Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Lot 31
11.12.2024 14:00UTC +00:00
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£ 1 638
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ID 1349717
Lot 31 | Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
Estimate value
£ 2 000 – 3 000
Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
Autograph manuscript, transcription for piano solo of Massenet's piano duet Scènes de bal, op. 17, no.2, 'Première Danse', [perhaps c.1871-72]
48 bars on six systems, one page, 322 x 270mm, title at head 'No. 2, Première danse', marked up by the engraver, paper by Lard-Esnault of Paris. Provenance: [possibly W. Westley Manning, Esq., R.B.A., A.R.E. – his posthumous sale, Sotheby's, 11-12 October 1954, lot 42].

An arrangement for piano solo of a duet by his friend Jules Massenet. Massenet composed his seven Scènes de bal duets in 1869-70 (though the title page of the published edition claimed they were composed in Pest in 1865): Bizet's piano solo transcriptions were no doubt commissioned by the publisher Hartmann, whose premises on the boulevard de la Madeleine were an unofficial centre of Parisian musical life at the time. Such musical arrangements had been Bizet's main source of income for the ten years or more after his return from Rome in 1860. Macdonald dates Bizet's work to 'perhaps c.1871-72' alongside his transcriptions of Massenet's Scènes hongroises, also for Hartmann, placing it in a critical period just after the upheaval of the siege of Paris (when Massenet and Bizet had served together in the National Guard) and the subsequent Paris Commune, and just before the commission by the Opéra-Comique of Carmen in June 1872.

The autograph of Scène de bal no.1 is at the Library of Congress, nos 3 and 6 at the Stiftelsen Musikkulturens främjande in Stockholm, and no.5 at the Fondation Martin Bodmer (formerly in the Stefan Zweig collection). No version by Bizet of the seventh movement survives. T51.2 in Macdonald, The Bizet Catalogue (online).
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