Bizet Djamileh

 Day 136

Bizet Djamileh

Soloists

Chorus of Lille opera

Les Siècles

François-Xavier Roth

When I was at University it would still have been slightly infra dig to be an admirer of Carmen. Yes you were allowed to enjoy it but opera, unless by Mozart, Monteverdi or Wagner was not really thought of at the same level as the traditional classical forms. Thankfully those days are past and we can appreciate Carmen for the masterpiece that it surely is.  There is of course more to Bizet than Carmen. I know most of the other popular pieces and some of the songs, but this opera was new to me. It has just been added to the Bru Zane collection and as ever comes with extensive background notes.

It many ways it is a typical piece of mid 19th century French exoticism, with plenty of opportunities for colourful ‘oriental’  music - or at least oriental music as imagined by a western composer.  We know that Bizet was a master of this - think of the slow movement of the symphony or the lovely Adieux de L’hôtesse Arabe - and the music here is ravishing. But there are also plenty of lighter moments with some lovely melodies.What did surprise me was the harmonic range of the score - there was some movements which would not have been out of place in Tristan. Indeed Bizet was accused by some critics of the crime of Wagnerism.

Exoticism apart the score was perhaps less overtly French than some of the other operas I have been listening to this week. I think that (whatever language it was being sung in) you would probably eventually conclude that it was French but it would not be immediately obvious.  

There is a lot more Bizet to explore (the Bru Zane set contains a lot of almost unknown music). is operas have suffered from the lack of a proper critical edition and there are all sorts of problems in establishing a reliable text. He also left several works unfinished. Only four of his operas (two of them one-acters) were performed in his lifetime and of course he died only only a few weeks after the first performance of Carmen when he was only 36.  What he might have achieved had he lived to a full age is one of the great unknowns in operatic history.