M. Massenet had recently produced his “Marie Madeleine” and, curiously enough, it had been successful. This seems to have spurred Bizet on to emulation. With his usual happy knack of hitting on a subject, he wrote off to Gallet, requesting him to do a book with Geneviève de Paris—the holy Geneviève of legendary lore—for heroine. And Gallet, accommodating creature that he was, forthwith proceeded to construct his tableaux. Together they went off to Lamoureux and read the synopsis to him. He approved it heartily, and Bizet got to work. “Carmen” was then finished and was undergoing the usual stage of adjournment sine die. Three times it had been put into rehearsal, only to be withdrawn for apparently no reason, and poor Bizet was wearying of opera and its ways. This sacred work was relief to him. But hardly had he settled down to it when up came “Carmen” once again, this time in good earnest. He was forced to leave “Geneviève” and come to Paris for rehearsals. It was much against his inclination that he did so, for his health was failing fast. For long he had suffered from an abscess which had made his life a burden to him. Nor had his terrible industry been without its effect upon his physique. He did not know it, but he had sacrificed to his work the very things he had worked for. He felt exhausted, enfeebled, shattered. Probably the excitement of rehearsing “Carmen” kept him up the while; but it had its after-effect, and the strain proved all the more disastrous. A profound melancholy, too, had come over him; and do what he would he could not beat it off. A young singer (some aspirant for lyric fame) came one day to sing to him. “Ich grölle nicht” and “Aus der Heimath” were chosen. “Quel chef d'œuvre,” said he, “mais quelle désolation, c'est à vous donner la nostalgie de la mort.” Then he sat down to the piano and played the “Marche Funèbre” of Chopin. That was the frame of mind he was in.
In his gayer moments he would often long for Italy. He had never forgotten the happy days passed there with Guiraud. “I dreamed last night” (he is writing to Guiraud) “that we were all at Naples, installed in a most lovely villa, and living under a government purely artistic. The Senate was made up by Beethoven, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Giorgione, e tutti quanti. The National Guard was no more. In place of it there was a huge orchestra of which Litolff was the conductor. All suffrage was denied to idiots, humbugs, schemers, and ignoramuses—that is to say, suffrage was cut down to the smallest proportions imaginable. Geneviève was a little too amiable for Goethe, but despite this trifling circumstance the awakening was terribly bitter.”
“Carmen” was produced at last, on the 3rd of March in that year (1875). The Habanera—of which, by the way, he wrote for Mme. Galli-Marié no less than thirteen versions before he came across, in an old book, the one we know—the prelude to the second act, the toreador song, and the quintett were encored. The rest fell absolutely flat.
The blow was a terrific one to Bizet. He had dreamed of such a different lot for “Carmen.” Arm in arm with Guiraud he left the theatre, and together they paced the streets of Paris until dawn. Small wonder he felt bitter; and in vain the kindly Guiraud did his best to comfort him. Had not “Don Juan,” he argued, been accorded a reception no whit better when it was produced in Vienna? and had not poor Mozart said “I have written 'Don Juan' for myself and two of my friends”? But he found no consolation in the fact. The press, too, cut him to the quick. This “Carmen,” said they, was immoral, banale; it was all head and no heart; the composer had made up his mind to show how learned he was, with the result that he was only dull and obscure. Then again, the gipsy girl whose liaisons formed the subject of the story was at best an odious creature; the actress's gestures were the very incarnation of vice, there was something licentious even in the tones of her voice; the composer evidently belonged to the school of civet sans lièvre; there was no unity of style; it was not dramatic, and could never live; in a word, there was no health in it.
Even Du Locle—who of all men should have supported it—played him false. A minister of the Government wrote personally to the director for a box for his family. Du Locle replied with an invitation to the rehearsal, adding that he had rather that the minister came himself before he brought his daughters.
Prostrate with it all, poor Bizet returned to Bougival. When forced to give up “Geneviève,” he had written to Gallet: “I shall give the whole of May, June, and July to it.” And now May was already come, and he was in his bed. “Angine colossale,” were the words he sent to Guiraud, who was to have been with him the following Sunday. “Do not come as we arranged; imagine, if you can, a double pedal, A flat, E flat, straight through your head from left to right. This is how I am just now.”
He never wrote more than a few pages of “Geneviève.” He got worse and worse. But even so, the end came all too suddenly, and on the night of the 2nd of June he died—died as nearly as possible at the exact moment when Galli-Marié at the Opéra Comique was singing her song of fate in the card scene of the third act of his “Carmen.” The coincidence was true enough. That night it was with difficulty that she sung her song. Her nervousness, from some cause or another, was so great that it was with the utmost effort she pronounced the words: “La carte impitoyable; répétera la mort; encore, toujours la mort.” On finishing the scene, she fainted at the wings. Next morning came the news of Bizet's death. And some friends said—because it was not meet for them to see the body—that the poor fellow had killed himself. Small wonder if it were so!
By Aubrey Beardsley