 After his early Symphony in C, Bizet's purely orchestral output is sparse. The Roma symphony over which he laboured for more than eight years compares poorly, in Dean's view, with its juvenile predecessor. The work, says Dean, owes something to Gounod, and contains passages that recall Weber and Mendelssohn. However, Dean contends that the work suffers from poor organisation and an excess of pretentious music; he calls it a "misfire". Bizet's other mature orchestral work, the overture Patrie, is similarly dismissed: "an awful warning of the danger of confusing art with patriotism". The musicologist Hugh Macdonald argues that Bizet's best orchestral music is found in the suites that he derived respectively from the piano work Jeux d 'enfants and the incidental music for L'Arlésienne. In these he demonstrates a maturity of style that, had he lived longer, might have been the basis for future great orchestral works.
