The death of Georges Bizet on June 3, 1875, exactly three months after the famous opening night of Carmen at the Opéra Comique in Paris, is one of the cruelest ironies in the history of music. While it was certainly tragic that Puccini never lived to see Turandot and that Berlioz never lived to see Les Troyens, those composers were at the end of illustrious careers. Bizet was only 36 and had just revealed for the first time the true depth of his operatic genius. If Verdi, Wagner, or Strauss had died at that age, not many of their works would be heard in our opera houses today. Just a few extra months granted to Bizet would have shown him that the Vienna Opera had presented Carmen to a reception quite different from the shocked incomprehension that greeted it in Paris; just three more years would have given him the satisfaction of knowing that it had played in Brussels, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, London, Dublin, New York, and Philadelphia, and he would at last have made a respectable living as a composer instead of having to toil over four-hand arrangements of lesser operas by lesser composers.
If only those pig-headed Parisians on the first night had been less parochial in their judgment, we like to think, success and recognition might have staved off the quinsy and rheumatism that led to Bizet’s death, probably precipitated by depression. Bizet was used to failure, since none of his theatrical ventures had been successful before. But none of them displayed the genius that lifts every page of Carmen to starry heights. His early works Les Pêcheurs de Perles, La Jolie Fille de Perth, and Djamileh all show glimpses of what he could do. In Carmen Bizet invested more energy and passion than ever before.
The crucial idea, Bizet’s own, was to base the story on Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen. In 1872, he was commissioned to write a three-act opera for the Opéra Comique, a theater where operas traditionally ended happily, with villainy and sin put firmly in their place; loyalty and fidelity were always rewarded. It was a family theater where audiences would be amused and entertained, excited even, but never shocked. The choice of Carmen inevitably led to an impasse, since the heroine is the villain and meets her death on stage. She flaunts her attractions and boasts of her conquests. She smokes, seduces soldiers, corrupts customs officials, and smuggles on the side. But she is fascinating, clever, beautiful, and sometimes even tender, and her music is so alluring that no one can escape her magnetism. French society lived out a convenient hypocrisy by indulging its fancies in private while maintaining a correct exterior. What people saw at the Opéra Comique was unfortunately very public: sensuality was presented here in the raw, to music of unmistakable appeal. Social mores have so radically changed in our century that the complexity of the response to Carmen—a mixture of distaste, fascination, and guilt—is not easy to disentangle.
Bizet was not attempting to engineer social change or storm the barricades of propriety; he simply recognized a good subject for music and knew he could bring it to life on the stage. This is musical theater charged with an unprecedented realism that makes the two principal figures, Carmen and Don José, as vivid as flesh and blood, destroyed by their appetites and their weaknesses. The librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy (an experienced and expert team), made the story convincingly operatic by introducing two balancing characters, neither of any importance in Mérimée’s story. First is Micaëla, whose purity, devotion to Don José, and attachment to his dying mother make Carmen’s personality all the more striking and brazen. And Escamillo is the irresistible lure that entices Carmen from Don José, though the bullfighter, unlike the soldier, would never shed a tear over her infidelity.
The settings, too, are superbly theatrical: a square in Seville where soldiers change guard and cigarette girls gather; Lillas Pastia’s tavern, where all forms of lowlife meet; the smugglers’ hideout in the mountains; and finally the bullring where the slaughter of bulls inside (offstage) acts as dramatic counterpoint to José’s desperate murder of Carmen outside (onstage). Carmen, as even she herself knows, is doomed. So too is José, by his defiance of military orders, by joining forces with the smugglers, and by his willful neglect of Micaëla and his mother, not to mention his fatal passion for Carmen. In Mérimée’s version, he has also committed two murders.
Fearing that such a story would frighten off his loyal though dwindling public, Camille du Locle, director of the Opéra Comique, did his best to soften the blow by cautioning his public and steering high officials away. He could make nothing of the music, in any case, and described it as “Cochin-Chinese.” Such counter-advertising by a theater manager is hard to believe. The librettists similarly seem to have been willing to tone down the impact of the work that would make their names immortal. Throughout the long rehearsal period from October 1874 to March 1875, Bizet had to resist pressure for change and suffer the complaints of both orchestra and chorus that it was not performable.
But the composer had supporters, since his two principal singers believed in the opera from the start. Paul Lhérie, the Don José, was full of good intentions, though he sang disastrously flat in his unaccompanied entrance in Act II. In Célestine Galli-Marié, Bizet had a superlative, perhaps definitive, Carmen. She evidently brought to the role the blend of sultry sensuality and fatal bravado that all good Carmens need; her own private life was liberated (by the standards of the day), and she is said to have had an affair with Bizet, which is not unlikely given the pressures under which they were working and the uncertain state of his marriage. Further support for Bizet came from one or two good notices in the press and a few expressions of admiration from fellow composers.
The majority of the notices after that first night, though, were hostile and uncomprehending, and one or two were deeply insulting. The show did not close, however. It ran for more than 40 performances, not at all a disgraceful total, kept alive no doubt by its salacious reputation and, after a dozen performances, by the sensational irony of Bizet’s death. By the time the Opéra Comique dared to stage it again, in 1883, the opera was a worldwide success.
Part of Carmen’s appeal rests on its brilliant evocation of Spain. Bizet went to some trouble to find authentic melodies. The famous Habanera, for example, was adapted from a tune by the Spanish-American composer Sebastián Yradier. But Bizet could invent good Spanish music of his own, too. The Séguedille that closes Act I is superlatively colorful and dramatic, as is the gypsy song that opens the following act in Lillas Pastia’s tavern.
Yet much of the opera is not Spanish at all. Whatever its novelty, it belongs to the tradition of French opéra comique, as we can tell when leading characters present themselves in two-verse songs, or couplets. The depiction of the two smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado as comic figures belongs to the same tradition. There is also a strong strain of French lyricism in Carmen, derived from Gounod, Bizet’s mentor, who jokingly said that Micaëla’s Act III aria was stolen from him. It faithfully echoes his style in such works as Roméo et Juliette (on which Bizet had worked as pianist and assistant).
Those critics in 1875 who could see beyond the sensation of the story to the music were confused. Conventions were stretched, and the dramatic immediacy of the music was stronger than anything they had heard before. Such departures from custom were invariably labeled “Wagnerian,” a term of abuse in France at that time. Chromatic harmony and daring key shifts were assumed to be Wagner’s monopoly. But Bizet had no intention whatsoever of imitating Wagner, whose music and theories he knew little about. His music was modern, and for many critics that was enough. His genius is evident in the brilliance of each individual number, finding sharply distinctive melodies and moods for every scene. Few other composers of the time could boast such fertile invention.
The French learned to love Carmen, but not before it had conquered the world’s opera houses. In New York, it was first performed in Italian at the Academy of Music in 1878, then in English in 1881, reaching the Metropolitan Opera during its first season on January 5, 1884 (also still in Italian). It has remained in the Met’s repertoire ever since, and may well be, as Tchaikovsky predicted, the most popular opera in the world.
Angelo Badà as Remendado, Lenora Sparkes as Frasquita, Geraldine Farrar as Carmen, Sophie Braslau as Mercédès, and Albert Reiss as Dancaïre, 1914–15
White Studio