Chanson d’avril (1866)

Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe (1866)

Of the forty-five songs published under Bizet’s name, less than thirty of them are authentic. Having had the misfortune to die before Carmen made his name for him, he was in no position to stop his publisher cashing in on his new-found popularity by taking bits and pieces from his several unperformed stage works, fitting different words to them and issuing them as songs. Inevitably, his reputation as a composer of mélodies has suffered as a result.

While is true that Bizet was no Fauré or Duparc, the very best of his songs are on or near that level. Chanson d’avril, might derive from Gounod’s Chanson de printemps but at the same time it clearly anticipates Fauré’s Nell in its pulsating accompaniment, its vivacious melodic charm and the engagingly expressive exchanges between voice and piano in the second stanza. Where Bizet had a positive advantage over most other exponents of the mélodie was in his instinct for the theatre and his gift for characterisation. Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe - written to a drastically abbreviated version of a poem from Hugo’s Les Orientales - could almost be a scene from an opera, above all in the dramatic treatment of the line “Hélas! Adieu! Adieu! beau voyageur” which separates the first half of the song from the second. It is rare among orientalist songs of its time in that the exoticism of the verse is reflected not only in its hypnotically repetitive rhythms and its seductive harmonies but also in a voluptuous deployment of the voice. Before she makes her lingering farewell, the initially modest “hôtesse” becomes a provocative Arabian Carmen.