The movement titles are as follows: Originally there were ten numbers, with the seventh and eighth added after the first group; Trompette et tambour is adapted from a march at the start of act 5 of his opera Ivan IV.
[1] Bizet's biographer Winton Dean considers it to be a forerunner of similar childhood-related works by Debussy, Fauré and Ravel.
[2] He goes to comment that each "evokes a facet of childhood, but there is not a trace of triviality, self-consciousness or false sentiment".
[2] Harman and Mellers argue that, with the music Bizet wrote for the stage production of L'Arlésienne, the Jeux d'Enfants represents the rediscovery of his true musical nature, exploring his melodic gifts, while the concentrated form of short pieces allowed him to discover chromatic and enharmonic subtleties both "simple and single-minded", in contrast with the more romantic nostalgia of Schumann in his childhood pieces.
Sigfrid Karg-Elert wrote his orchestral suite after Bizet's Jeux d'enfants, Op.