born July 10, 1830, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies
died Nov. 13, 1903, Paris  

French Impressionist painter, who endured prolonged financial hardship in keeping faith with the aims of Impressionism. Despite acute eye trouble, his later years were his most prolific. The Parisian and provincial scenes of this period include “Place du Théâtre Française” (1898) and “Bridge at Bruges” (1903).

Pissarro was the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant, Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié. At the age of 12 he left home for studies in Paris, where he showed an early interest in art. Returning to the West Indies after five years to work in his father's store, he began making sketches of the exotic island and its people. Because he was unable to obtain his father's permission to study art, he ran away to Caracas in 1853 and remained there for two years with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye. Finally, Pissarro's father relented, and in 1855 he returned to France. His earliest canvases, dating from this period, are figure paintings and landscapes of the tropics and of the French countryside; although broadly painted, they show the careful observation of nature that was to remain a characteristic of his art throughout his life.

The uninspired academic teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was enrolled, led Pissarro to seek out the painter Camille Corot, who permitted Pissarro to call himself Corot's “pupil” at a Salon exhibition in 1864. At this time Pissarro was also attracted to the rural, sentimental paintings of the Barbizon artist Jean-François Millet and to the works of Gustave Courbet, the leading proponent of everyday Realism. During the 1860s Pissarro participated in the famous Parisian Café Guerbois discussions, in which artists and writers exchanged ideas, and worked with the younger painters Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. To escape the Franco-German War, in 1870 Pissarro fled to England; there he and Monet, who had also fled France, visited the museums, where they viewed British landscape paintings. It was in London that Pissarro married Julie Vellay, formerly his mother's maid, who had already borne him two of their seven children.

When Pissarro returned to France in 1871, he found his house in Louveciennes looted and a great number of his paintings destroyed. Soon he was to look for another house in Pontoise. (Because it was costly to live in Paris, Pissarro, like several of his painter friends, lived in villages not far from the city.) His surroundings formed the theme of his art for some 30 years and were always carefully chosen: “I require a spot that has beauty!” At Pontoise he was joined by Paul Cézanne in 1872, and the two of them painted out-of-doors, even in the middle of winter.

Pissarro's paintings are never dramatic; on the contrary, his leading motifs during the 1870s and 1880s are simply houses, factories, trees, haystacks, fields, labouring peasants, and river scenes. Forms do not dissolve but remain firm, and colours are strong; during the latter part of the 1870s his comma-like brushstrokes frequently recorded the sparkling scintillation of light, as in “Orchard with Flowering Fruit Trees, Springtime, Pontoise” (1877). Although his paintings were sold by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who represented several of the Impressionists, Pissarro continued to experience financial hardships, which he described in letters to his eldest son, Lucien; this remarkable correspondence began in 1883 and lasted for 20 years.

In some of the letters to his son, Pissarro expressed dissatisfaction with his own work. Preoccupied by problems of style and technique, he eagerly embraced the Neo-Impressionist theories of Georges Seurat, whom he met in 1885 through the painter Paul Signac. Seurat's technique, consisting of meticulously painted small dots of juxtaposed colours, was adopted by Pissarro; for about five years he painted in this “divisionist” manner, a style which made his works unpopular with dealers, collectors, and even his old fellow artists. Overwhelmingly discouraged by their continuing state of poverty, Madame Pissarro considered drowning herself and their two youngest children. Finally, Pissarro abandoned the style, not, however, because of the opposition he met but because “it was impossible to be true to my sensations and consequently to render life and movement, impossible to be faithful to the effects, so random and so admirable, of nature . . . .” At about this time, also, there was an estrangement from Paul Gauguin, who had formerly worked at his side but now was involved with the new Symbolist movement.

