Jacques Bizet

Portrait of six-year-old Jacques Bizet by Jules-Élie Delaunay , Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Jacques Bizet (born July 10, 1872 in Paris , † November 3, 1922 there ) was a French entrepreneur and writer . He was the son of the composer Georges Bizet .

After his father died when Bizet was three years old, his mother Geneviève Halévy Bizet married the Jewish lawyer Émile Straus. During his school days Jacques went to the same class as the later writer Marcel Proust , which resulted in a lifelong friendship. However, she was so intimate on the part of Proust that he fell in love with Bizet; However, Bizet had refused the mutual sexual intercourse desired by Proust.

After leaving school, Bizet studied medicine at the University of Paris for two years before working as a journalist and, together with Proust and his cousin Daniel Halévy, published the literary magazine Le Banquet . In 1892 it published the first French translations of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche , who himself was an admirer of the operatic music of Bizet's father. In March 1893, the magazine was discontinued without notice or explanation. As a result, Bizet wrote some plays influenced by Pierre Carlet de Marivaux and Oscar Wilde .

Bizet revered his father's music for a lifetime, who appeared to him as a legendary figure of light due to his untimely death. Until 1908, Bizet tried several times to convince the well-known music critic and avowed admirer of his father, Romain Rolland , to write a detailed biography of Georges Bizet. Although Rolland was not averse, he never got around to it, which Bizet disappointed.

Bizet was also the general representative of Georges Richard , with whom he founded the Unic automobile company. Thereby he made the acquaintance of Jules Salomon . Thanks to his financial commitment, in 1909, together with Richard and Salomon, he founded the later automobile company Le Zèbre , which worked under the name “Bizet Constructeur” until 1911.

During years of alcohol and drug problems, Bizet dealt intensively with the suicide, which he finally committed with a head shot in 1922, only fifteen days before Proust's death.

literature

• John W. Klein: Georges Bizet's Tragic Son , in: Music & Letters , Oxford University 1968.