Alexandre Dratwicki on Bizet and Bru Zane

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Georges Bizet, and the Palazzetto Bru Zane recently commemorated the occasion with a beautiful anthology of some of his lesser-known works - including the 'ode-symphonie' Vasco de Gama (written during his stay at the Villa Medici as a recipient of the coveted Prix de Rome), the prize-winning cantata Clovis et Clotilde, the one-act opera Djamileh, and a generous selection of his often overlooked solo piano music.

Bru Zane's Artistic Director Alexandre Dratwicki spoke to me last month about Bizet's experiences in Italy, the foreshadowings of Carmen in some of the pieces on the album, the French and German composers who influenced his early work, and the label's plans to explore forgotten French operatic composers of the early twentieth century by harnessing the power of the fairy tale...

Although he died believing that it was a failure, the enormous popularity of Carmen has rather eclipsed the rest of Bizet's legacy - do you see any foreshadowing of the opera in his earlier works?

Carmen of course occupies its own space, but if you break down exactly what it is that makes that piece so popular then I think you’ll find a lot of those same qualities in the works on this portrait-album. For one thing, Carmen is essentially a long line of fantastic tunes – numbers like the Habanera, Séguedille, Chanson Bohème and Toreador Song, which are literal showstoppers. And the Boléro in Vasco de Gama is similar: it’s not necessary to the drama, but it’s the most exciting moment in the score. Right from the early days, Bizet knows exactly when to hit pause and create these little moments of glory, and he does the same thing with Clotilde’s beautiful prayer at the very beginning of Clovis et Clotilde.

Then there’s the strong sense of local colour which pervades several of these pieces. Bizet actually travelled very little in real life, because he was the most Parisian guy you can imagine - but even in his early works you see that he’s already very interested in travelling through music. Le retour de Virginie is set on an island in the sea, Vasco de Gama is of course all about exploring the world, and a lot of the piano music is also preoccupied with exoticism. Later on we see it in Les pêcheurs de perles, La jolie fille de Perth (that's set in Scotland rather than Australia, by the way!), and most famously in Carmen: all of these operas are set in countries which Bizet never visited.

The only country which he knows first-hand is Italy, which provides the setting for Don Procopio and Le docteur Miracle (which isn’t on the CD but is set in Padua, near our centre in Venice!). But even there, both pieces still feel completely Parisian in style. 

How did the young Bizet develop during his time in Italy?

Some years ago I published a book on the composers who spent time at the Villa Medici after being awarded the Prix de Rome – this was my specialism at the Sorbonne, so you asked the right person! The Prix de Rome was basically an intellectual disaster because throughout the whole of the nineteenth century the music in Rome was not good at all, and the Académie knew there was no real model for young composers there. Italian music was considered vulgar. The students weren’t authorised to study Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini in the library of the Villa Medici – they have lots of scores there, but they’re all by people like Gluck, Lalo, Berlioz and Saint-Saëns. The Prix de Rome was a state-funded scholarship which lasted four or five years - but after two years they were encouraged to leave Italy and go to Munich or Bayreuth, then return to Paris for the final year to create something on a larger scale. They were set exercises called ‘envoies de Rome’, but most of them were sent from Germany and then Paris!

With that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the first work Bizet studied in Italy was actually by a French composer. When he arrived in Rome he knew that he would have to send an opera or ode-symphonie back to Paris at the end of his first year, so he found Félicien David’s Christophe Colomb in the Villa Medici library and thought ‘OK, I’ll do Vasco de Gama!’. We know exactly what he took out of the library, because they kept a register: he borrowed all the church music of Jean-François Lesueur  [1760-1837]. Bizet didn’t learn how to write sacred music by going round the churches in Italy and listening to the castrati – he studied scores and composed à la manière de Lesueur!

Bizet wrote in his letters that the singers in Rome were very poor in comparison with those in Germany or France; Gounod and Massenet said the same. They also felt that the music itself was not very interesting, and it’s telling that Bizet never writes in the Italian style in his mature operas. In Don Procopio [composed during his Prix de Rome years] he writes a cavatina, cabaletta and stretta, so he obviously understood the conventions, but for him it was just an exercise. Certainly he has a nice line in cantabile, but that also comes from French opera - he’s absolutely not affected by Italian music.

How about German influences? Is there perhaps a whisper of Wagner in some of the early orchestral works?

I would say more that he was more influenced by what was well known and respected in France at the time. A lot of French people were quite anti-Wagner when he first arrived on the scene, so we have to consider other German models: people like Beethoven, Weber and Mendelssohn, who weren’t primarily operatic composers. Weber may be remembered for Der Freischütz these days, but back then he was well-known in France for his piano sonatas, which are hardly ever performed any more; we know that Bizet played the first one, which is very complicated.

