About this Piece

The same year that L’Arlésienne premiered, Bizet received a commission from Paris’ Opéra-Comique for a full-length opera. Though the Opéra-Comique was primarily known for staging comedies of manners in which upstanding morals and general goodness prevail, Bizet decided to turn toward a darker subject—one filled with lust, jealousy, rage, and murder.

Inspiration for the opera came from Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella about a seductive tobacco factory worker, Carmen, and the soldier Don José, whose infatuation turns fatal. Bizet engaged the two experienced librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who helped shape the stage work with additional supporting characters. Though Bizet had never traveled to Spain, he infused the opera with Iberian touches such as castanets and traditional dances such the seguidilla and habanera (the latter influenced by 19th-century Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier). Still, a lyrical French sensibility runs throughout.

When it opened at the Opéra-Comique in 1875, Carmen scandalized audiences. Writing in Le Siècle, the critic Oscar Comettant declared, “Carmen is neither scenic nor dramatic. One cannot express musically the savagery and the caprices of Mlle. Carmen with orchestral details.” However, fascination with the new opera fueled the public’s interest in the work, and accompanied by Bizet’s untimely death exactly three months after Carmen’s opening, the opera sustained a lengthy first run of more than 40 performances. Within a few years, Carmen would become an international sensation, celebrated for its novel fusion of drama and music. To this day it is a perennial favorite at opera houses around the world, leaving musical theater lovers questioning what future brilliance Bizet might have produced had he lived longer.

Following Bizet’s death, composer Ernest Guiraud (who arranged the second L’Arlésienne Suite) fashioned a pair of orchestral suites bringing together the opera’s most famous melodies. Tonight’s program presents selections from both of Guiraud’s arrangements. It opens with the theme of the toreadors’ heroic entrance to crashing cymbals and the great bullfighter Escamillo’s song. From there ominous horns of the Prélude foreshadow tragedy before melting into a sinuous Aragonaise, a dance from northeastern Spain, punctuated with tambourine. The beginning fanfare of La Garde montante calls an amateur regiment of children imitating soldiers marching through the streets of Seville. A strumming harp evoking a Spanish guitar and gentle flute melody introduce the meltingly beautiful Intermezzo, which links Acts II and III and dissolves into placid reverie. Things pick up in the seductive Séguedille depicting the imprisoned Carmen at once enchanting Don José and devising her escape. Les dragons d’Alcala refers to the stationed cavalry outside Seville’s city walls and emerges as a lumbering march. Tonight’s compilation closes with the apotheosis of the “ardent, crazy, feverish” Bohemian lifestyle in the dizzying and intoxicating Danse Bohème, accelerating and crescendoing until it can only self-destruct.

—Amanda Angel