ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Carmen is a dramatic opera in four acts with music by Georges Bizet and a French libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, based on the novel Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, which in turn was possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies (1824) by Aleksandr Pushkin. Mérimée read the poem in Russian in 1840 and translated it into French in 1852.
The opera premiered at Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875 but its release was negatively received by most critics. It was about to be cancelled after almost a fourth or fifth performance, and although it went ahead in the end and eventually 48 performances were carried out in its first season, it did little to raise revenue for the declining Opéra-Comique. Near the end of the season, the theatre was giving away tickets for free to draw more people into the theatre. Bizet died of a heart attack at 36 years of age on 3 June 1875 without ever knowing how popular Carmen would end up being. In October 1875 it was produced in Vienna, with public and critic success, marking the beginning of its international popularity. It was not performed again at Opéra-Comique until 1883.
This last of Bizet’s operas not only transformed the Opéra-Comique genre that had been unchanged for half a century, but it virtually ended it altogether. In just a few years, the traditional distinction between opera (serious, heroic and declamatory) and Opéra-Comique (light, bourgeois and with spoken dialogue) disappeared. Moreover, Carmen promoted a movement that was to win both celebrity and notoriety first in Italy and then in the rest of the world: the cult of realism known as verism.
The early death of Bizet along with the negligence of his heirs and publishers led to major problems regarding the texts for scholars and performers, as did the rest of his operas, and solutions hadn’t been provided until the 60s.
The story of Carmen is set in Seville (Spain) around 1820 and the main character is a beautiful gypsy with a fierce temper. Carmen, free with her love, seduces Corporal Don José, an inexperienced soldier. Carmen’s relationship with the Corporal leads him to reject his former love and rebel against his superior, and as a deserter he joins a group of smugglers. In the end, when Carmen reveals her love for the bullfighter Escamillo, the jealousy drives José to murder her.
