Carmen

Selling cigarettes in Sevilla to eke out a living, Carmen turns the head of the young soldier Don José. After a dispute between plant workers, Don José is actually supposed to lead Carmen away into prison, but secretly helps her to escape and goes to prison in her place. From that event on, he completely loses himself in his love to Carmen. Soon, Carmen gets tired of Don José being jealous and so she makes eyes at torero Escamillo. Story takes its course and soon it becomes clear that a deadly finale in the bullfighting is going be inevitable…

Carmen marks the peak of Bizets time dealing with the “opéra comique”, an opera with spoken dialogues and at the same time, Bizet breaks with traditional aspects of an opera. “The heroine, immoral from the beginning on, the hero, sinking from one level of society to next, the poet who doesn’t present a moral of the story: these factors combined appal theatre directors so heavily that they desperately try to change the Libretto. But Bizet is not someone who lets himself be forced into compromising”, says Mina Curtiss in her Bizet monography, which was published in 1978. Even today, the opera Carmen still has the same staggering effects on the audience as in Bizet’s time. The fate theme can already be heard in the Overture. Later one, this theme can also be found in Habanera, Seguidilla and the Toreador song, showing that all characters might be doomed. “No Senta sentimentality!”, said Friedrich Nietzsche in 1888 in the case of Wagner, "but love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel - and in this, its ’nature'!”