Bizet: Symphony in C major (1855)
Allegro vivo
Adagio
Scherzo:- Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
Here is what was once a somewhat obscure work, yet championed by that greatest of British conductors, Sir Thomas Beecham. Composed at the age of seventeen, this effervescent symphony falls very little short of that ultimate miracle of youthful genius, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture – also by a seventeen-year-old. Yet its very existence was not even known about until it was discovered by Bizet’s Scottish biographer D.C. Parker in the library of the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris, among a collection of manuscripts donated by the composer Reynaldo Hahn in September 1933. Hahn happened to be a friend of Jacques Bizet (the composer’s son), but evidently thought very little of what now must surely be regarded as one of the most remarkable of all teenage masterpieces. So, nearly eighty years after it was finished, it was introduced to the world by the great conductor Felix Weingartner, via an unsuspecting audience in Basel on 26 February 1935.
We cannot be entirely sure why he should have chosen to compose a symphony at this stage of his life – unless it were as a composition exercise at the conservatoire, where he was still a student (such a precedent – in reverse! – is well known, in the shape of Shostakovich’s first symphony, composed as a graduation piece when just two years older than Bizet). After all, there was scant historical precedent for the writing of symphonies in France at that time, and he would have had little more than Cherubini’s D major as a local model – although he obviously knew that Gounod (whom he greatly admired) had completed his own first symphony that very same year, since he was engaged in making an arrangement of it. The extraordinary and far seeing symphonies of Berlioz would have been somewhat out of range – certainly of the teaching in the conservatoire at that time! But he would most likely have studied scores by Mozart and Mendelssohn, and it is these predecessors which appear to exert the strongest influences in terms of structure and orchestration. Yet there is already a harmonic and melodic language – peculiarly French – which infects the Austro-German model with an unmistakably Gallic élan, and which would prove – in retrospect – to be entirely recognizable as Bizet’s own. For a life cut so tragically short by the trials and exertions caused by producing one of the great nineteenth century music dramas, this amazing symphony could hardly have got its creator’s career off to a more prodigious start. Yet Bizet was never to enjoy the success of either of those two masterworks which framed his working life. Tchaikovsky’s enormous debt to the other of them – Carmen – has been well documented, not least by the Russian composer himself; and one can’t help imagining the ecstasies he might have experienced on hearing the great soaring string melody of the symphony’s Adagio – if only it had been available to him …
© Alan George
