page_title: Carmen
section_title: Premiere and initial run
hierarchical_section_title: Carmen / Performance history / Premiere and initial run
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of Bizet's opera Carmen, published in Journal Amusant, 1875. The image, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is marked "domaine public" Čeština: Ilustrace Bizetiny opery Carmen z časopisu Journal Amusant, rok 1875. Licence domaine public
context_page_description: Carmen is an opera in four acts by French composer Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on a eponymous novella by Prosper Mérimée. The opera was first performed by the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875, where its breaking of conventions shocked and scandalized its first audiences.
  Bizet died suddenly after the 33rd performance, unaware that the work would achieve international acclaim within the following ten years. Carmen has since become one of the most popular and frequently performed operas in the classical canon; the "Habanera" from act 1 and the "Toreador Song" from act 2 are among the best known of all operatic arias.
  The opera is written in the genre of opéra comique with musical numbers separated by dialogue. It is set in southern Spain and tells the story of the downfall of Don José, a naïve soldier who is seduced by the wiles of the fiery gypsy Carmen. José abandons his childhood sweetheart and deserts from his military duties, yet loses Carmen's love to the glamorous torero Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage.
context_section_description: Because rehearsals did not start until October 1874 and lasted longer than anticipated, the premiere was delayed. The final rehearsals went well, and in a generally optimistic mood the first night was fixed for 3 March 1875, the day on which, coincidentally, Bizet's appointment as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour was formally announced. The premiere, which was conducted by Adolphe Deloffre, was attended by many of Paris's leading musical figures, including Massenet, Offenbach, Delibes and Gounod; during the performance the last-named was overheard complaining bitterly that Bizet had stolen the music of Micaëla's act 3 aria from him: "That melody is mine!" Halévy recorded his impressions of the premiere in a letter to a friend; the first act was evidently well received, with applause for the main numbers and numerous curtain calls. The first part of act 2 also went well, but after the toreador's song there was, Halévy noted, "coldness". In act 3 only Micaëla's aria earned applause as the audience became increasingly disconcerted. The final act was "glacial from first to last", and Bizet was left "only with the consolations of a few friends". The critic Ernest Newman wrote later that the sentimentalist Opéra-Comique audience was "shocked by the drastic realism of the action" and by the low standing and defective morality of most of the characters. According to the composer Benjamin Godard, Bizet retorted, in response to a compliment, "Don't you see that all these bourgeois have not understood a wretched word of the work I have written for them?" In a different vein, shortly after the work had concluded, Massenet sent Bizet a congratulatory note: "How happy you must be at this time—it's a great success!".
  The general tone of the next day's press reviews ranged from disappointment to outrage. The more conservative critics complained about "Wagnerism" and the subordination of the voice to the noise of the orchestra. There was consternation that the heroine was an amoral seductress rather than a woman of virtue; Galli-Marié's interpretation of the role was described by one critic as "the very incarnation of vice". Others compared the work unfavourably with the traditional Opéra-Comique repertoire of Auber and Boieldieu. Léon Escudier in L'Art Musical called Carmen's music "dull and obscure ... the ear grows weary of waiting for the cadence that never comes". It seemed that Bizet had generally failed to fulfill expectations, both of those who (given Halévy's and Meilhac's past associations) had expected something in the Offenbach mould, and of critics such as Adolphe Jullien who had anticipated a Wagnerian music drama. Among the few supportive critics was the poet Théodore de Banville; writing in Le National, he applauded Bizet for presenting a drama with real men and women instead of the usual Opéra-Comique "puppets".
  In its initial run at the Opéra-Comique, Carmen provoked little public enthusiasm; it shared the theatre for a while with Verdi's much more popular Requiem. Carmen was often performed to half-empty houses, even when the management gave away large numbers of tickets. Early on 3 June, the day after the opera's 33rd performance, Bizet died suddenly of heart disease, at the age of 36. It was his wedding anniversary. That night's performance was cancelled; the tragic circumstances brought a temporary increase in public interest during the brief period before the season ended. Du Locle brought Carmen back in November 1875, with the original cast, and it ran for a further 12 performances until 15 February 1876 to give a year's total for the original production of 48. Among those who attended one of these later performances was Tchaikovsky, who wrote to his benefactor, Nadezhda von Meck: "Carmen is a masterpiece in every sense of the word ... one of those rare creations which expresses the efforts of a whole musical epoch". After the final performance, Carmen was not seen in Paris again until 1883.
caption: Cartoon from Journal amusant, 1875
exif: {}