Symphony in C (Bizet)

His widow, Geneviève Halévy (1849–1926), gave the manuscript to Reynaldo Hahn, who passed it along with other papers to the archives of the conservatory library, where it was found in 1933 by Jean Chantavoine.

[4][5] Soon thereafter, Bizet's first British biographer Douglas Charles Parker (1885–1970) showed the manuscript to the conductor Felix Weingartner, who led the first performance in Basel, Switzerland, on 26 February 1935.

[6] The symphony was immediately hailed as a youthful masterpiece on a par with Felix Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, written at about the same age, and quickly became part of the standard Romantic repertoire.

[9] As Bizet would later write of this period: "Fifteen years ago [i.e. 1855/56], when I used to say "Sapho and the choruses from Ulysse are masterpieces", people laughed in my face.

[17] Although Bizet's symphony was closely drawing on Gounod's work, critics view it as a much superior composition, showing a precocious and sophisticated grasp of harmonic language and design, as well as originality and melodic inspiration.

[18] That the Symphony was never even mentioned in Bizet's extensive correspondence, let alone published in his lifetime, has given rise to speculation as to the composer's motives in suppressing the work.

If he never published it, this was because Bizet himself was opposed to the idea, having introduced into his work Don Procopio an excerpt from the symphony he thought suitable for this theatre piece.

However, the symphonic genre was not a popular one for French composers in the second half of the nineteenth century, who instead concentrated most of their large-scale efforts on theatrical and operatic music.

"[21] This bias against formal symphonic writing was also entrenched within the culture of the Paris Conservatory, which considered the symphony to be (as in the case of Bizet's own) a mere student exercise on the path toward submissions for the Prix de Rome, the highest prize a young French composer could attain.

[22] As the noted musicologist Julien Tiersot observed in 1903: In [19th-century] France the symphony was considered a scholastic exercise, so much so that for a long time it appeared only with those competing to be "sent to Rome."

But it clearly had no greater importance nor a higher artistic meaning in the eyes of the judges... Gounod, Félicien David, Henri Reber, they too, in their lost moments, wrote symphonies, works that did justice to the purity of their intentions, but none of which has remained alive.

[1] It may also have been, as hinted at by the 1938 correspondence from Chevrier-Choudens, that Bizet intended to mine his student effort for material in what he saw as more serious compositions (including, possibly, two aborted symphonies written while in Rome).

Whatever the case, the work remained unpublished, unplayed, and unknown at Bizet's death, passing into the possession of his widow, Geneviève Halévy.

Although Bizet's first biographer, Douglas Charles Parker, is widely credited with bringing the symphony to public attention, it was the French musicologist Jean Chantavoine who first revealed the existence of the work, in an article published in the periodical Le Ménestrel in 1933.

[7] Although a student assignment, many musicologists find the symphony shows a precocious grasp of harmonic language and design, a sophistication which has invited comparisons with Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Rossini, and Beethoven.