A large and successful retrospective exhibition of Pissarro's paintings was held by Durand-Ruel in 1892, giving the artist greater financial stability, although by this time he was troubled by a chronic eye infection that frequently made it impossible for him to work out-of-doors. Both in 1893 and 1897 he took hotel rooms in Paris from which he painted 24 canvases of the city's streets by day and by night, in sun, rain, and fog. During the 1890s he also did a series of river scenes in Rouen, likewise depicting the various effects of nature. From 1900 until his death three years later, Pissarro continued working, mainly in Paris, Éragny, Dieppe, and Le Havre, with freshness of vision and increasing freedom in his technique. More than 1,600 works, consisting of oils, gouaches, temperas, pastels—and even paintings on fans and on porcelain—as well as nearly 200 fine prints, give testimony to the high quality of Pissarro's half century of work.

Pissarro was the only Impressionist painter who participated in all eight of the group's exhibitions. His kindness, warmth, wisdom, and encouraging words cast him in a fatherly role to struggling younger artists—Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Gauguin—who were exploring new means of personal expression. Despite financial burdens that continued until he reached his 60s, Pissarro never lost faith in the new art, believing that “one must be sure of success to the very end, for without that there is no hope!”

 "Pissarro, Camille."Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD .[Accessed January  29, 2007].

born February 25, 1841, Limoges, France
died December 3, 1919, Cagnes  

French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.

Early years

Renoir was born into a family of artisans. His father, a tailor who had seven children, moved with his family to Paris about 1845. Renoir demonstrated his gift at an early age. Quickly recognizing his talent, his parents apprenticed him, at age 13, to work in a porcelain factory, where he learned to decorate plates with bouquets of flowers. Shortly after that, he was painting fans and then cloth panels representing religious themes for missionaries to hang in their churches. His skill and the great pleasure he took in his work soon convinced him he should study painting in earnest. Having saved a little money, he decided, in 1862, to take evening courses in drawing and anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts as well as painting lessons at the studio of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss painter who had been a student of the 19th-century Neoclassical painter J.-A.-D. Ingres. Although the academic style of his teacher did not suit Renoir, he nevertheless accepted its discipline in order to acquire the elementary skills needed to become a painter.

Renoir felt a much greater affinity with three students who entered the studio a few months later: Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, and Frédéric Bazille. All four students dreamed of an art that was closer to life and free from past traditions. The shared ideals of the four young men quickly led to a strong friendship, and Renoir's early works include Portrait of the Painter Bazille (1867), The Painter Sisley and His Wife (1868), and Monet Painting in His Garden (1873). At the same time in another workshop at the Académie Suisse, the young artists Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro were preoccupied with the same problems as Renoir and his friends. With Bazille as the intermediary, the two groups met frequently.

Association with the Impressionists

 

Circumstances encouraged Renoir to attempt a new freedom and experimentation in his style. The convention of the time was that a painting—even a landscape—had to be executed in the studio. In the spring of 1864, however, Gleyre's four students moved temporarily to the forest of Fontainebleau, where they devoted themselves to painting directly from nature. The Fontainebleau forest had earlier attracted other artists, among them Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, who insisted that art represent the reality of everyday life, even though they had not yet completely renounced the constraints imposed by traditional training. In 1863 Édouard Manet took a much bolder step: his picture Déjeuner sur l'herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass”) provoked a violent scandal because its subject and technique stressed the observation of modern reality over the repetition of a traditional ideal. Manet's daring made him, in the eyes of these young artists, the leader of a new movement.

Conditions were ripe for the birth of a new pictorial language, and Impressionism, bursting upon the scene, attracted notoriety with the first Impressionist exposition of 1874, held independently of the official Salon. It took 10 years for the movement to acquire its definitive form, its independent vision, and its unique perceptiveness. But one can point to 1874 as the year of departure for the movement that subsequently spawned modern art.

Renoir's work is a perfect illustration of this new approach in thought and technique. By using small, multicoloured strokes, he evoked the vibration of the atmosphere, the sparkling effect of foliage, and especially the luminosity of a young woman's skin in the outdoors. Renoir and his companions stubbornly strove to produce light-suffused paintings from which black was excluded, but their pursuits led to many disappointments: their paintings, so divergent from traditional formulas, were frequently rejected by the juries of the Salon and were extremely difficult to sell. Despite the continuing criticism, some of the Impressionists were making themselves known, as much among art critics as among the lay public. Renoir, because of his fascination with the human figure, was distinctive among the others, who were more interested in landscape. Thus, he obtained several orders for portraits and was introduced, thanks to the publisher Georges Charpentier, to upper-middle-class society, from whom he obtained commissions for portraits, most notably of women and children.

