It was said he was too proud to teach, but many times, when I arrived at rehearsals, he was at the piano working as an accompanist to earn extra money to pay for rehearsals of what he was sure was his masterpiece, Carmen, a commission from the prestigious Opéra-Comique.
Students often bragged to one another about the clear successes among the school’s graduates. I think we imagined that before a career began there was a bargain to be struck with Fame and that the way to learn how to do this was to study those Fame had chosen. Bizet’s story was told with every possible detail, for at any moment it seemed as if some deciding success or failure would descend and supply the lesson the story lacked. There were as many signs supporting a good end for him as a bad one.
Bizet had won the Prix de Rome, but the students spoke assuredly on how he’d chosen his previous librettos badly and that this had held him back as a composer. The libretto he’d chosen this time, though, came from a famous novel, and the librettists, Meilhac and Halévy, were widely considered to be the best. And Halévy was related to Bizet by marriage. This was thought to be a good omen.
Pauline told me what she had heard of his struggle from Louis, who knew the director of the Opéra-Comique well.
The story was of a young seductress, murdered when she steals a young man away from an arranged marriage and then rejects him. This troubled the theater’s manager, for the Comique was a family theater and marriages were regularly arranged between performances or even during them. The bourgeois families paid for boxes in order to have a better view of one another, not the stage; and they typically talked all the way through, believing the real drama was with them. They were famous to the singers, composers, and musicians of the Conservatoire as Paris’s most ungrateful and wealthiest subscription audience, and so when the management began canceling rehearsals of Bizet’s opera, saying it was for lack of funds, the students scoffed. Bizet only took them at their word and earned the money required, and so the rehearsals continued.
It soon seemed there was no one who would not betray him. The most famous song, the Habanera, he rewrote thirteen times at the insistence of the soprano who was creating the role of Carmen, and she still hated it; the orchestra complained, incomprehensibly, that the music was “Indochinese.” This made me laugh—there was a pidgin used inside of a maison close, I knew, that this referred to—but then the soprano put her disappointment in a letter to a friend, delivered by what would seem to be a very deliberate accident to the director, who, in turn, kept the dress rehearsals empty in order to protect the debut. More letters still appeared the next day, published in all of the newspapers, denouncing the opera as immoral—the complaints of ghosts.
The opera finally opened. Many of us from the Conservatoire attended, proud as the audience applauded vigorously at the end of the first act—but this was when the very proper young Mica?la brought a note to the young soldier from his mother that was the opening of a marriage negotiation. Carmen appeared, and by the time the aforementioned Habanera concluded, it was clear, as the soldier picked up the flower Carmen dropped for him, that the marriage negotiation would be for nothing. Next the cigarette girls lit real cigarettes and stabbed each other with knives; Carmen wed the soldier in a Gypsy wedding in the mountains, their hands soaked together in a chalice of red wine; and then at the end, the young soldier murdered her for rejecting him. After he stabbed her to death, the audience sat in silent fury. No applause from them—though we, his claque, did try, full of dread.
The next day the papers were filled with reviews declaring it was “a revolting display of animal passion.” Bizet was heartbroken, refused our congratulations, and went away to his family’s country estate and did not seem to return. On the night of the thirty-second performance, the unlucky letter-writing lead soprano fainted during the third act, and when she was revived, she refused to go back onstage, overcome with a premonition of Bizet’s death.
It seems to me if she’d known what it would bring she likely would have stood and gone on.