Il fior -- tenore bizetiano

Speranza

Georges Bizet, born in Paris in 1838 to parents who were both musicians, entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of nine. There he went on to study with Fromental Halévy, composer of La Juive, whose daughter, Geneviève, Bizet later married. In 1857, he won a Prix de Rome scholarship; his first opera, the one-act Le Docteur Miracle, dates from that year. In his thirty-seven years, he wrote six published operas; eight others were unpublished or incomplete. His reputation rests on the last of his works, Carmen, and on his incidental music for Daudet's play L'Arlésienne, though his first grand opera, Les Pêcheurs de Perles, is periodically revived.
Carmen began to take shape in Bizet's mind in 1872. The subject was drawn from the short novel Carmen (1852), by Prosper Mérimée, in turn inspired by the writing of George Henry Borrow, an Englishman who had lived among the Gypsies in Spain. The libretto was the work of Halévy's nephew, Ludovic, and Henri Meilhac, both experienced in the opéra comique form, which stipulated spoken dialogue.
The premiere audience at the Opéra Comique, March 3, 1875, turned "glacial" by Act IV. Carmen did not start to become a real success in Paris until its revival seven years later. Bizet had died three months after the premiere, believing his work a failure. After his death, Ernest Guiraud composed music for the spoken dialogue for Vienna in 1875.
New York first heard Carmen in Italian, on October 23, 1878, at the Academy of Music. The Met premiere, on January 5, 1884, was also in Italian. The French original was introduced on December 20, 1893, with Emma Calvé (Carmen), Jean de Reszke (Don José) and Emma Eames (Micaela) heading the cast. The opera is the most frequently performed French work in the Met's history, with 945 performances to its credit in New York and on tour as of its last revival, at the end of the 2007-08 season. The Met's new staging, directed by Richard Eyre, had its premiere on December 31, 2009, with Elina Garanča and Roberto Alagna as Carmen and Don José.

Carmen and Escamillo outside the bullring (Rachvelishvili, Ketelsen) © Beatriz Schiller 2013

WHAT TO READ AND HEAR

Anita Rachvelishvili and Yonghoon Lee as Carmen and Don José at the Metropolitan Opera © Beth Bergman 2013

Susan McClary's energetic, opinionated Cambridge Opera Handbook on Carmen is not without its detractors, but it is the most readily available source on the opera. The 1977 Greenwood Press reprint of Mina Curtiss's superb 1958 Bizet and his World is hard to find but well worth seeking, as is the paperback reprint of Winton Dean's Bizet (Fitzhenry and Whiteside). Dean's pithy entry on Carmen is a highlight of his entertaining (but out of print) Essays on Opera (Oxford). Rodney Milnes's essay on Carmen recordings in Alan Blyth's Opera on Record (Colophon paperback, out of print) is a concise guide to the merits of the multitude of Carmen textual variants available on disc.
On CD, Victoria de los Angeles is a bewitching Gypsy on Thomas Beecham's elegant 1958–59 recording (EMI), which uses the Guiraud recitatives, as does Fritz Reiner's shrewd, expressive 1951 reading starring the incomparable Risë Stevens (RCA). Georg Solti makes selective, theatrically satisfying use of the controversial Fritz Oeser edition of the score — including some original Carmen dialogue — in his 1975 recording (Decca), with Tatiana Troyanos and Plácido Domingo. Domingo is also Don José in the compact, fiery 1977 performance led by Claudio Abbado (DG), whose Carmen is of a piece with the virtues of his prima donna, Teresa Berganza. Regina Resnik and Mario Del Monaco are the bold, effective principals on Thomas Schippers's 1963 performance (Decca). The most exhilarating use of dialogue is on André Cluytens's 1950 Opéra Comique set (EMI), with the luscious, witty Solange Michel its practiced Gypsy. Roberto Alagna's passionate Don José is available on EMI's 2002 recording, singing opposite the Carmen of Angela Gheorghiu, who offers the first recorded performance of an alternate Act I aria for the Gypsy, evidently rejected by Galli-Marie, who created the role for Bizet in 1875.
On DVD, the performance of choice is Francesca Zambello's 2007 Covent Garden staging, with Anna Caterina Antonacci and Jonas Kaufmann in dazzling form. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Elina Garanča, Roberto Alagna, Barbara Frittoli and Teddy Tahu Rhodes in a 2010 Live in HD presentation of the Metropolitan Opera production, directed by Richard Eyre. Franco Zeffirelli's lavish take on Carmen is available in its 1978 Wiener Staatsoper incarnation (TDK), with Carlos Kleiber pacing Domingo and Elena Obraztsova, as well as in a more recent capture of an Arena di Verona performance starring the comely Marina Domashenko (TDK). A 1967 film of Carmen, its soundtrack conducted by Herbert von Karajan, features Grace Bumbry, Jon Vickers, Mirella Freni and Justino Díaz as its powerful principals (DG).