Ouvre ton coeur (1859-60)

Douce mer (1866)

Pastorale (1868)

Chanson d’avril (1866)

Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe (1866)

Of the more than forty songs published under Bizet’s name, less than thirty of them are authentic – issued during the composer’s life time, that is, and seen by him through the press. 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 incomplete or 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.

Even so, by no means all of the posthumous publications are to be regretted. It is highly unlikely that anything of the “ode-symphony” Vasco da Gama that (as a recent winner of the Prix de Rome) Bizet wrote at the Villa Medici in 1859-60 would be heard today if Ouvre ton coeur had not been extracted from it and presented, without further comment, as a “Spanish Serenade.” The words, sung in the original by a soprano en travesti, are the same as those Bizet actually set in Vasco da Gama. The keyboard arrangement of the orchestral part is nowhere near as sophisticated as Bizet’s own piano accompaniments, but it is at least effective in evoking the sound of a strummed guitar and sustaining the lively rhythms of the bolero. While it is stretching credibility to claim it as an anticipation of the Danse bohème in Carmen, even if they do have a phrase in common, some of the harmonies and the decorative cadences in the vocal line certainly indicate an early familiarity with the Spanish idiom.

Douce mer – which, like the next three items in this group, is included in the major Bizet song collection, the Vingt mélodies, in 1873 – offers an outstanding example of the composer’s skill in writing for the piano. A dreamy barcarolle, it is accompanied throughout by a gentle murmuring figure that varies in shape and harmony according to the nature of the water the little boat passes through. Poetic piano writing like that would be out of place in the deliberately naive Pastorale which, however, while restricting the accompaniment to the shepherd’s drum rhythm and pipe tune, liberates the vocal line as the harmonies resolve from minor to major at the end of each stanza. The intimacy that develops between voice and piano in Chanson d’avril is worthy of Fauré, whose Nell clearly owes more than a little to Bizet’s example. While it, in its turn, owes no less to Gounod’s Chanson de printemps, it is as delightfully fresh as any springtime inspiration of its kined.           

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.