Ten facts, basic and otherwise, about Georges Bizet’s Carmen:
Carmen had its premiere in Paris in 1875. Two characters are at the center: Carmen, who demands her freedom at any cost, and her lover, Don José. He starts out as a respectable soldier, but obsessive love turns him into a lawbreaker, an outcast, and finally, a killer.
Bizet wrote several operas, but Carmen is far and away the most successful. Other popular works by Bizet are the opera The Pearl Fishers, the suites from L'Arlésienne and the Symphony in C.
While composing Carmen, Bizet was also teaching piano. One 12-year-old student remembered, "I was afraid of him. Not that he ever scolded, but the way he would look at you through those eyeglasses! I ... sometimes would make little slips in fingering. Then he would say savagely: Je ne dors pas! [I'm not asleep!]" *
The first performance of Carmen was received coldly. Bizet himself regarded its reception as a fiasco. Three months later, he died at age 36, never to know its worldwide success.
The Metropolitan Opera first performed Carmen in 1884; it has been staged there 1,000 times since.
The opening scene of Carmen takes place outside a cigarette factory in Seville. This was an actual place, which at its height employed 6000 women as cigarette makers. The building still stands today and now belongs to the University of Seville.
The original version of Carmen mixed music with spoken dialogue. The dialogue was soon replaced by sung recitatives, which held the stage for a century. In today's opera world, both versions are heard. (The Met uses the sung recitatives.)
Bizet was very particular about Carmen's opening number, her famous Habanera. After wrangling with his librettist, Bizet wrote most of its words himself. It's said he rewrote the melody 13 times.
Carmen has been endlessly arranged and adapted: in film, on Broadway, and as a ballet. And then there's that song about the cuspidor.
The opera Carmen is based on a short novel, Carmen, by the French writer Prosper Merimee. One of his inspirations seems to have been a poem by the Russian Alexander Pushkin. Later, the influence may have traveled the other direction: from France to Russia. In Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades, there's also a soldier who becomes an obsessed outcast. And as in Carmen, there's a chorus of children playing soldier. Coincidence?
Much of this material comes from Michael' Rose's The Birth of an Opera (Norton).
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