Recommended Recording
Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Jan de Gaetani, Philip Langridge, Stephen Roberts, London Sinfonietta/David Atherton. Decca Headline HEAD 24/5.
(1838–75)
La Maison du Docteur (1855)
Le Docteur Miracle (1857)
Don Procopio (1859)
Ivan IV (1863)
Les Pêcheurs de Perles (1863)
La Jolie Fille de Perth (1867)
Djamileh (1872)
Carmen (1875)
Bizet’s short life – he died at thirty-six – was beset by disasters, disappointments, self-destroyed scores and abandoned projects, and although he wrote one of the most celebrated operas in the history of the medium, he never lived to see the measure of Carmen’s success. His interest in opera began early, while he was still studying in Paris with Halévy and (privately but influentially) Gounod, and his first stage works were more Italianate than French, modelled after Donizetti and Rossini. Later scores attracted the criticism that they were ‘Wagnerian’, although it’s hard to see why. Apart from Carmen, only one other opera, Les Pêcheurs de Perles, has survived in repertory, along with a mere handful of concert scores, including the youthful Symphony in C (which must be one of the most effective things ever written by a teenager), the suite of incidental music to the play L’Arlésienne, and the piano pieces Jeux d’Enfants.
FORM: Opera in four acts; in French
COMPOSER: Georges Bizet (1838–75)
LIBRETTO: H. Meilhac and L. Halévy; after Prosper Mérimée’s story
FIRST PERFORMANCE: Paris, 3 March 1875
Principal Characters
Carmen, a gypsy girl
Don José, a corporal
Micaëla, a country girl
Zuniga, Don José’s lieutenant
Escamillo, a toreador
Synopsis of the Plot
Setting: Seville, Spain; about 1820
ACT I In the square, dominated by a cigarette factory, a group of soldiers are lazily mounting guard when Micaëla arrives, looking for her soldier sweetheart, Don José, and is told to come back later. As Don José and Zuniga march in with the relief guard, the girls emerge from the factory for a break and Carmen is quickly surrounded by admirers. With her eye firmly fixed on José, she warns that loving her is a dangerous game and she tosses him a rose. When everyone has gone, José retrieves the rose and hides it in his tunic. Micaëla returns and is telling José news about his mother when José is informed that Carmen has attacked another girl, and he must arrest and guard her. Left alone with José, Carmen charms him into allowing her to escape.
ACT II Carmen is the centre of admiration at the local inn. Escamillo, the toreador, is particularly captivated by her, as is Zuniga. But when Carmen learns that José, who has been demoted and imprisoned for helping her, is about to be released, she warns them both to go away and not return. José arrives, delighted to be back with his beloved Carmen, who tries to persuade him to throw in his lot with some smugglers with whom she is working. José refuses, but when Zuniga returns and is attacked by Carmen’s new friends, he has no alternative but to escape with them.
ACT III In the smugglers’ hideaway Carmen and José are becoming increasingly disillusioned with each other. Escamillo comes looking for Carmen and José is forced to fight him. Micaëla, who has been searching for José, pleads with him to go with her to see his dying mother. José agrees, but he warns Carmen that the affair is not yet over.
ACT IV A grand bullfight is about to take place and Carmen enters triumphantly on Escamillo’s arm, ignoring warnings that José is in the crowd. Confronted by her rejected lover, she refuses to return to him and throws his ring in his face. Consumed by jealous rage, José stabs her to the heart before giving himself up.
Music and Background
Carmen is written in a form known as opéra comique, which means not that it’s a comedy but that it mixes song with spoken dialogue, and would have surprised audiences of its time in that it takes the otherwise straightforward ‘comique’ style to unprecedented levels of perfection and sophistication. Spain was an abiding obsession of French composers from the later 19th century onwards, and Carmen is saturated in local colour, with set-piece Spanish dances like the habanera and seguidilla. The orchestration is especially fine – it was praised by later composers like Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss – and the emphasis on orchestral sound is the one vaguely understandable reason why contemporary critics thought of it as Wagnerian.
Highlights
Arguably every thirty bars! Act I has Carmen’s habanera ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ and seguidilla ‘Près des ramparts de Séville’. Act II introduces Escamillo with his bullish ‘Toréador, en garde’, and gives Don José his first real chance to shine with the Flower Song: ‘La fleur que tu m’avais jetée’. Act III has Carmen’s fatalistic foresight of death, ‘En vain pour éviter’, and Micaëla’s enchanting ‘Je dis que rien’, with a dramatic highlight in José’s ‘Dût-il m’en coûter la vie’. Act IV begins with the procession to the bull ring.
Did You Know?
Recommended Recording
Agnes Baltsa, José Carreras, Katia Ricciarelli, José van Dam, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Herbert von Karajan. DG 410 088-2. A hard choice when there are so many alternatives – including Maria Callas (EMI), Marilyn Horne (DG) and Teresa Berganza (DG) – but this is a near-flawless cast, with Baltsa on devastating form, before the voice got raw.