Renoir mastered the ability to convey his immediate visual impressions, and his paintings showed great vitality, emphasizing the pleasures of life despite the financial worries that troubled him. Several of his masterpieces date from this period: La Loge (1874; “The Theatre Box”), Le Moulin de la galette (1876), The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), and Mme Charpentier and Her Children (1878). Charpentier organized a personal exposition for the works of Renoir in 1879 in the gallery La Vie Moderne.

Rejection of Impressionism

 

In 1881 and 1882 Renoir made several trips to Algeria, Italy, and Provence, and these eventually had a considerable effect on his art and on his life. He became convinced that the systematic use of the Impressionistic technique was no longer sufficient for him and that small brushstrokes of contrasting colours placed side by side did not allow him to convey the satiny effects of the skin. He also discovered that black did not deserve the opprobrium given to it by his comrades and that, in certain cases, it had a striking effect and gave a great intensity to the other colours. During his journey to Italy, he discovered Raphael and the hallmarks of classicism: the beauty of drawing, the purity of a clear line to define a form, and the expressive force of smooth painting when used to enhance the suppleness and modeling of a body. At this same time, he happened to read Il libro dell'arte (1437; A Treatise on Painting) by Cennino Cennini, which reinforced his new ideas. All of these revelations were so powerful and unexpected that they provoked a crisis, and he was tempted to break with Impressionism, which he had already begun to doubt. He felt that until now he had been mistaken in pursuing the ephemeral in art.

Most of his works executed from 1883 to 1884 on are so marked by a new discipline that art historians have grouped them under the title the “Ingres” period (to signify their vague similarity to the technique of J.-A.-D. Ingres) or the “harsh,” or “dry,” period. Renoir's experiments with Impressionism were not wasted, however, because he retained a luminous palette. Nevertheless, in paintings from this period, such as The Umbrellas (c. 1883) and many depictions of bathers, Renoir emphasized volume, form, contours, and line rather than colour and brushstroke.

His strong reaction against Impressionism continued until about 1890. During these years he made several trips to southern France: Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, and Martigues. The nature of this sunlit region gave greater encouragement to his separation from Impressionism, which to him was associated with the landscapes of the valley of the Seine. Southern France offered him scenes bursting with colour and sensuality. At the same time, the seemingly joyous spontaneity of nature gave him the desire to depart from his newfound adherence to the dictates of classicism. While in southern France, he recovered the instinctive freshness of his art; he painted women at their bath with the same healthful bloom he would give to bouquets of flowers.

His financial situation was appreciably improved; he was married in 1890 to Aline Charigot (some sources give the year as 1881), and the exposition that was organized for him in 1892 by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was a great success. Renoir's future was assured, and his work of that period reflected his new security and also his confidence in the future.

Later years

Renoir had his first attack of rheumatism in 1894, and, as the attacks became more and more frequent, he spent more and more time in southern France, where the climate was better for his health. About 1899 he sought refuge in the small village of Cagnes; in 1907 he settled there permanently, buying the estate of Les Collettes, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1910 he was no longer able to walk. Although his infirmity became more and more constraining, Renoir never ceased to paint; when his fingers were no longer supple, he continued by binding his paintbrush to his hand.

In spite of his misfortune, Renoir's paintings during this period still embodied a cheerful attitude toward life. His themes became more personal and intimate, focusing on portraits of his wife, his children, and Gabrielle, his maid, who often also posed for his nude paintings. His still lifes were composed of flowers and fruits from his own garden, and the landscapes were those that surrounded him. The nudes, especially, reflect the serenity that he found in his work. Examples of this period include The Artist's Family (1896) and Sleeping Bather (1897). He attempted to embody his admiration for the female form in sculpture, with the assistance of young Richard Guino. Since Renoir was no longer able to do sculpture himself, Guino became, about 1913, the skillful instrument who willingly followed his directions. He yielded before the personality of Renoir and succeeded so well that the works have all the qualities of Renoir's style.