That said, the French translation of Der Freischütz (‘Le chasseur noir’ or ‘Le chasseur maudit’) was performed in Paris - as was the French version of Rienzi, which Bizet saw in 1869. When I listen to music by young Bizet, like the Overture in A major or Le retour de Virginie, I hear a sort of Weber renaissance. That’s especially true in terms of the harmony, as German music was considered the harmonic model at the time. On a melodic level I do hear some traces of the early Wagnerian style, although it could equally come from that affiliation with Weber and Mendelssohn…there are passages in Le retour de Virginie which remind me of Walpurgisnacht.

How many world premiere recordings feature on the new Bizet anthology?

Although there were already a couple of recordings of the piano music out there, this side of Bizet’s output still gets overlooked because he’s seen as primarily an opera composer. But his solo piano works are often very challenging, especially the set of six paraphrases on Gounod’s operas which we’ve recorded for the first time here. These are very much in the tradition of Liszt’s virtuoso paraphrases on Verdi and Meyerbeer - they’re not intended for young ladies to play in the salon! 

Clovis et Clotilde and Djamileh aren’t world premiere recordings, but it’s the first time they’ve been recorded on period instruments. Clovis et Clotilde was recorded by Montserrat Caballé very late in her career and she sounds wonderful, but there’s little sense of text or French style - it could be [Bellini's] Capuleti or Puritani! The same goes for Djamileh, which is often done like a Verdi opera with strong Italian voices and usually conducted way too slow! 

I think that this whole question of tempo goes some way to explaining why French music fell by the wayside when Italian and German music continued to thrive. In Italian music the emphasis is often on virtuosity sopra tutto, so the tempo is dictated by the singer’s breath: in the coloratura of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia there is only really one basic tempo that works for singers. In German music the speed is often decided by the chromaticism and harmony: Mahler and Bruckner often sound even better at slower tempi because the harmony is more dissonant, and in Wagner the singers can breathe pretty much wherever they need to because the orchestra have all these long lines underneath. 

It’s only in French music like in Massenet's Hérodiade or Spontini's La vestale that you find people like Riccardo Muti slowing things down to almost half the original tempo, and quite honestly it can sound banal or plain boring if you don’t keep things moving! The music still works on one level, but you lose the sense of it essentially being sung drama - and lose the audience’s attention in the process…

What’s next from the Palazzetto Bru Zane?

We still have a lot to do, because there’s no chance of us running out of things to discover! After Lalo's Le roi d’Ys there will be L’Ancêtre by Saint-Säens from Monte-Carlo, which brings us close to completing the set of his operas. It’s incredible that twelve of them (so everything other than Samson et Dalila) were unrecorded, and the last one to appear will be Étienne Marcel.

The second forthcoming release will be Ambroise Thomas’s Psyché, which is a big opéra comique in the tradition of Gounod’s Faust: it sounds like a tragédie lyrique, but Thomas adds some comic characters in the story of Psyche and Eros. It’s an impressive work which we recently recorded in Budapest, and it’s a special project for us because it’s dedicated to the memory of the Belgian coloratura soprano Jodie Devos: she was originally scheduled to sing the title-role in Paris in 2020, but that was cancelled because of COVID restrictions and sadly we lost Jodie to cancer last year.

After that we’ll release Clémence de Grandval’s Mazeppa, which is a little like Massenet in terms of the style; Nicole Car [who recently recorded Massenet’s Hérodiade] sang the soprano role and she was incredible, so I already know it will be a big success because of her. Then we finish the season with La belle au bois dormant by Charles Silver, who was a student of Massenet – he wrote the piece at the Villa Medici after winning the Prix de Rome. It’s a huge fairy tale in music, and it’s quite cinematic: it’s also very true to the original story by Perrault, so all the big moments you’re waiting for are there!

The story of Sleeping Beauty is of course very well known, which is so helpful when you’re trying to market these hugely expensive productions and recordings of operas by composers who aren't very well known. My idea is to lead with the title rather than the composer’s name, so that families and the press have something to grab onto - and you can also catch people on TikTok and Instagram if you want to grow your audience. I don’t see that as dumbing down or selling out: it’s just about using whatever strategy is most effective to get these amazing works out there. 

I think this idea of fairy tale operas could be the way forward for us. Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel is super-popular, but there are so many more to discover - operas about Aladdin and Cinderella, for instance…I would also love to explore more works by composers from the early part of the twentieth century: people like Arthur Coquard, Félix Fourdrain and Henry Février, all of whom are completely unknown. These guys bridge that gap between Massenet and Puccini, and the music is almost cinematic in terms of the emotional scope and impact.