Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra

PCO Presents Bizet

Premieres 3 pm, Sunday, November 22, 2020

Program Notes

Georges Bizet, the offspring of two talented musicians was extremely precocious in musical matters. He was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine and was winning prizes there within a year. He produced his earliest known works, two vocalizes for soprano, at age twelve.

Bizet studied at the Conservatoire until he was nineteen, gathering awards for piano, organ, fugue and solfeggio*, and composing a variety of works, one of which was a prize-winning operetta in a competition sponsored by Jacques Offenbach. At nineteen, he won the Prix de Rome, which provided a five-year stipend, a residency in Italy and France, and the opportunity to devote his time to study and composition. The years of planning, composing and travel came to an end when his prize stipend expired.

At the age of 24 he was faced with the reality of providing his own living. After 1863, Bizet gave much of his time to all manner of musical hackwork: private teacher, rehearsal accompanist, music critic, but mostly to transcribing the popular pieces of the day for a variety of instruments. “It is maddening to interrupt the work I love for two days in order to write cornet solos. Still, one must live!” he lamented. From these later years we have the works for which he is mainly remembered: The Pearl Fishers, Jeux d’enfants, the incidental music to L’Arlésienne and the opera Carmen. Bizet died at age 36, before he knew that Carmen would make his name famous around the world.

Bizet’s Symphony in C, written in his seventeenth year, is a marvel of early musical maturation that rivals the precocity of Mozart and Mendelssohn. It is a work in which the composer exhibited his careful study of Haydn, Rossini and Gounod. Gounod was Bizet’s counterpoint teacher whose own First Symphony had appeared only a year earlier.

It seems the symphony was not performed during Bizet’s lifetime. The manuscript became part of his estate after his death and was given into the possession of his wife, who did not fully appreciate her husband’s genius. She bequeathed it to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, and he to the Paris Conservatoire Library, where it gathered dust until Bizet’s first English biographer, D.C. Parker, unearthed it in 1933.

The symphony was finally premiered on February 26, 1935 in Basel, Switzerland by conductor Felix Weingartner. The Symphony in C opens with a bubbling main theme outlining chordal patterns and a contrasting legato second theme, introduced by the oboe. The slow second movement contains a haunting, bittersweet serenade for oboe followed by a soaring melody for strings. The final two movements are a sprightly scherzo with a rustic-sounding trio, and a vivacious finale.

* “solfeggio” or “solfa,” is a system where every note of a scale is given its own unique syllable, which is used to sing that note every time it appears. A major or a minor scale (the most common scales in Western classical music) has seven notes, and so the solfege system has seven basic syllables: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti.

Program notes by Conductor Laureate, Douglas Meyer.

Video produced by CW Studios.