Renoir's wife died in 1915 after having returned from Gérardmer, where she had gone to see their son Jean, who had been seriously wounded in the war, and who would go on to become an important filmmaker. Renoir survived his wife by four years. Several months before his death, he was able to go to Paris to see his Portrait of Mme Georges Charpentier (1876–77), which had been recently acquired by the state. On that occasion, several friends wheeled him for the last time through the Louvre to view the masterpieces that he had venerated throughout his life.

 

"Renoir, Pierre-Auguste."Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD .[Accessed January  29, 2007].

born Nov. 29, 1797, Bergamo, Cisalpine Republic
died April 8, 1848, Bergamo, Lombardy, Austrian Empire  

Italian opera composer whose numerous operas in both Italian and French represent a transitional stage in operatic development between Rossini and Verdi. Among his major works are Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), La fille du régiment (1840), and La favorite (1840). In his serious operas he developed considerably the dramatic weight and emotional content of the genre, and his comic operas have a sparkling wit and gaiety all their own.

Early life.

The youngest of three sons of the caretaker of the monte di pieta (the municipal pawnshop), Donizetti began his musical studies with Giovanni Simone Mayr, a Bavarian priest who was musical director of Sta. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo's chief church, and also a successful composer of opera. As a choirboy Donizetti did not shine, but Mayr perceived in him a nascent musical ability and secured his entry into the Liceo Filarmonico (the music school) at Bologna, where he had a thorough training in fugue and counterpoint. His father hoped he would become a church composer, but, though he did compose a vast quantity of sacred music, his natural instinct was for the theatre.

Donizetti scored his first success with Enrico di Borgogna, which first appeared in 1818 at the Teatro San Luca, in Venice, and during the next 12 years he composed no fewer than 31 operas, most of them produced at Naples and now forgotten. In 1830 his Anna Bolena, produced in Milan, carried his fame abroad to all the European capitals and eventually across the Atlantic. Two years later he scored another lasting success with L'elisir d'amore (The Elixir of Love), a comedy full of charm and character with a libretto by Felice Romani, the best theatre poet of the day. Lucrezia Borgia (1833), also with a libretto by Romani, consolidated his reputation at La Scala in Milan and elsewhere. Like the opera composers Gioacchino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini before him, he next gravitated to Paris, where his Marino Faliero, though not a failure, suffered from comparison with Bellini's I Puritani, produced a few weeks before. Donizetti then returned to Naples for the production of his tragic masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor, on Sept. 26, 1835.

In 1828 Donizetti had married Virginia Vasseli, the sister of one of his closest friends in Rome; they made their home in Naples. He was deeply devoted to her and never really recovered his spirits after her death, soon after the stillbirth of a son, in 1837. His distress was exacerbated by the fact that none of the three children born to them survived birth. It seems clear that syphilis, to which Donizetti himself later succumbed, was already taking its toll of his family.

Success in Paris.

Donizetti continued to work in Naples until 1838, when municipal censors objected to the production of his Poliuto, which dealt with a Christian martyr, on the ground that the sacred subject was unsuitable for the stage. He thereupon returned to Paris, where the field had been cleared for him by Bellini's early death and Rossini's retirement. There he revived some of his best operas, though Lucrezia Borgia had to be withdrawn because of objections by Victor Hugo, on whose drama the libretto was based. Poliuto was produced in 1840 as Les Martyrs with a French text by Eugène Scribe. It was preceded two months earlier by the opéra comique La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment), which gained enormous popularity over the years through the performances of the leading sopranos of the day, including Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, Marcella Sembrich, Emma Albani, and other divas of the 19th century. Later in the same year the Paris Opéra produced La favorite, Donizetti's first essay in French grand opera.

