upon many friends and colleagues with questions of many kinds, chief of whom are the following, all deserving my sincere thanks:

I am especially indebted to the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University, St Louis, for enabling the Catalogue to be published on line. I would particularly wish to record my debts to Joe Loewenstein, Perry Trolard, Douglas Knox and to the many students who have contributed to the process.





Hugh Macdonald

St Louis, MO, 2014