Henri Meillac and Ludovic Halévy based their libretto of Carmen on the novella of the same title, written by Prosper Mérimée in 1845. The première was staged at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875. Irt was Bizet’s last work and his death, three months later was also associated with his disappoitment at its lukewarm reception. Carmen brought a powerful wave of new features to traditional French opera, upsetting the expectations of the bien-pensant Paris audience. Cigarette girls, smugglers, women of ill-repute, perversion, sensuality, carnality and shady ambiguous characters certainly didn’t come up to the ideals that the French bourgeois liked to see represented on stage. Accepted on the printed page, Merimée’s realism, despite all the adjustments, was too crude in its stage transposition.
In this masterpiece by Bizet we finally find a woman who is free, fatale and often very awkward, but capable of speaking her mind right from the outset: “Quand je vous aimerai, ma foi je ne sais pas. / Peut-être jamais, peut-être demain; / mais pas aujourd’hui, c’est certain.” (When am I going to love you? My word, I don’t know. / Perhaps never, perhaps tomorrow; / but not today, that’s certain.) The blame thus lies with José as he experiences his passion for her in a profoundly distorted way. But not even she can escape this blame. Because destiny will drag her down a road that is almost inexorably one way only and ends at the tip of a knife.