Bartolomeo Merelli, a fellow pupil of Donizetti, was now director of La Scala and also of the Kärnthnerthor Theater, in Vienna. He engaged Donizetti to compose an opera for La Scala. The work, Maria Padilla, was produced in 1841 only a few weeks before the famous premiere of Verdi's Nabucco. Merelli also commissioned an opera for his Viennese theatre. There, Linda di Chamounix, a romantic opera semiseria, was produced in 1842 and dedicated to the empress Maria Anna. Donizetti had already been brought to the notice of the emperor Ferdinand I by his chancellor, Prince Metternich, and had conducted Rossini's Stabat Mater in his presence. He now received the appointment of official composer to the Emperor, which obliged him to be in Vienna for six months in the year but left him free to work elsewhere during the rest. At the same time Rossini, who had always furthered Donizetti's interests in Paris and entrusted to him the first performance of his Stabat Mater at Bologna, urged him to undertake the vacant directorship of the Liceo in that city. But Donizetti felt that he could not undertake this responsibility and preferred to continue his profitable operatic career. Back in Paris, he produced at the Théâtre Italien the delightful and witty comic opera, Don Pasquale.

Physical breakdown

But Donizetti was already in the grip of his fatal disease. He produced his last important opera, Dom Sébastien, with a libretto by Scribe, at the Paris Opéra in 1843 under the strain of constant headaches and occasional lapses of mental capacity. He suddenly aged, lost his good looks and his equability of temper, which had hitherto seen him through the trials of operatic production. Dom Sébastien, though unfavourably reviewed in the press, was nonetheless a success with the public.

The remaining years were a story of degeneration into hopeless insanity. As a patient in a private asylum near Paris, he had considerable difficulties with the French police, who were supported by the doctors; he was at last taken home to Bergamo by his devoted nephew Andrea, son of his eldest brother. He lingered on until April 8, 1848, a victim of general paralysis of the syphilitic insane, deprived of willpower, speech, and physical control. It was a pitiable end for a gay and handsome man who, unlike Bellini, was never envious of the successes of other composers and at all times displayed an openhearted generosity. To the French composer Hector Berlioz, for example, whose criticisms in Le Journal des Débats were consistently hostile, he spontaneously sent a letter of introduction to Prince Metternich, when Berlioz was about to leave for Vienna.

Donizetti always won more favour with the public than with the critics. During his lifetime his success was enormous and the rewards considerable. His popularity continued until the end of the century, but by 1914 his operas had almost disappeared from the repertory, overshadowed by the more substantial masterpieces of Verdi and Richard Wagner. In the 1950s there was a revival of interest in his works, after which it seemed unlikely that, at least, Lucia di Lammermoor, L'elisir d'amore, and Don Pasquale would be allowed to pass into oblivion.

Dyneley Hussey

Major Works

Operas

75 including Alfredo il Grande (1823); Emilia di Liverpool (1824); Le convenienze e le inconvenienze teatrali (1827); Il borgomastro di Sardaam (1827); La regina di Golconda (1828); Il giovedì grasso (1828); Il castello di Kenilworth (after Scott, 1829); Anna Bolena (1830); L'elisir d'amore (1832); Il furioso all'isola di San Domingo (1833); Torquato Tasso (1833); Lucrezia Borgia (1833); Maria Stuarda (1834); Gemma di Vergy (1834); Marino Faliero (after Byron, 1835); Lucia di Lammermoor (after Scott, 1835); Belisario (1836); Il campanello di notte (1836); Betly (1836); Pia de' Tolomei (1837); Roberto d'Evereux, Conte d'Essex (1837); Poliuto (1840); La fille du régiment (1840); La favorite (1840); Linda di Chamounix (1842); Don Pasquale (1843); Maria di Rohan (1843); Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal (1843).

Other works.

Two oratorios, several cantatas, religious pieces, at least 20 string quartets, three string quintets, and numerous songs.

 

 

"Donizetti, Gaetano."Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD .[Accessed January  29, 2007].

born Oct. 25, 1838, Paris
died June 3, 1875, Bougival, near Paris

original name  Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet  French composer best remembered for his opera Carmen (1875). His realistic approach influenced the verismo school of opera at the end of the 19th century.

Bizet's father was a singing teacher and his mother a gifted amateur pianist, and his musical talents declared themselves so early and so unmistakably that he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire before he had completed his 10th year. There, his teachers included the accomplished composers Charles Gounod and Fromental Halévy, and he quickly won a succession of prizes, culminating in the Prix de Rome, awarded for his cantata Clovis et Clotilde in 1857. This prize carried with it a five-year state pension, two years of which musicians were bound to spend at the French Academy in Rome.

