- Bizet by Hugh Macdonald, and: The Bizet Catalogue by Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald’s new Bizet biography combines in an elegant narrative the findings of previous Bizet scholarship in English and French (Winton Dean, Mina Curtiss, Lesley A. Wright, Rémy Stricker, Hervé Lacombe, etc.) with valuable personal observations and insights, underpinned by the fruits of the new online Bizet catalogue. The latter aims for the first time to catalogue fully the composer’s work, and includes large amounts of detailed description of manuscript and published scores, orchestral parts, details of self-borrowings, letters, published libretti, excerpted and arranged materials, performance histories, discographies, and bibliographies. Together, these two new sources contribute significantly to the study of Bizet, his life, and his works.
This biography forms part of the Oxford University Press ‘Master Musician’ series and is constructed in a traditional way: proceeding chronologically, each chapter covers a discrete period of Bizet’s life and, like any biography of a French composer working during the Second Empire and Third Republic, centres on an operatic work. While many of these operas—Djamileh, La Jolie Fille de Perth, Ivan IV, etc.—are little known to the wider public, Macdonald re-evaluates their musical materials and makes a strong case for their reinstatement in, if not a performance canon, then a traditional musicological canon that does not reduce the composer to Les Pêcheurs de perles and Carmen. The start of each chapter paints a vivid and engaging picture of Bizet’s life (and loves …) and career in Paris, and of his travels during the years following his Prix de Rome. Large sections are dedicated to the genesis and musical description of the featured opera, together with those of smaller significant works, whether symphonic, religious, solo vocal, or chamber. Macdonald’s narrative is fluid and easy to read, making the most of some delightfully colourful quotations from Bizet’s letters (which are, however, only given in English, frustrating the scholar who might want to take their study further and prefer the original French).
Contextualization of Bizet’s life and works is a strong point of the book, and Macdonald appeals to a wide readership with his evocative, yet nononsense prose to describe things as varied as Bizet’s familial and artistic network, the ‘Haussmanization’ of Paris’s thoroughfares, and the building sites Bizet would have had to circumnavigate to get from his home to Paris’s theatre district. This sort of contextualization suggests an almost micro-historical approach to Bizet’s biography, and yet this culturally sensitive framework sits unhappily with the rather traditionally informed judgements that pepper Macdonald’s narrative. For example, the influential teacher and Institut member François Bazin is described as a ‘nonentity’ (p. 17) for not having left a siginificant mark on a certain history of French music. On the same page, the rise of Offenbach in the late 1840s is tied to a ‘decline in Parisian tastes’, and a bit later Macdonald refers to the ‘healthier traditions of music-making in Germany’ (p. 27). He is reluctant to engage with anti-Wagnerian criticisms of Bizet’s music, dismissing these arguments as pure uninformed nonsense, and blatantly ignores Nietzsche’s rather tongue-in-cheek championing of Bizet and Carmen’s italianità in Der Fall Wagner following Bizet’s death as an antidote to Wagnerian obscurantism and leitmotivic technique. Moreover, Macdonald writes scathingly of the critical landscape of the time, the littérateurs who were supposedly barely musically literate, and decries all Wagnerian obsession of the critics as pedantry. Of course, there is a strong element of truth to what he says, but it is the wider context and social, political, and artistic anxieties revealed by these debates that are of interest, particularly in a revisionist historiography; all these elements are dismissed in his quest for an affirmation of the value of Bizet and his art. Macdonald rather shoots himself in the foot: it is precisely through rereading that history...
