50 Fun Facts About Carmen

Which Russian composer predicted Carmen would conquer the world?

Tchaikovsky. He heard Carmen in Paris in January 1876 and later wrote that within ten years it would be the world's most popular opera; after a cold start at home, it triumphed abroad within the decade.

Carmen is based on an 1845 novella by which French writer?

Prosper Mérimée. He said the tale grew from a story the Countess of Montijo told him in Spain in 1830; her daughter later became the Empress Eugénie.

Who wrote the libretto of Carmen?

Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. They were Offenbach's hit-makers, the wits behind La belle Hélène and La vie parisienne: comedy specialists writing a tragedy.

In which Spanish city is Carmen set?

Seville. Bizet never set foot there, or anywhere else in Spain: he built the opera's Spanish sound from borrowed songs and dance rhythms.

Where does Carmen work when the opera opens?

In a cigarette factory. Its real-life model, a vast royal tobacco works, still stands and has housed a university since the 1950s.

What does Carmen throw at Don José after her entrance aria?

He has been ignoring her; the flower later becomes the subject of his great act 2 aria.

Which line opens the Carmen aria known as the Habanera?

L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, 'Love is a rebellious bird'. The words are not his librettists' work: Bizet wrote them himself.

Which Carmen number did Bizet adapt from Sebastián Iradier's song 'El Arreglito', believing it a folk tune?

The Habanera. When Bizet learned that the tune's composer had died only ten years earlier, he added a note to the vocal score crediting him.

With which song does Carmen persuade José to loosen her bonds and let her escape?

The Seguidilla. Its promise of a night's dancing at Lillas Pastia's tavern works too well: José lets her slip away and spends two months locked up in her place.

What is the name of the bullfighter who wins Carmen's love?

Escamillo. The novella has only Lucas, a picador glimpsed in the arena; the opera promoted him to a swaggering matador with the Toreador Song for an entrance.

In Carmen, who is Micaëla?

José's village sweetheart. She is nowhere in the novella: the librettists added 'a very innocent, very chaste young girl' to calm a theatre director alarmed by the plot.

What are the names of Carmen's two friends who read fortunes with her in act 3?

Frasquita and Mercédès. They tell fortunes for fun, but when Carmen takes her turn hers comes up death, first for her and then for José.

What forces José to desert the army and join the smugglers at the end of act 2?

He fights his officer, Zuniga. Moments earlier José had refused to desert and was heading back to barracks; then Zuniga walked in on them and the brawl settled it.

What does Carmen throw down in the final scene, just before José stabs her?

The ring he gave her. She flings it away as the crowd inside roars for her new lover, turns for the arena gate, and José stabs her.

Which of these shocked Carmen's first Paris audiences in 1875?

The heroine murdered on stage. Reviewers were just as appalled that she was a seductress, not a woman of virtue: one called the leading lady's gestures 'a very incarnation of vice'.

Which Paris company staged the first performance of Carmen in March 1875?

The Opéra-Comique. For a century it had specialised in light, moral pieces where virtue is rewarded, and one of its two directors fought to keep Carmen off its stage.

How did Bizet's Carmen originally handle the passages between musical numbers?

With spoken dialogue. Sung recitatives were added only after Bizet's death, yet outside France that sung-through version held the stage for most of the next century.

Who created the title role of Carmen at the premiere?

Célestine Galli-Marié. She backed Bizet whenever the management wanted the work toned down, and its librettists later blamed her performance for the first run's failure.

Why did soprano Marie Roze turn down the title role of Carmen?

The character was too immoral. After meeting Bizet, Roze wrote that she had expected the tragic ending to temper Carmen's 'very scabrous side', and she withdrew.

Which composer reportedly complained at Carmen's premiere that Bizet had stolen Micaëla's aria: 'That melody is mine!'?

Charles Gounod. He went on: take out the Spanish airs and his own tunes, and nothing was left to Bizet's credit 'but the sauce that masks the fish'.

On the night Bizet died, the first Carmen reportedly felt foreboding during which scene?

The card scene. Turning up the cards that foretell Carmen's death, she is said to have been overcome and to have fainted as she left the stage; Bizet died hours later.

Months after Bizet's death, a triumphant production in which city launched Carmen's worldwide fame?

Vienna. Its staging of October 1875 sent Carmen round the world, yet Paris, where the opera was born, dropped it early in 1876 and did not revive it until 1883.

Which composer is said to have seen Carmen twenty times and to have longed 'to embrace Bizet'?

Johannes Brahms. For once he and Wagner, whose followers fought a bitter feud, were on the same side: Wagner too came away from Carmen full of praise.

Which German leader is said to have seen Carmen 27 times?

Otto von Bismarck. If the story is true, the chancellor whose armies had crushed France in 1870-71 became one of this French opera's most devoted fans.

Which philosopher praised Carmen as the opposite of Wagner's music?

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Case of Wagner opens with him hearing 'Bizet's masterpiece for the twentieth time' and adds: 'I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me.'

Enrico Caruso sang José in San Francisco on 17 April 1906 and was woken hours later by what?

A violent earthquake. It was the great San Francisco quake of 18 April 1906: Caruso fled the Palace Hotel, got out of the burning city and never sang there again.

Which legendary soprano recorded the title role of Carmen but never sang it on stage?

Maria Callas. Her 1964 studio set was her only Carmen; Zeffirelli's film Callas Forever imagines the ageing diva miming the role on screen to that old recording.

