Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet entered the Paris Conservatoire at nine and at eighteen won the Prix de Rome, France's top prize for young composers. For all that early promise, his career was a string of operas that failed or half-succeeded, and he supported himself partly by arranging other composers' music and giving piano lessons.

Carmen changed everything, but not in time. Its premiere in March 1875 unsettled audiences with its realism, a working-class heroine, and an on-stage murder, and Bizet died of a heart attack three months later at thirty-six, believing the opera a failure. Within years it had become one of the most performed operas in the world.

Carmen is the place to start, whether the full opera or the orchestral suite drawn from it. Then try the Symphony in C, written when he was seventeen and unperformed until 1935.