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Georges Bizet music biography continued...

at an early age and his mother enrolled him in the Paris Conservatory of Music just before his tenth birthday. Bizet's first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, was written there when he was seventeen, evidently as a student assignment. In 1857 a setting of the one-act operetta" Le docteur Miracle" won him a share in a prize offered by Jacques Offenbach, one of the originators of the operetta form. Bizet also won the Music Composition scholarship of the Prix de Rome, the conditions of which required him to study in Rome for three years. There, his talent developed as he wrote such works as the opera Don Procopio. Apart from this period in Rome, Bizet lived in the Paris area all his life. His mother died shortly after his return to Paris. He composed the opera "Les pêcheurs de perles" (The Pearl Fishers) for the Theatre-Lyrique in 1863, which was an initial failure. He followed it with "La jolie fille de Perth" (1867), and "Jeux d'enfants" (Children's games) for the piano.
The popular "L'arlésienne," which followed was originally produced as incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet, first performed in 1872. In 1875, Bizet also composed a romantic opera, "Djamileh," which is often seen as a precursor to "Carmen." This latter opera is Bizet's best-known work and is based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by Prosper Mérimée. Bizet composed the title role for a mezzo-soprano. Carmen was not initially well-received but praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Their views proved to be prophetic, as Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. However Bizet did not live to see its success, as he died from angina at the age of 36 a few months after its first few performances, on his third wedding anniversary. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and left behind a legacy that has influenced the greatest composers and performers of opera for centuries.