Its impact was greatest in Italy, for Carmen was the forerunner of the verismo operas typified by Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.Īs for the music, Richard Strauss summed it up: “If you want to learn how to orchestrate, don’t study Wagner’s scores – study the score of Carmen.

In the next three years, it was produced in almost all the major opera houses of Europe. Within months, a second production of Carmen in Vienna was acclaimed as a masterpiece.

So powerful and potent is Carmen’s beauty and passion that he impulsively leaves behind a career in uniform and follows. We meet Carmen as the soon-to-be-smitten soldier, Don Jos, is arresting her. On the night of Carmen’s 31st performance Bizet died of a heart attack, still believing his opera was a failure. In one of the most popular operas of all time, Bizet’s free-spirited femme fatale, Carmen, is the kind of woman your mother warned you about. Yet, despite Bizet’s resignation (“a definite and hopeless flop”), it had a respectable run of 37 performances that season alone, added to which Bizet was made a Chevalier De La Légion D’honneur and received from his publisher the fairly hefty sum of 25,000 francs for the score. Unprepared for the sight of women smoking on stage, the “low-life” characters and its theme of erotic obsession, the critics damned Carmen as “vulgar”, “undramatic” and “contemptible”. Its critical reception dealt Bizet a terrible blow. Ironically, this most famous of mezzo-soprano arias was plagiarised by Bizet from El Arreglito, a song by Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier (1809-65).Ĭarmen was first performed on March 3, 1875. The original Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié, instructed him to rewrite the famous Habanera no fewer than 14 times to accommodate her voice.

How long is carmen opera