It was not what polite society was used to seeing at the opera. Audiences were scandalized by the way in which Carmen toys with the men around her as Don José, an army corporal, and Escamillo, a toreador, literally come to blows as they fight for her affections.
The first few outings for Carmen, which premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875, were not exactly what one would call a success. The moment Bizet’s heroine sings the first few notes of the Habanera, the aria with which she announces her arrival on the scene, one knows immediately that we are in a world light years away from the comedies, historical melodramas and affairs of the bourgeoisie that had been the mainstay of nineteenth-century musical theatre.įor French audiences of the time, Carmen, full of lowlifes and smugglers, would have been as distant to them as the mythological epics created by Bellini, Berlioz and Wagner.
Dallas time.That date was originally to be opening night of the companys 2020/2021. After he died, many of his contemporaries were quick to applaud his achievements with no less a figure than Tchaikovsky declaring that he had written a masterpiece.Georges Bizet’s Carmen was as radical a departure from the established traditions of opera as any single work in the history of the genre. The video stream of The Dallas Operas Carmen premieres online on the evening of October 9, 2020, at 7:30 p.m. But as tastes changed, so the opera’s fortunes rose for it to become rightly recognised as one of the great works of the genre. Premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875, by the time of Bizet’s premature death exactly three months later, Carmen was playing to half-empty houses. Blazing a trail for the pioneers of Italian verismo that would follow him, Bizet’s work was such a departure from the traditions of French opera that at first Parisian audiences of the late nineteenth century simply failed to understand it they could neither accept an opera that championed what they considered the debauched world of an underclass, unable to rein in its passions, nor entertain a piece of theatre whose heroine was a confident, sensual and, in their view, immoral gypsy woman, a character the likes of which had never been seen before.Īs a consequence, Carmen’s initial run was little short of disastrous. Yet Bizet himself was never to know the great success that Carmen would become. Carmen includes two of opera’s most popular arias, the Habanera and the Toreador song, so well-known that even those who have still to enjoy Georges Bizet’s magnificent final opera in full can hum their tunes.
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