Georges Bizet died on June 3, 1875, exactly three months after the premiere of Carmen, convinced that his life’s work was a colossal failure. This episode traces the Paris-born prodigy who entered the Conservatoire at nine after the age rule was waived, astonished Franz Liszt by sight-reading one of his most difficult unpublished pieces, and then refused the lucrative path of a touring virtuoso because he wanted to be respected as a creator.

The conversation follows him from the Prix de Rome and the Villa Medici through years of 16-hour days transcribing other composers’ scores for piano, the indifferent reception of The Pearl Fishers, and the Wagner premiere that reshaped his harmonic language. It then moves through the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune to the battle over Carmen at the Opéra-Comique, where musicians called the score unplayable and the chorus was told to brawl and smoke on stage, and to the global triumph that arrived only after his death.

• Why losing one competition led Bizet to vow never to write religious music again
• The state-subsidized bottleneck that let only eight of 54 Prix de Rome winners reach the Opéra
• Wagnerism as an insult: unresolved harmonic tension versus tidy four-bar French melodies
• How a theater for arranging bourgeois marriages reacted to an amoral cigarette-factory heroine
• Tchaikovsky’s prediction, Brahms’s 20 visits, and the critics who reversed themselves after his death