Carmen

Carmen premiered at the Opéra Comique of Paris on March 3, 1875. For a year after its premiere, it was considered a failure, denounced by critics as "immoral" and "superficial".

The story is set in Seville, Spain, circa 1830, and concerns Carmen, a beautiful gypsy with a fiery temper. Free with her love, she woos the corporal Don José, an inexperienced soldier. Their relationship leads to his rejection of his former love, mutiny against his superior, his turn to a criminal life, and ultimate jealous murder of Carmen. Although he is briefly happy with Carmen, he falls into madness when she turns from him to the bullfighter Escamillo.

Several well-known pieces from this opera have taken on a life separate to the work: the Prélude (overture), the Toréador Song, and the Habanera. Today, it is one of the world's most popular operas and a staple of the standard operatic repertoire. Carmen appears as number four on Opera America's list of the 20 most-performed operas in North America.

Synopsis

ACT I - A Public Square in Seville
Corporal Moralès and the soldiers while away the time watching the passers-by. A peasant girl named Micaëla arrives to ask Moralès if he knows Don José, and is told that the young corporal is expected shortly. Avoiding an invitation to step inside the guardroom, Micaëla escapes. The factory bell rings and the men of Seville gather round the cigarette factory girls as they return after their lunch break. The gypsy Carmen is awaited with anticipation. When the men gather round her, she tells them love obeys no laws. Only one man ignores her - Don José. Carmen throws a flower at him. The women go back into the factory and the crowd disperses. Micaëla returns, bringing news of José’s mother. When he starts to read her letter, Micaëla runs off in embarrassment since it suggests that he marry her. As José decides to obey his mother, a fight is heard from within the factory. Carmen and one of her fellow workers have quarrelled and the other girl was wounded. Zuñiga orders José to tie Carmen up and take her to prison. Carmen entices him to go dancing at Lillas Pastia’s tavern outside the walls of Seville. Mesmerized, José agrees to help her escape. He unties the rope and, as they leave for prison, Carmen slips away. Don José is arrested.

Act II – Lillas Pastia’s Tavern
Carmen and her friends Frasquita and Mercédès entertain Zuñiga and other officers. Zuniga tells Carmen that José has been released from prision that very day. The bullfighter Escamillo enters and describes the excitements of his profession, in particular the amorous rewards that follow a successful bullfight. Escamillo then propositions Carmen, but she replies that she is engaged for the moment. He says he will wait. When the bullfighter has departed, the smugglers Dancaïro and Remendado enter. They have business for which they need their female accomplices. Frasquita and Mercédès are game, but Carmen refuses to leave Seville, for she is in love. Her friends are incredulous. The smugglers withdraw as José enters. Carmen tells him that she has been dancing for his officers. When he reacts jealously, she agrees to entertain him alone. Bugles are heard, calling the soldiers. José says that he must return to barracks. Angrily, Carmen mocks him, but he answers by producing the flower she threw him and telling her how its faded scent sustained his love during the long weeks in prison. Deserting his unit, José joins the smugglers.

Act III – A Wild Mountain Pass
The smugglers and gypsies are hiding in the mountains. The women turn the cards to tell their fortunes. Frasquita and Mercédès foresee rich and gallant lovers, but Carmen’s cards spell death, for her and for José. She accepts the prophecy. The smugglers depart to intercept the stolen goods. Micaëla appears. She says that she fears nothing so much as meeting the woman who has turned the man she once loved into a criminal, but she hurries away in fear when a shot rings out. It is José firing at an intruder, who turns out to be Escamillo, transporting bulls to Seville. When he refers to the soldier whom Carmen once loved, José reveals himself and they fight. Carmen and the smugglers return and separate them. Escamillo invites everyone, especially Carmen, to be his guests at the next bullfight in Seville. José is enraged. Micaëla is discovered, and she begs José to go with her to his mother but he furiously refuses. Micaëla then reveals that his mother is dying. José promises Carmen that they will meet again. As José and Micaëla leave, Escamillo is heard singing in the distance.

Act IV – Public Square in Seville at the Entrance of the Bull Ring
Prior to the bullfight in Seville, Carmen enters on Escamillo's arm and the two declare their love to each other. Escamillo exits into the bull ring and José approaches Carmen. He implores her to forget the past and start a new life with him. She tells him calmly that everything between them is over. She was born free and she will die free. While the crowd is heard cheering Escamillo, José tries to prevent Carmen from joining her new lover. Carmen finally loses her temper, takes from her finger the ring that José once gave her, and throws it at his feet. José stabs her, and then confesses to the murder of the woman he loved.

About the Composer

Georges Bizet (October 25, 1838 – June 3, 1875) was a French composer and pianist of the romantic era. He is best known for the opera Carmen.

Bizet was born in Paris. He was registered with the legal name Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, but was baptized Georges Bizet and was always known by the latter name. He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1848, two weeks before his tenth birthday. His first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, was written in 1855, when he was only sixteen, evidently as a student assignment. It seems that Bizet completely forgot about it himself, and it was not discovered again until 1935, in the archives of the Conservatory library. Upon its first performance (February 26, 1935), it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire

At the Conservatoire Bizet studied under Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Genéviève he later married. Halévy died in 1864, leaving his last opera Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but it was not performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death.

In 1857 a setting of the one-act operetta Le docteur Miracle won him a share in a prize offered by Jacques Offenbach. He also won the Music Composition scholarship of the, the conditions of which required him to study in Rome for three years. There, his talent developed as he wrote such works as the opera Don Procopio (1858-59). There he also composed his only major sacred work, Te Deum (1858), which he submitted to the Prix Rodrigues competition, a contest for Prix de Rome winners only. Bizet failed to win the Prix, and the Te Deum score remained unpublished until 1971. He made two attempts to write another symphony in 1859, but destroyed the manuscripts in December of that year. Apart from this period in Rome , Bizet lived in the Paris area all his life.

Carmen (1875) is Bizet's best-known work and is based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by Prosper Mérimée. Bizet composed the title role for a mezzo-soprano. Carmen was not initially well-received but praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Johannes Brahms attended over twenty performances of it, and considered it the greatest opera produced in Europe since the Franco-Prussian war. The views of these composers proved to be prophetic, as Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. However Bizet did not live to see its success as he died from a heart attack at the age of 36, on his third wedding anniversary, only a few months after Carmen's first performances . He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris .

Who and What you'll see at the Juneau Symphony's performance

The Juneau Symphony is presenting an unstaged version of the opera, meaning all of the musicians and singers will be on stage during the entire performance. The singers will not act out the story. The lyrics will be sung in French and there will be English supertitles projected above the stage. There will be one intermission.

The Cast