Georges Bizet
Carmen Suite
Carmen, Bizet’s last work, was premiered in Paris in 1875 to a hostile and uncomprehending audience. The opera’s failure, followed three months later by Bizet’s death at the age of 36, is legendary for being one of the cruelest misjudgments of history, because success and recognition might (we like to think) have staved off the illnesses that led to his death, precipitated without doubt by depression. Bizet was used to failure, since none of his previous theatrical ventures were successful. Yet none of them displayed the genius that lifts every page of Carmen to great heights. Had he lived, Bizet would surely have extended his list of masterpieces. Verdi, after all, found his true voice at the same age as Bizet and lived into his eighties. Wagner, at 36, still had his seven greatest operas to write. No matter how satisfying we find Carmen, its hint of yet finer unwritten operas is inescapably depressing. It became, as Tchaikovsky predicted, the most popular opera in the world and it is one of the greatest.
It was Bizet’s own idea to use Prosper Mérimée’s novel, Carmen, as the story. In 1872 he was commissioned to write a three-act opera for the Opéra-Comique. He was assigned the libretto team of Meilhac and Halévy, who divided up their duties according to French custom with Meilhac in charge of the plot and the dialogue, Halévy writing verses for music. The changes they made to Mérimée were both commercial and astute. They removed two of the murders from the story and one of the major characters, Carmen’s husband. They invented, following a one-line lead from Mérimée, the pure Micaela. This double adjustment made the plot almost acceptable to the Opéra-Comique’s audience. By removing a villain and putting in a virgin, they moved the story of low life a few notches up toward respectability. Micaela is a brilliant creation; she helps to measure Don José’s decline by acting both as a contrast to Carmen and as a representative of the normal world that José chose to desert.
The Opéra-Comique preferred that its dramas intersperse music with spoken dialogue rather than recitative. It also preferred its operas to end happily with villainy and sin put firmly in their place. It was a family theatre where audiences were amused and entertained, but never shocked. Clearly, the subject matter of Bizet’s opera stunned and scandalized its audience, since the heroine is, in a sense, a villain, who smokes, seduces men, smuggles on the side and meets her death on stage. Here, sensuality is presented very much in the raw, and the French were not ready for it. If Bizet had lived even one more year, he would have seen Carmen become a popular success abroad and, after a few more years, a success in France as well.