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Carmen: George Bizet
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Georges Bizet s Carmen is one of the world s most popular operas, and with good reason. This seductive tale of the irresistible gypsy woman who drives men to extremes has enchanted generations of music lovers with its passion, drama and action. Filled with some of the cannon s greatest arias, including the "Toreador Song" and "Habanera," Carmen is a true classic.
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Although best known today as the composer of Carmen, success for that opera did not come until after Bizet's death. He was in fact better known in his day for his non-operatic compositions such as Jeux d'enfants, Petite Suite and incidental music to L'Arlésienne (from 1872, the year he began contemplating Carmen). He was ... an accomplished pianist who astonished even Franz Liszt, but he rarely appeared in public and composed only a few pieces for the piano.
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If you have fallen in love with Georges Bizet's stirring opera Carmen, then you are not going to want to miss the adaptation of the opera to the stage, in a beautiful and heartbreaking musical form. Telling the tale of the exotic and irresistible gypsy-woman Carmen, who simply cannot be freed from the demons of her people, this musical is a moving trip to the theater you won't want to miss!
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Eventually 45 performances of Carmen were presented to diminishing audiences. During the 31st performance (June 3) Mme. Galli-Marié became extremely disturbed during the card scene and exited the stage and fainted - convinced that something terrible had happened. That night Bizet had died in Bougival.
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The librettists, for whom Carmen was merely a sideshow, secretly tried to induce the singers to over-dramatise in order to lessen the impact of the work. However, much to Bizet's delight, the final rehearsals seemed to convince the majority of the company of the genius of the opera.
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George Bizet (1838-1875) composed his opera Carmen following the old tradition of setting operas in Spain, more than 20 in Seville alone. It opened in 1875 at the Opera Comique in Paris.The story-line is more complicated than Prosper Merimée’s novel; more characters were added and stereotypes exaggerated by the libbrétists Meilhac and Halevy. The original story had to be adapted to conform to the conventions and expectations of the audience accostumed to bourgeois melodrama. The result was a little too shocking for the family theater (Carmen was a public enemy, a threat to law and order, conjuring revolutionary ghosts, and inevitably had to die in the end, something unseen in the Opera Comique) but ... a little too diluted and denaturalized for the purist, who considered it basically a French opera imbued with Spanish gypsy motifs, perhaps a Spanish reflection of a moment in French history, after the failed revolution of the Paris Commune. It was not a success, initially. Nevertheless, Carmen would soon become the most popular opera of all time and the Spanish Gypsy the enduring symbol of the exotiziced romantic construction of Spain, as can testified by the numerous versions and resurrections of Carmen, on stage, on screen, even on ice. Amazingly, as to this day Carmen is still often claimed, in academic discourse and in popular culture, to represent the pure -unmediated- spirit of Spain.
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George Bizet