What location were the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique in?
Bizet's first opera, the one-act Le docteur Miracle, was written in 1856 when the 18-year-old composer was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris. It was Bizet's winning entry in a competition organised by the celebrated composer Jacques Offenbach, and gained him a cash award, a gold medal, and a performance of the prize work at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. In 1857 Bizet was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome, and as a result spent most of the following three years in Italy, where he wrote Don Procopio, a short opera buffa in the style of Donizetti. By this time Bizet had written several non-stage works, including his Symphony in C, but the poor reception accorded to his 1858 Te Deum, a religious work he composed in Rome, helped convince him that his future lay primarily with the musical theatre. He planned and possibly began several operatic works before his return to Paris in 1860, but none of these projects came to fruition.In Paris, Bizet discovered the difficulties faced by young and relatively unknown composers trying to get their operas performed. Of the capital's two state-subsidised opera houses, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, the former offered a static repertoire in which works by foreign composers, particularly Rossini and Meyerbeer, were dominant. Even established French composers such as Gounod had difficulty getting works performed there. At the Opéra-Comique, innovation was equally rare; although more French works were performed, the style and character of most productions had hardly changed since the 1830s. However, one condition of the Opéra-Comique's state funding was that from time to time it should produce one-act works by former Prix de Rome laureates. Under this provision, Bizet wrote La guzla de l'Emir, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, and this went into rehearsal early in 1862.In April 1862, as the La guzla rehearsals proceeded, Bizet was approached by Léon Carvalho, manager of the independent Théâtre Lyrique company. Carvalho had been offered an annual grant of 100,000 francs by the retiring Minister of Fine Arts, Count Walewski, on condition that each year he stage a new three-act opera from a recent Prix de Rome winner. Carvalho had a high opinion of Bizet's abilities, and offered him the libretto of Les pêcheurs de perles, an exotic story by Carré and Eugène Cormon set on the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Sensing the opportunity for a genuine theatrical success, Bizet accepted the commission. Because Walewski restricted his grant to composers who had not had any previous work performed commercially, Bizet hurriedly withdrew La guzla from the Opéra-Comique; it has never been performed, and the music has disappeared.
Paris