50 Fun Facts About Carmen

How many acts does Carmen have?

Bizet died after its 33rd performance, never knowing it would become one of the most performed operas in the world.

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

He claimed the tale came from the Countess of Montijo, mother of the future Empress Eugénie, during his 1830 travels in Spain.

Who wrote the libretto of Carmen?

The pair were best known as Offenbach's operetta writers; the unmusical one wrote the dialogue and the other the verses.

In which Spanish city is Carmen set?

Act 1 opens in a square outside a tobacco factory, and act 4 outside the bullring, around the year 1820.

Where does Carmen work when the opera opens?

She is arrested after attacking another factory girl with a knife.

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.

What is the actual first line, and title, of the aria everyone calls the 'Habanera'?

'Love is a rebellious bird'; the word habanera just means a dance of Havana.

Bizet based the Habanera on a song by which Spanish composer, believing it to be a folk tune?

When told the composer had died only ten years earlier, he added a note crediting the source in the first vocal score.

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

She sings of a night of dancing with her lover, whoever that may be, at Lillas Pastia's tavern; José is arrested for letting her go.

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

He introduces himself with the Toreador Song, of which Bizet reportedly said 'they asked for ordure, and they've got it'.

Who is Micaëla?

She does not exist in the novella; the librettists invented her as a 'very innocent, very chaste' foil to reassure a nervous theatre.

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

Their cards promise love and money; Carmen's keep turning up death, for her and for José.

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

Carmen's gypsy comrades restrain the officer, and José has no way back to barracks.

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

She dies outside the arena while the crowd inside cheers the bullfighter.

Which of these features of Carmen scandalised its first audiences in 1875?

Low-life characters, immorality and a knife fight among factory girls did not help; one critic called the heroine 'the very incarnation of vice'.

Where and when was Carmen first performed?

The same day, Bizet's appointment as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour was announced.

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

Ernest Guiraud composed recitatives for the Vienna production after Bizet's death, and that grand-opera format ruled outside France for a century.

Who created the title role of Carmen at the premiere?

She was a staunch ally of Bizet against the management, and gossip held that the two were having an affair during rehearsals.

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

The librettists' own preference, Zulma Bouffar, had already been rejected as unsuitable.

Which composer was overheard at the premiere saying Bizet stole Micaëla's act 3 aria: 'That melody is mine!'?

Massenet, by contrast, sent a note the same night calling it 'a great success'.

How old was Bizet when he died, three months after the premiere?

He died of heart disease on 3 June 1875, the day after the 33rd performance and on his wedding anniversary.

After its first run, in which year was Carmen finally revived in Paris?

It had to conquer Vienna, Brussels, London and New York first; the theatre's manager thought the work immoral.

Which composer would have 'gone to the ends of the earth to embrace Bizet' and saw Carmen twenty times?

Wagner also praised the Vienna production; Tchaikovsky called the opera 'a masterpiece in every sense of the word'.

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

Nietzsche wrote that he 'became a better man when Bizet speaks to me'.

Which philosopher admired Carmen, calling its entrance aria 'ironically provocative'?

He set Bizet's Mediterranean clarity against Wagner, whom he had once idolised.

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

He had sat up until 3 am reading his reviews before fleeing the Palace Hotel with the rest of the company.

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

The part's demand for acting as well as singing has deterred several great voices.

Which Russian composer turned Carmen's music into a 1967 ballet suite for his ballerina wife?

The Carmen Suite was written for Maya Plisetskaya, then the Bolshoi's prima ballerina.

Which violinist-composer wrote the 'ingenious and technically difficult' Carmen Fantasy?

Busoni and Horowitz later wrote their own piano fantasies and variations on the opera's themes.

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

Billy Rose produced it with an all-Black cast, almost none of whom had ever been on stage before.

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

In Hammerstein's version the toreador becomes a boxer, Husky Miller, and Carmen works in a parachute factory.

In Mérimée's novella, how does José tell his story?

The narrator, a scholar hunting for a Roman battlefield, befriends the bandit before hearing the tale on the eve of his garrotting.

Which character from the novella did the opera cut, along with the fact that José kills him?

The novella's bullfighter is a minor picador named Lucas; the opera built him up into a star baritone.

Which Pushkin poem, which Mérimée later translated, may have influenced the novella?

George Borrow's book The Zincali, on Spain's Romani people, was another of Mérimée's sources.

The novella was first published in October 1845 in which journal?

Only three of its parts appeared there; the fourth was added for the 1846 book edition.

What was Bizet's name at birth in Paris in 1838?

He was baptised Georges in 1840 and used that name for the rest of his life; his father had been a hairdresser and wigmaker.

Which prestigious prize did the student Bizet win in 1857?

It sent him to the Villa Medici in Rome for three years, a place he called 'paradise'.

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

Her father Fromental Halévy wrote the opera La Juive; the marriage was 'intermittently happy' and produced one son.

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

Its 1863 premiere at the Théâtre Lyrique was no great success; its tenor-baritone duet is now a concert staple.

The prelude to act 3 of Carmen was originally written for which other Bizet score?

The suite from that incidental music to Daudet's play was an instant hit, unlike almost everything else Bizet wrote in his lifetime.

Where did Bizet spend the summer of 1874 completing his 1,200-page draft of Carmen?

He wrote that he had produced 'a work that is all clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody'; he died in the same village a year later.

Which of these percussion instruments feature in Carmen's orchestra?

The pit at the premiere held around 60 players; Carmen plays her own castanets while dancing for José.

What voice type is the role of Carmen written for?

The tenor who created José, Paul Lhérie, later switched to baritone roles.

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

He was assured the Romani characters would be comic and Carmen's death buried under 'triumphal processions, ballets and joyous fanfares'; it was not enough.

Which composer complained in 1919 that the ballet added to Carmen abroad was 'a hideous blemish'?

Mahler had already dropped the ballet interludes when he revived the opera in Vienna in 1900.

What is the gritty Italian opera style of Puccini, said to have its bridge in Carmen?

Critic Hugh Macdonald calls Strauss's Salome and Berg's Lulu 'distant degenerate descendants of Bizet's temptress'.

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

'She would rather die than be false to herself,' he wrote.

Roughly how many times had the Metropolitan Opera performed Carmen by 2011?

Its Met debut came on 9 January 1884, when the New York Times called it Bizet's 'pretty and effective work'.

Who replaced Carmen's spoken dialogue with recitatives for the 1875 Vienna production?

He also borrowed music from L'Arlésienne to give the second act a spectacular ballet.

After how many performances of Carmen did Bizet die suddenly on 3 June 1875?

He died of heart disease on his wedding anniversary, and that night's performance was cancelled.