Which Soviet composer turned Carmen's music into a 1967 ballet for his wife, Bolshoi star Maya Plisetskaya?

Rodion Shchedrin. His wife had first asked Shostakovich, who said he was 'afraid of Bizet'; the Soviet culture minister then banned the ballet as an insult to the opera.

Which violin virtuoso composed the Carmen Fantasy, a showpiece built on the opera's best-known tunes?

Pablo de Sarasate. His showpiece later met a rival: Franz Waxman wrote another Carmen Fantasie for the 1946 film Humoresque, and Jascha Heifetz took that one up.

Carmen Jones, the 1943 Broadway musical that moved the story to wartime America, had lyrics by whom?

Oscar Hammerstein II. He left Bizet's music almost untouched but rewrote every word, turning the bullfighter into a prizefighter called Husky Miller.

Who starred in Otto Preminger's 1954 film of Carmen Jones?

Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. Both were famous singers, yet neither sings a note in the film: opera voices were dubbed in, hers by a young Marilyn Horne.

In the novella behind Carmen, how does José tell his story?

In prison, awaiting execution. The narrator, a scholar who met the bandit while hunting for a Roman battlefield, visits his cell and hears it all the day before he is garrotted.

In the novella behind the opera, the one-eyed bandit Garcia, whom José kills in a knife fight, is Carmen's what?

Her husband. The opera drops him altogether; in the novella José wins Carmen back and his first words are to tell her she is a widow.

Which Russian writer's poem 'The Gypsies' is thought to have helped inspire the story of Carmen?

Alexander Pushkin. The novella's author translated the poem into French, and the taunt Carmen sings at her arrest, 'Coupe-moi, brûle-moi', is lifted from that translation.

Which singer made her acting debut as the lead in MTV's 2001 film Carmen: A Hip Hopera?

Beyoncé. The film moves the story to Philadelphia and Los Angeles, turns the soldier into a police sergeant and swaps most of Bizet's score for hip-hop.

Which piano virtuoso was astonished when the young Bizet sight-read one of his hardest pieces at a dinner party?

Franz Liszt. He declared that he had thought only two men could master the piece's difficulties, but now there were three, and the youngest was perhaps the boldest.

Bizet's 1857 Prix de Rome paid for a long stay at which Roman villa?

The Villa Medici, home of the French Academy in Rome. The rules called for a third year in Germany, but Bizet won permission to spend it in Italy instead.

Bizet's wife Geneviève, his teacher's daughter, was the cousin of which collaborator?

The librettist Ludovic Halévy. Her father Fromental Halévy had taught Bizet; as a widow she became a famous salon hostess and a model for Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes.

Which earlier Bizet opera, set in Ceylon, is his best-known work after Carmen?

The Pearl Fishers. It closed after eighteen performances in 1863 and was never staged again in his lifetime, yet its tenor-baritone duet is now one of the most famous in opera.

The flute-and-harp prelude to act 3 of Carmen is widely said to have been meant for which other Bizet score?

L'Arlésienne. Daudet's play failed in 1872 and closed within weeks, but the concert suite Bizet made from its music was instantly popular.

Days before his death at Bougival in 1875, an ailing Bizet went swimming in which river?

The Seine. A fever and two heart attacks followed within days, in the riverside village where he had finished Carmen's 1,200-page draft the summer before.

Which instrument does Carmen play herself while dancing for Don José in act 2?

Castanets. Midway through, a bugle sounds the recall from his barracks; she takes it for accompaniment and dances on, then flies into a rage when he says he must go.

What voice type is the role of Carmen written for?

Mezzo-soprano. The bright soprano line goes to the innocent Micaëla instead; one biographer called Carmen a new kind of heroine, far from the 'spotless soprano' school.

What became of Adolphe de Leuven, the theatre co-director who fought against staging Carmen?

He resigned his post. He had been promised a tamer heroine whose death would be buried under 'triumphal processions, ballets and joyous fanfares'; unconvinced, he left early in 1874.

Which composer, an old friend of Bizet, still complained in 1919 that the ballet added to Carmen was 'a hideous blemish'?

Camille Saint-Saëns. Forty-four years after his friend's death he was still angry: the inserted dances were a 'strange idea', out of keeping with the opera's character.

Carmen is often called a bridge to which gritty style of Italian opera, later made famous by Puccini?

Verismo. The name comes from the Italian for 'truth': by putting smugglers, deserters and ne'er-do-wells centre stage, Bizet blazed the trail Puccini's generation followed.

The critic Harold C. Schonberg likened Carmen to a female version of which operatic character?

Don Giovanni. 'She would rather die than be false to herself,' he wrote: like Mozart's seducer, she is offered a way out and goes to her death unrepentant.

Which silent comedian spoofed the story in his 1915 film A Burlesque on Carmen?

Charlie Chaplin. Playing a soldier called Darn Hosiery, he was sending up Cecil B. DeMille's Carmen, filmed that same year with the opera star Geraldine Farrar.

Ernest Guiraud, Carmen's posthumous arranger, completed which unfinished Offenbach opera?

The Tales of Hoffmann. Offenbach died with the score unfinished, and the New Orleans-born Guiraud completed its orchestration for the premiere four months later.

Three months after Carmen opened, Bizet died on which personal anniversary?

His wedding. He had married Geneviève, his old teacher's daughter, six years earlier to the day, and that night's performance of Carmen was cancelled.