L'ITALIA DI BIZET

Speranza

On 27 January 1858 Bizet arrived at the Villa Medici, a 16th-century palace that since 1803 had housed the French Académie in Rome and which he described in a letter home as "paradise".

Under its director, the painter Jean-Victor Schnetz, the villa Medici provided an ideal environment in which Bizet and his fellow-laureates could pursue their artistic endeavours.

Bizet relished the convivial atmosphere, and quickly involved himself in the distractions of its social life.

In his first six months in Rome his only composition was a Te Deum written for the Rodrigues Prize, a competition for a new religious work open to Prix de Rome winners.

This piece failed to impress the judges, who awarded the prize to Adrien Barthe, the only other entrant.

Bizet was discouraged to the extent that he vowed to write no more religious music.

His Te Deum remained forgotten and unpublished until 1971.

Through the winter of 1858–59 Bizet worked on his first envoi, an opera buffa setting of Carlo Cambiaggio's libretto Don Procopio.

Under the terms of his prize, Bizet's first envoi was supposed to be a mass, but following his Te Deum experience he was averse to writing religious music.

He was apprehensive about how this breach of the rules would be received at the Académie, but their response to Don Procopio was initially positive, with praise for the composer's "easy and brilliant touch" and "youthful and bold style."

 

Georges Bizet photographed in about 1860

For his second envoi, not wishing to test the Académie's tolerance too far, Bizet proposed to submit a quasi-religious work in the form of a secular mass on a text by Horace.

This work, entitled Carmen Saeculare, was intended as a song to Apollo and Diana.

No trace exists, and it is unlikely that Bizet ever started it.

A tendency to conceive ambitious projects, only to quickly abandon them, became a feature of Bizet's Rome years.

In addition to Carmen Saeculare he considered and discarded at least five opera projects, two attempts at a symphony, and a symphonic ode on the theme of Ulysses and Circe.

After Don Procopio Bizet completed only one further work in Rome, the symphonic poem Vasco da Gama.

This replaced Carmen Saeculare as his second envoi, and was well received by the Académie, though swiftly forgotten thereafter.

In the summer of 1859 Bizet and several companions travelled in the mountains and forests around Anagni and Frosinone.

They also visited a convict settlement at Anzio.

Bizet sent an enthusiastic letter to Marmontel, recounting his experiences.

In August he made an extended journey south to Naples and Pompeii, where he was unimpressed with the former but delighted with the latter.

"Here you live with the ancients; you see their temples, their theatres, their houses in which you find their furniture, their kitchen utensils."

Bizet began sketching a symphony based on his Italian experiences, but made little immediate headway; the project, which became his Roma symphony, was not finished until 1868.

On his return to Rome Bizet successfully requested permission to extend his stay in Italy into a third year, rather than going to Germany, so that he could complete "an important work" (which has not been identified).

In September 1860, while visiting Venice with his friend and fellow-laureate Ernest Guiraud, Bizet received news that his mother was gravely ill in Paris, and made his way home.