Carmen

Few operas are more popular with contemporary audiences than Georges Bizet’s Carmen, but unfortunately it was not ever thus. Carmen’s premiere at the Opéra Comique, Paris in 1875 was far from successful, and the generally poor reviews may have hastened Bizet’s death from a heart attack three months later. The opera’s plotline, drawn from a novella by Prosper Mérimée, was a major issue for its early audiences. On stage Bizet had placed ordinary, working-class people, not the gods, aristocrats and mythical beings of operatic tradition. Carmen herself is sexually a free spirit, and around her mills a gaggle of small-time criminals and would-be admirers. While the whiff of lowlife was initially too strong for Parisian opera-goers to stomach, the magnificent music Bizet had written soon triumphed in opera houses across the world. The swashbuckling overture, Carmen’s “Habanera”, Escamillo’s “Toreador Song”—all of these numbers, and others, reach an astonishingly high level of melodic invention. Although Carmen’s tale of a woman stalked and eventually murdered by a spurned lover has seemed newly controversial in the era of the #MeToo movement, directors have found new ways of framing the opera’s riveting action to reflect the more egalitarian gender politics of the 21st century.