Carmen

• 1. Introduction

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  Carmen, the four-act opera by Georges Bizet, began its life on the 3rd of March 1875 with a Paris premiere so scandalous that one critic described the title character's portrayal as "the very incarnation of vice". The audience at the Opéra-Comique grew colder with each act. By the final curtain, Bizet was left, in the words of librettist Ludovic Halévy, with nothing but "the consolations of a few friends". Yet by the time of Bizet's death just three months later, after the opera's 33rd performance, something extraordinary was already underway in Vienna. The man who had written what he called "a work that is all clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody" died without knowing it would become one of the most performed operas in history. How did a work so despised at birth come to be considered, in Tchaikovsky's words, "a masterpiece in every sense of the word"? And what was it about Carmen herself that could alarm audiences and seduce them at the same time?

• 2. The Road to the Opéra-Comique

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  Bizet had spent years fighting for a foothold on the Parisian stage. Despite holding the prestigious Prix de Rome, he found the capital's two main state-funded opera houses deeply resistant to young French composers. His partnership with Léon Carvalho at the independent Théâtre Lyrique produced two full-scale operas, Les pêcheurs de perles in 1863 and La jolie fille de Perth in 1867, but neither found much favour with the public. When Djamileh opened at the Opéra-Comique in May 1872 and was withdrawn after 11 performances, it might have seemed like another dead end. Instead, it earned him a commission for a full-length work, with Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy attached as librettists. Halévy was not a stranger: he had written the text for Bizet's student opera Le docteur Miracle in 1856, and was also a cousin of Bizet's wife, Geneviève. Together, Meilhac and Halévy had built their reputations as the writers behind many of Jacques Offenbach's operettas. Bizet was the one who pushed to adapt Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen as the subject. Mérimée's story, a blend of travelogue and adventure published in 1845 in the Revue des deux Mondes, was said to have grown from travels the writer made in Spain in 1830, and possibly from an incident related to him by his friend the Countess Montijo. Bizet may have first encountered the story as early as his Rome sojourn of 1858-60, since his journals record Mérimée among the authors he was reading in those years. The theatre's director Adolphe de Leuven opposed the project from the start, fearing the story was too risqué for what he considered a family house. He extracted assurances from Halévy that Carmen's character would be softened, that the gypsies would appear as comic figures, and that Carmen's death would be overshadowed by "triumphal processions, ballets and joyous fanfares". De Leuven reluctantly agreed, then resigned from the theatre early in 1874 anyway, his hostility undiminished.

• 3. Writing Carmen

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  Meilhac handled the dialogue while Halévy wrote the verses, a division of labour that had served their partnership well in the past. Meilhac, by all accounts, was completely unmusical. Bizet began composing in or around January 1873, and by the summer had finished the music for the first act and sketched further material. Then the project stalled. Finding a singer capable of playing Carmen proved difficult, and tensions between the theatre's joint directors added delay. It was not until early 1874 that Bizet resumed serious work. He completed a draft of the composition, 1,200 pages of music, over a summer spent at the artists' colony at Bougival just outside Paris. Rehearsals that autumn brought constant revision. The orchestra found some passages impossible to play. Individual singers pushed for changes. Management made its own demands. The vocal score Bizet published in March 1875 diverged significantly from the version he had sold to the publishers Choudens in January of that year, and the conducting score used at the premiere differed from both. Bizet also rewrote parts of the libretto himself, including new words for the Habanera and fresh text for Carmen's solo in the act 3 card scene. He altered the order of sequences and supplied a new opening line for the Seguidilla in act 1 whenever he felt the librettists had strayed too far from Mérimée's original. The opera's characters departed from the source in significant ways. Mérimée's José narrates from a prison cell while awaiting execution. Micaëla does not exist in the novella at all. Escamillo's equivalent is merely a picador named Lucas who appears only briefly. Carmen in the novella is, as Bizet's biographer Mina Curtiss put it, "an unmitigated and unconvincing monster" whose character had to be both simplified and deepened to work on stage. Bizet's biographer Winton Dean contends that it is José, not Carmen, who stands at the true centre of the drama: "It is his fate rather than Carmen's that interests us."

• 4. Assembling the Cast

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  The search for a singer to play Carmen began in mid-1873. Press speculation pointed to Zulma Bouffar, who had performed in many of Offenbach's operas and was reportedly the librettists' preferred choice. She was rejected, deemed unsuitable by both Bizet and theatre director du Locle. Marie Roze, well known at the Opéra-Comique, the Paris Opéra, and in London, turned down the role the moment she learned her character would have to die on stage. Célestine Galli-Marié eventually agreed terms after several months of negotiation. She was a demanding and at times tempestuous performer who became a staunch defender of Bizet's original intentions, repeatedly backing his resistance to management pressure to tone down the work. During rehearsals she was widely believed to be conducting a love affair with the composer. Don José went to Paul Lhérie, a rising tenor at the Opéra-Comique who had recently appeared in works by Massenet and Delibes; years later he would become a baritone and sing in the Covent Garden premiere of Les pêcheurs de perles in 1887. Jacques Bouhy, a young Belgian-born baritone, was cast as Escamillo, having already taken on demanding roles such as Méphistophélès in Gounod's Faust and Mozart's Figaro. Marguerite Chapuy, who sang Micaëla, was at the beginning of what would be a short career; the impresario James H. Mapleson described her as "one of the most charming vocalists it has been my pleasure to know". She married and retired from the stage altogether in 1876, turning down substantial inducements from Mapleson to return.

