Bizet found the libretto for Don Procopio while browsing in a secondhand bookshop in Rome, where he was staying after winning the Prix de Rome. He immediately saw the possibilities for an opera buffa and set to work. The result, while derivative of the entire Italian school (Bizet himself called it revived Cimarosa), also has the sparkle of the school and displays an ease with sheer farce that one would not have associated with the Bizet of Carmen or Les pêcheurs de perles. Bizet deliberately wrote in the Italian idiom, and if his creativity was focused more on effective imitation than innovation (and the terms of the Prix involved writing a Mass rather than a comic opera), his tutor, Ambroise Thomas, still praised it for its ease and assured style.

It was not actually performed until 1906, the year that the full score was published. (Auber, then serving as the Conservatoire director, had taken the manuscript home and lost it.) Bizet did use excerpts in his later operas, most notably recycling much of Odoardo's "Sulle piume" for Smith's serenade in La jolie fille de Perth.

© Anne Feeney, All Music Guide