3 March — the premiere of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen took place on the stage of the Paris theater Opéra-Comique. It ended in a complete fiasco. The first two acts were received by the audience fairly well, the third rather restrainedly, and during the fourth an icy silence settled over the hall. The opera’s libretto was reproached for vulgarity, and the music for excessive “learnedness,” colorlessness, insufficient romanticism, and lack of refinement. As a result, the opera was declared “immoral.” Apparently, the audience could not immediately switch from expecting something “pure and light” to fatal passion and a tragic denouement, to its peculiar “devilish music.” The true scale of Carmen was appreciated only after Bizet’s death, and at first this was helped by the intervention of Ernest Guiraud, who replaced the spoken dialogues with recitatives. Only in recent decades have theaters again begun to turn back to the author’s version. The failure of Carmen weighed heavily on Bizet and had a fatal effect on his health; exactly three months later, on 3 June 1875, Bizet died. He was only 36 years old.
3 December — the Moscow premiere of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto took place. To this day, this work remains one of the most popular piano concertos in the world’s musical literature. Initially, the composer dedicated it to the composer and pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, who was supposed to become its first performer. Tchaikovsky presented him with a finished but not yet orchestrated concerto. However, the musician spoke of the piece very unfavorably, saying that it was quite difficult to perform and “good for nothing.” Offended, Tchaikovsky refused to change anything in it and, on the advice of the pianist Karl Klindworth, sent the manuscript to the German conductor, pianist, and composer Hans von Bülow, who gladly agreed to perform it. On 25 October 1875, a successful premiere of the concerto took place in Boston, performed by Bülow with an orchestra conducted by Benjamin Lang. A few days later, the concerto was performed for the first time in St. Petersburg. Its Moscow premiere took place on 3 December 1875 in the Column Hall of the Noble Assembly. The concerto was played by the brilliant pianist Sergey Taneyev, and the orchestra was conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein, who revised his attitude toward this composition and later repeatedly performed it himself with great success as a pianist. Even during Tchaikovsky’s lifetime, his First Concerto gained enormous popularity.
15 December — in the Paris Journal of Education and Entertainment, intended for a youth audience, the publication of one of Jules Verne’s best novels, The Mysterious Island, came to an end. Readers’ interest in the magazine publication of this work was consistently sustained over the course of two years, since the beginning of the novel had reached subscribers as early as 1 January 1874. Its plot was a modernized version of Robinson Crusoe.
17 April — in the city of Jabalpur, in central India, in the officers’ mess of the British colonial corps, Colonel Chamberlain invented a greatly complicated version of a billiards game. Chamberlain took colored pool balls (pool appeared earlier than snooker) and, marking certain spots on the table, placed them on those points. The name of the game—“snooker”—was also coined by Chamberlain.
This word means “a first-year cadet.” The name stuck to the new game because during play Neville called one of the officers a “snooker” when he found himself in a difficult situation: he needed to play a colored ball without a direct line of sight to that ball. The new game quickly gained popularity among “British Indians.” And ten years later, the metropole became acquainted with it.
After lengthy diplomatic negotiations, the Kuril Islands, occupied by the Russians in 1706, were ceded to Japan in exchange for half of Sakhalin. The treaty was signed in St. Petersburg on 25 April. The total number of residents on the Kuril Islands is no more than five hundred. Southern Sakhalin would be seized again by Japan only in 1904, and returned again in 1945; in the same year, the Kuril Islands would also be returned to Russia again.
20 May — in Paris, 17 states signed the Metre Convention to ensure international uniformity of measurements and to improve the metric system of measures.
1 July — the Universal Postal Union began its activities.
27 August — Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered the element gallium, predicted by Mendeleev.
1 September — Edgar Rice Burroughs, an American writer, the “father” of Tarzan, was born.
At an exhibition of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi exhibited two paintings—“Steppes” and “The Chumak Road.”