The Chants du Rhin (Songs of the Rhine), a cycle of six pieces, based on poems by Joseph Méry. They were written in 1865, and Bizet performed two of them on 16 April 1866 at a soirée of the Beaujolais Philharmonic Society. The songs are grouped symmetrically around La bohémienne as the central piece, framed by two meditatively yearning pieces (in E and D flat major) and two vividly exuberant ones (similarly in E and D flat major), with L’aurore serving as an introduction.

In this cycle Bizet takes up the theme of the gypsy girl which had already entered European music in the operas: The Bohemian Girl by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe and Verdi’s Il Trovatore, as well as in Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano. Bizet will return to it one year later in La jolie fille de Perth, and ten years later in Carmen. The fourth piece, Les confidences, shows similarities in tonality, structure and motifs to the middle part of the third movement of Chopin’s, Sonata in B minor.