• 5. The Premiere and Its Aftermath

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  The 3rd of March 1875 happened to be the same day Bizet's appointment as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour was formally announced. The premiere was conducted by Adolphe Deloffre and attended by many of Paris's leading musical figures: Massenet, Offenbach, Delibes, and Gounod were all present. Gounod was overheard during the performance complaining that Bizet had stolen the melody of Micaëla's act 3 aria from him, insisting "That melody is mine!" Halévy recorded the evening in a letter to a friend. The first act went well, with applause and curtain calls. The first part of act 2 also held the audience. But after the toreador's song, Halévy noted "coldness". Act 3 earned only Micaëla's aria any real response. The final act was, in Halévy's word, "glacial from first to last". Bizet remarked, according to the composer Benjamin Godard, that "all these bourgeois have not understood a wretched word of the work I have written for them". Press reviews the next day ranged from disappointment to outrage. Conservative critics complained about Wagnerism and the subordination of the voice to the orchestra. There was shock that the heroine was an amoral seductress; one critic called Galli-Marié's interpretation "the very incarnation of vice". Léon Escudier in L'Art musical dismissed Carmen's music as "dull and obscure... the ear grows weary of waiting for the cadence that never comes". A lonely exception was the poet Théodore de Banville, who applauded Bizet in Le National for presenting real men and women in place of Opéra-Comique "puppets". Carmen ran to half-empty houses and sometimes gave away large numbers of tickets to fill the seats, sharing the theatre with Verdi's far more popular Requiem. Then, on the morning of the 3rd of June 1875, the day after the 33rd performance, Bizet died of heart disease at the age of 36. It was his wedding anniversary. Du Locle brought Carmen back in November with the original cast, and among those who attended one of the later performances was Tchaikovsky, who wrote to his benefactor Nadezhda von Meck calling the work "one of those rare creations which expresses the efforts of a whole musical epoch".

• 6. From Scandal to Global Stage

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  Shortly before his death Bizet had signed a contract for a production of Carmen at the Vienna Court Opera. For this version, first staged on the 23rd of October 1875, his friend Ernest Guiraud replaced the original spoken dialogue with recitatives to create a grand opera format. Guiraud also reorchestrated music from Bizet's L'Arlésienne suite to provide a ballet for act 2. The Court Opera's director Franz von Jauner blended some of Guiraud's recitatives with portions of the original dialogue, creating a hybrid version that would become the international standard for most of the following century. The Vienna audience responded with enthusiasm, and so did Wagner and Brahms. Brahms reportedly attended the opera twenty times and said he would have "gone to the ends of the earth to embrace Bizet". In February 1876 Carmen began a run in Brussels at La Monnaie. On the 17th of June 1878 it reached London's Her Majesty's Theatre, where Minnie Hauk began what would be a long association with the title role; a parallel Covent Garden production with Adelina Patti was cancelled when Patti withdrew. On the 23rd of October 1878 the opera had its American premiere at the New York Academy of Music, and that same year reached Saint Petersburg. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck apparently saw it on 27 different occasions. Friedrich Nietzsche declared that he "became a better man when Bizet speaks to me". In Paris, however, manager Carvalho considered the work immoral and blocked its return to the Opéra-Comique until April 1883, when he staged an under-rehearsed version that stripped out some of the controversial elements. Critics condemned him for offering a travesty of what had come to be recognised as a masterpiece, but the public filled the house. Carvalho yielded that October, brought back Galli-Marié, and restored the score and libretto to their 1875 forms. By 1888, the 50th anniversary of Bizet's birth, Carmen had been performed at the Opéra-Comique 330 times; by his centenary year of 1938, that figure had reached 2,271.

• 7. Carmen in Music and Culture

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  Carmen's habanera is based on "El arreglito", a song by the Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier, who lived from 1809 to 1865. Bizet had believed it to be a genuine folk melody; on learning its actual origin, he added a note to the vocal score crediting Yradier. The defiant song "Coupe-moi, brûle-moi" drew on a genuine folksong, while the Seguidilla borrowed rhythms and instrumentation associated with flamenco. Yet Dean insists the opera is fundamentally French rather than Spanish, with the borrowed material forming only a small ingredient in the larger musical whole. The prelude to act 1 introduces three recurring themes: the bullfighters' entry from act 4, the toreador's refrain, and a fate motif that, in two slightly differing forms, stands for both Carmen herself and the doom she embodies. This motif, played on clarinet, bassoon, cornet, and cellos over tremolo strings, sounds at pivotal moments throughout the opera, appearing fortissimo at the moment José kills Carmen as the chorus sings the toreador's refrain offstage. Carmen's character attracted composers and choreographers across many decades. In 1883 the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate wrote a Carmen Fantasy for violin. The Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin adapted the music into a ballet, the Carmen Suite of 1967, written for his wife Maya Plisetskaya, then the Bolshoi Ballet's principal ballerina. On screen, the story attracted directors from Raoul Walsh in 1915 to Otto Preminger, whose 1954 Carmen Jones transposed the drama to 1940s North Carolina with an all-black cast. Francesco Rosi's 1984 film, with Julia Migenes and Plácido Domingo, remained faithful to Bizet's original. Carmen on Ice in 1990 starred Katarina Witt, Brian Boitano, and Brian Orser, inspired by Witt's gold medal performance at the 1988 Winter Olympics. Maria Callas, though she recorded the part, never performed it on stage. Musicologist Hugh Macdonald suggested that outside the French repertoire, Richard Strauss's Salome and Alban Berg's Lulu "may be seen as distant degenerate descendants of Bizet's temptress". The first acoustical recording dates from 1908, and the story's stage and screen life has not slowed: in 2005, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, directed by Mark Dornford-May and set in South Africa, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.