It’s regularly voted the most popular opera in the world, but Georges Bizet had no idea that his final work would become such a triumph, as Martin Buzacott explains. Prosper Mérimée was a French ...

Bizet’s Carmen has everything you want from an opera: high drama, passionate characters, a love story. And what’s more it’s absolutely packed with great melodies – even if you don’t know the opera, ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The 150th anniversary of Bizet’s death this year has not received much attention. Only aged 36, Bizet had ...

Sally Macarthur does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

After the composer’s one-act opera Djamileh (1871), a director of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, Camille du Locle, suggested that Bizet collaborate with two of Paris’s leading librettists: Henri Meilhac and ...

Georges Bizet was just 24 when he wrote his first full-scale opera. He soon wished that he hadn’t. The Pearl Fishers, wrote one caustic Parisian critic, had “neither fishermen in the libretto nor ...

Bizet came from a very musical family – his father was a composer and his mother was a pianist – and his own musical talents were obvious from an early age. In fact, he was such a talented child that ...