There is one (Corporal Don José) who ignores her, but this merely intrigues her and she tosses him a flower. In Act One the alluring gypsy girl Carmen comes off shift at the local cigarette factory and flirts with the soldiers, who have been changing the guard. Set in Seville in about the 1820s, the four-act opera is full of passion and violence. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée’s novel of the same name. Before the premiere Bizet had noted “I have written a work that is all clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody.” Sadly, after the first performance, he was also to say he foresaw “a definite and hopeless flop” and he was still full of pessimism when he died suddenly of a heart attack three months later, never to know that Carmen would become one of the world’s most popular operas. Opéra comique was not what we might think of as comic opera, but a French version of the German Singspiel featuring spoken dialogue between the sung sections. This deeply upset public proprieties – the characters were the antithesis of what was considered proper at the time. His characters (shockingly to many at the time) were factory workers, cigarette-smoking, liberated women, gypsies and others. Bizet, a realist, chose to be different and wrote in Carmen about the non-heroic and the underclass. Its composer, Georges Bizet, was asked to write a new work for the Paris Opéra-Comique, who were in the habit of staging light pieces with definite moral overtones. A French opera set in Spain, composed in the Italian verismo style and premiered in Paris in 1875, gave the opera-going public a massive shock.
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