Bizet had already shown a gift for composition far superior to that of a merely precocious boy. His first stage work, the one-act operetta Le Docteur miracle, performed in Paris in 1857, is marked simply by high spirits and an easy mastery of the operetta idiom of the day. His Symphony in C Major, however, written in 1855 but subsequently lost and not discovered and performed until 1935, will bear easy comparison with any of the works written at the same age of 17 by either Mozart or Felix Mendelssohn. Flowing and resourceful counterpoint, orchestral expertise, and a happy blend of the Viennese classical style with French melody give the symphony a high place in Bizet's output.

The young composer was already aware of his gifts and of the danger inherent in his facility. “I want to do nothing chic, ” he wrote from Rome, “I want to have ideas before beginning a piece, and that is not how I worked in Paris.” In Rome he set himself to study Robert Schumann, Carl Maria von Weber, Mendelssohn, and Gounod, who was regarded as more than half a German composer by the admirers of the fashionable French composer Daniel Auber.

Mozart's music affects me too deeply and makes me really unwell. Certain things by Rossini have the same effect; but oddly enough Beethoven and Meyerbeer never go so far as that. As for Haydn, he has sent me to sleep for some time past.

Instead of spending his statutory third year in Germany, he chose to stay on in Rome, where he collected impressions that were eventually collected to form a second C major symphony (Roma), first performed in 1869. An Italian-text opera, Don Procopio, written at this time, shows Donizetti's style, and the ode Vasco de Gama is largely modelled on Gounod and Meyerbeer.

When Bizet returned to Paris in the autumn of 1860, he was accompanied by his friend Ernest Guiraud, who was to be responsible for popularizing Bizet's work after his death. In spite of very decided opinions, Bizet was still immature in his outlook on life (youthfully cynical, for instance, in his attitude toward women) and was plagued by an artistic conscience that accused him of preferring the facilely charming in music to the truly great. He was even ashamed of his admiration for the operas of his Italian contemporary Giuseppe Verdi and longed for the faith and vision of the typical Romantic artist, which he could never achieve. “I should write better music,” he wrote in October 1866 to his friend and pupil Edmond Galabert, “if I believed a lot of things which are not true.” In fact the skepticism and materialism of the dominant Positivist philosophy persistently troubled Bizet; it may well have been an inability to reconcile his intelligence with his emotions that caused him to embark on so many operatic projects that he never brought to a conclusion. The kind of drama demanded by the French operatic public of the day could very seldom engage his whole personality. The weaknesses in the first two operas that he completed after his return to Paris are a result not so much of the composer's excessive regard for public taste as of his flagging interest in the drama. Neither Les Pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers; first performed 1863) nor La Jolie Fille de Perth (1867; The Fair Maid of Perth) had a libretto capable of eliciting or focussing the latent musical and dramatic powers that Bizet eventually proved to possess. The chief interest of Les Pêcheurs de perles lies in its exotic Oriental setting and the choral writing, which is more individual than that of the lyrical music, over which Gounod still casts a long shadow. Although La Jolie Fille de Perth bears only a skeletal resemblance to Sir Walter Scott's novel, the characterization is stronger (the gypsy Mab and the “Danse bohémienne” anticipate Carmen), and even such conventional features as the night patrol, the drinking chorus, the ballroom scene, and the heroine's madness exhibit a freshness and elegance of language that raise the work unmistakably above the general level of French opera of the day.

