[115] Newman perceives evidence of Bizet's later achievements in many of his earliest works: "[A]gain and again we light upon some touch or other in them that only a musician with a dramatic root of the matter in him could have achieved. [2] Heutige Hörer mögen auch Parallelen zur Musik Franz Schuberts wahrnehmen können, der zur Zeit Bizets in Frankreich jedoch kaum bekannt war.

[126] Among the opera's early champions were Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and particularly Wagner, who commented: "Here, thank God, at last for a change is somebody with ideas in his head.

Bizet would later write to Marmontel: "In your class one learns something besides the piano; one becomes a musician". Bizet schrieb daraus eine Suite, deren erste Aufführung am 10. [14] Two of his songs, "Petite Marguerite" and "La Rose et l'abeille", were published in 1854.

Don Procopio was revived in Monte Carlo in 1906;[130] an Italian version of Les pêcheurs de perles was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on 13 November 1916, with Caruso in the leading tenor role,[131] and it has since become a staple at many opera houses. Only when the leading singers threatened to withdraw from the production did the management give way. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

He played a piano version to a select audience that included the Opéra's principal baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, hoping that the singer's approval might influence the directors of the Opéra to stage the work. According to Bizet they considered him an unsuitable catch: "penniless, left-wing, anti-religious and Bohemian",[65] which Dean observes are odd grounds of objection from "a family bristling with artists and eccentrics".

This prize carried with it a five-year state pension, two years of which musicians were bound to spend at the French Academy in Rome. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. “I should write better music,” he wrote in October 1866 to his friend and pupil Edmond Galabert, “if I believed a lot of things which are not true.” In fact the skepticism and materialism of the dominant Positivist philosophy persistently troubled Bizet; it may well have been an inability to reconcile his intelligence with his emotions that caused him to embark on so many operatic projects that he never brought to a conclusion. [Henri] Meilhac and [Ludovic] Halévy are doing my piece". Bei Aufführungen und Aufnahmen der zweiten Suite wird Guirauds Beitrag meist nicht erwähnt.