Although warmly acknowledged by Berlioz, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Liszt, Bizet was still obliged during these years to undertake the musical hackwork that only the most successful French composers were able to avoid. Stories of his moodiness and readiness to pick a quarrel suggest a profound inner uncertainty, and the cynicism and vulnerability of adolescence hardly yielded to a mature emotional attitude of life until his marriage, on June 3, 1869, to Geneviève Halévy, the daughter of the composer of the opera La Juive (1835; The Jewess). Between his engagement in 1867 and his marriage, Bizet was himself aware of undergoing “an extraordinary change . . . both as artist and man. I am purifying myself and becoming better.” Adverse criticism of certain features of La Jolie Fille de Perth prompted him to break once and for all with “the school of flonflons, trills and falsehoods” and to concentrate his attention on the two elements that had always been the strongest features of his music—the creation of exotic atmosphere and the concern with dramatic truth. The first of these was brilliantly exemplified in the one-act Djamileh (1872), original enough to be accused of “exceeding even Richard Wagner in bizarrerie and strangeness”; and the second in the incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne (1872), which is marked by a delicacy and tenderness quite new to his music. Besides the happiness of his marriage, which was crowned by the birth of a son in July of this same year, his letters show that he was deeply stirred by the events of the Franco-Prussian War, and, during the siege of Paris, he served in the national guard.

It was in the first flush of this new emotional maturity, but with the ardour and enthusiasm of youth still unshadowed, that he wrote his masterpiece, Carmen, based on a story by the contemporary French author Prosper Mérimée. The realism of the work, which caused a scandal when it was first produced in 1875, was to inaugurate a new chapter in the history of opera; and the combination of brilliant local colour and directness of emotional impact with fastidious workmanship and a wealth of melody have made this opera a favourite with musicians and public alike. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche regarded it as the type of “Mediterranean” music that was the antidote to Wagner's Teutonic sound. The scandal caused by Carmen was only beginning to yield to enthusiastic admiration when Bizet suddenly died. (M. Du P.C.)

Major Works

Operas.

Eight published operas, including Les Pêcheurs de perles (first performed 1863); Carmen (1875).

Orchestral works.

Symphony in C major (composed 1855); Petite Suite, arranged from Jeux d'enfants (1871); suite, L'Arlésienne (1872).

Incidental music.

Incidental music for Daudet's L'Arlésienne (1872).

Piano music.

Jeux d'enfants, 12 pieces for piano duet (1871); Variations chromatiques de concert (1868).

Songs.

Thirty-seven published songs, including “Chanson d'avril” (1866?); “Berceuse” (1868).

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
born April 25 [May 7, New Style], 1840, Votkinsk, Russia
died October 25 [November 6], 1893, St. Petersburg  

 

 

In 1854 his mother fell victim to cholera and died. During the boy's last years at the school, Tchaikovsky's father finally came to realize his son's vocation and invited the professional teacher Rudolph Kündinger to give him piano lessons. At age 17 Tchaikovsky came under the influence of the Italian singing instructor Luigi Piccioli, the first person to appreciate his musical talents, and thereafter Tchaikovsky developed a lifelong passion for Italian music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni proved another revelation that deeply affected his musical taste. In the summer of 1861 he traveled outside Russia for the first time, visiting Germany, France, and England, and in October of that year he began attending music classes offered by the recently founded Russian Musical Society. When St. Petersburg Conservatory opened the following fall, Tchaikovsky was among its first students. After making the decision to dedicate his life to music, he resigned from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as a clerk.

Tchaikovsky spent nearly three years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with Nikolay Zaremba and composition and instrumentation with Anton Rubinstein. Among his earliest orchestral works was an overture entitled The Storm (composed 1864), a mature attempt at dramatic program music. The first public performance of any of his works took place in August 1865, when Johann Strauss the Younger conducted Tchaikovsky's Characteristic Dances at a concert in Pavlovsk, near St. Petersburg.

 

In March 1871 the audience at Moscow's Hall of Nobility witnessed the successful performance of Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1, and in April 1872 he finished another opera, The Oprichnik. While spending the summer at his sister's estate in Ukraine, he began to work on his Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, later dubbed The Little Russian, which he completed later that year. The Oprichnik was first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in April 1874. Despite its initial success, the opera did not convince the critics, with whom Tchaikovsky ultimately agreed. His next opera, Vakula the Smith (1874), later revised as Cherevichki (1885; The Little Shoes), was similarly judged. In his early operas the young composer experienced difficulty in striking a balance between creative fervour and his ability to assess critically the work in progress. However, his instrumental works began to earn him his reputation, and, at the end of 1874, Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, a work destined for fame despite its initial rejection by Rubinstein. The concerto premiered successfully in Boston in October 1875, with Hans von Bülow as the soloist. During the summer of 1875, Tchaikovsky composed Symphony No. 3 in D Major, which gained almost immediate acclaim in Russia.

At the very end of 1875, Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel in Europe. He was powerfully impressed by a performance of Georges Bizet's Carmen at the Opéra-Comique in Paris; in contrast, the production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, which he attended in Bayreuth, Germany, during the summer of 1876, left him cold. In November 1876 he put the final touches on his symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, a work with which he felt particularly pleased. Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky had completed the composition of Swan Lake, which was the first in his famed trilogy of ballets. The ballet's premiere took place on February 20, 1877, but it was not a success owing to poor staging and choreography, and it was soon dropped from the repertoire.

 

The period after Tchaikovsky's departure from Moscow proved creatively very productive. Early in 1878 he finished several of his most famous compositions—the opera Eugene Onegin, the Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, and the Violin Concerto in D Major. From December 1878 to August 1879 he worked on the opera The Maid of Orleans, which was not particularly well received. Over the next 10 years Tchaikovsky produced his operas Mazepa (1883; based on Aleksandr Pushkin's Poltava) and The Enchantress (1887), as well as the masterly symphonies Manfred (1885) and Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (1888). His other major achievements of this period include Serenade for Strings in C Major, Opus 48 (1880), Capriccio italien (1880), and the 1812 Overture (1880).

 

In the spring of 1891 Tchaikovsky was invited to visit the United States on the occasion of the inauguration of Carnegie Hall in New York City. He conducted before enthusiastic audiences in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Upon his return to Russia, he completed his last two compositions for the stage—the one-act opera Iolanta (1891) and a two-act ballet Nutcracker (1892). In February 1893 he began working on his Symphony No. 6 in B Minor (Pathétique), which was destined to become his most celebrated masterpiece. He dedicated it to his nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davydov, who in Tchaikovsky's late years became increasingly an object of his passionate love. His world stature was confirmed by his triumphant European and American tours and his acceptance in June 1893 of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.

 fashionable late 18th- and 19th-century dance for four couples in square formation. Imported by English aristocrats in 1815 from elite Parisian ballrooms, it consisted of four, or sometimes five, contredanses; like the contredanse (q.v.), the quadrille depended more on the cooperative execution of intertwining figures, or floor patterns, than on intricate stepwork. Each of the quadrille's sections was danced with prescribed combinations of figures, such as the tour de deux mains (“two-hand turn”), in which the couple held hands and turned; or the chaîne des dames (“ladies' chain”), in which opposite women first passed each other by the right hand, and then each gave her left hand to the opposite man, who turned her into place beside himself. The quadrille was frequently danced to a medley of opera melodies. The lancers, a variation of the quadrille, became popular in the late 1800s and was still danced in the mid-20th century in folk-dance clubs.

 

 ively courtship dance of Bohemian folk origin. It is characterized by three quick steps and a hop and is danced to music in ²/₄ time. The couples cover much space as they circle about the dance floor. Introduced in Paris in about 1843, it became extraordinarily popular in ballrooms and on the stage, sweeping across Europe and the Americas from Scandinavia to Latin America and developing many varieties. Still popular in the 20th century both as a folk dance and as a ballroom dance, polkas also appear in stage works—e.g., in Jaromir Weinberger's opera Schwanda the Bagpiper and in Bedřich Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride.

 

 highly popular ballroom dance evolved from the ländler in the 18th century. Characterized by a step, slide, and step in ³/₄ time, the waltz, with its turning, embracing couples, at first shocked polite society. It became the ballroom dance par excellence of the 19th century, however, and tenaciously maintained its popularity in the 20th. Its variations include the rapid, whirling Viennese waltz and the gliding, dipping Boston. Composers of famous waltzes include Frédéric Chopin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Johann Strauss and his sons, especially Johann Strauss the Younger, who was known as “the Waltz King.”

 

 "waltz."Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD .[Accessed January  17, 2007].