Assembling the cast The search for a singer-actress to play Carmen began in mid-1873. Press speculation favoured
Zulma Bouffar, who was perhaps the librettists' preferred choice. She had sung leading roles in many of
Offenbach's operas, but she was unacceptable to Bizet and was turned down by du Locle as unsuitable. In September an approach was made to
Marie Roze, well known for previous triumphs at the Opéra-Comique, the Opéra and in London. She refused the part when she learned that she would be required to die on stage. The role was then offered to
Célestine Galli-Marié, who agreed to terms with du Locle after several months' negotiation. Galli-Marié, a demanding and at times tempestuous performer, would prove a staunch ally of Bizet, often supporting his resistance to demands from the management that the work should be toned down. At the time it was generally believed that she and the composer were conducting a love affair during the months of rehearsal.
Jacques Bouhy, engaged to sing Escamillo, was a young Belgian-born baritone who had already appeared in demanding roles such as Méphistophélès in Gounod's
Faust and as
Mozart's Figaro.
Marguerite Chapuy, who sang Micaëla, was at the beginning of a short career in which she was briefly a star at London's
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; the impresario
James H. Mapleson thought her "one of the most charming vocalists it has been my pleasure to know". However, she married and left the stage altogether in 1876, refusing Mapleson's considerable cash inducements to return.
Premiere and initial run '', 1911 Because rehearsals did not start until October 1874 and lasted longer than anticipated, the premiere was delayed. The final rehearsals went well, and in a generally optimistic mood the first night was fixed for 3 March 1875, the day on which, coincidentally, Bizet's appointment as a Chevalier of the
Legion of Honour was formally announced. The premiere, which was conducted by
Adolphe Deloffre, was attended by many of Paris's leading musical figures, including Massenet, Offenbach, Delibes and Gounod; Halévy recorded his impressions of the premiere in a letter to a friend; the first act was evidently well received, with applause for the main numbers and numerous curtain calls. The first part of act 2 also went well, but after the toreador's song there was, Halévy noted, "coldness". In act 3 only Micaëla's aria earned applause as the audience became increasingly disconcerted. The final act was "glacial from first to last", and Bizet was left "only with the consolations of a few friends". The critic
Ernest Newman wrote later that the sentimentalist Opéra-Comique audience was "shocked by the drastic realism of the action" and by the low standing and defective morality of most of the characters. According to the composer
Benjamin Godard, Bizet retorted, in response to a compliment, "Don't you see that all these bourgeois have not understood a wretched word of the work I have written for them?" In a different vein, shortly after the work had concluded, Massenet sent Bizet a congratulatory note: "How happy you must be at this time—it's a great success!" The general tone of the next day's press reviews ranged from disappointment to outrage. The more conservative critics complained about "Wagnerism" and the subordination of the voice to the noise of the orchestra. There was consternation that the heroine was an amoral seductress rather than a woman of virtue; Galli-Marié's interpretation of the role was described by one critic as "the very incarnation of vice". It seemed that Bizet had generally failed to fulfill expectations, both of those who (given Halévy's and Meilhac's past associations) had expected something in the Offenbach mould, and of critics such as Adolphe Jullien who had anticipated a
Wagnerian music drama. Among the few supportive critics was the poet
Théodore de Banville; writing in
Le National, he applauded Bizet for presenting a drama with real men and women instead of the usual Opéra-Comique "puppets". In its initial run at the Opéra-Comique,
Carmen provoked little public enthusiasm; it shared the theatre for a while with
Verdi's much more popular
Requiem.
Carmen was often performed to half-empty houses, even when the management gave away large numbers of tickets. Among those who attended one of these later performances was
Tchaikovsky, who wrote to his benefactor,
Nadezhda von Meck: "
Carmen is a masterpiece in every sense of the word... one of those rare creations which expresses the efforts of a whole musical epoch." After the final performance,
Carmen was not seen in Paris again until 1883. Despite its deviations from Bizet's original format, and some critical reservations, the 1875 Vienna production was a great success with the city's public. It also won praise from both Wagner and
Brahms. The latter reportedly saw the opera twenty times, and said he would have "gone to the ends of the earth to embrace Bizet". The Viennese triumph began the opera's rapid ascent towards worldwide fame. In February 1876 it began a run in Brussels at
La Monnaie; it returned there the following year, with Galli-Marié in the title role, and thereafter became a permanent fixture in the Brussels repertory. On 17 June 1878
Carmen was produced in London, at
Her Majesty's Theatre, where
Minnie Hauk began her long association with the part of Carmen. A parallel London production at Covent Garden, with
Adelina Patti, was cancelled when Patti withdrew. The successful Her Majesty's production, sung in Italian, had an equally enthusiastic reception in
Dublin. On 23 October 1878 the opera received its American premiere, at the New York
Academy of Music, and in the same year was introduced to
Saint Petersburg.
Carmen was also acclaimed in numerous French provincial cities including
Marseille,
Lyon and, in 1881,
Dieppe, where Galli-Marié returned to the role. In August 1881 the singer wrote to Bizet's widow to report that
Carmens Spanish premiere, in Barcelona, had been "another great success". But Carvalho, who had assumed the management of the Opéra-Comique, thought the work immoral and refused to reinstate it. Meilhac and Hálevy were more prepared to countenance a revival, provided that Galli-Marié had no part in it; they blamed her interpretation for the relative failure of the opening run.
Worldwide success ,
Enrico Caruso and
Pasquale Amato On 9 January 1884,
Carmen was given its first New York
Metropolitan Opera performance, to a mixed critical reception.
The New York Times welcomed Bizet's "pretty and effective work", but compared
Zelia Trebelli's interpretation of the title role unfavourably with that of Minnie Hauk. On 17 April 1906, on tour with the Met, he sang the role at the Grand Opera House in
San Francisco. Afterwards he sat up until 3 am reading the reviews in the early editions of the following day's papers. Two hours later he was awakened by the first violent shocks of the
1906 San Francisco earthquake, after which he and his fellow performers made a hurried escape from the
Palace Hotel. The popularity of
Carmen continued through succeeding generations of American opera-goers; by the beginning of 2011 the Met alone had performed it almost a thousand times. Carmen's
habanera from act 1, and the toreador's song "
Votre toast" from act 2, are among the most popular and best-known of all operatic arias, the latter "a splendid piece of swagger" according to Newman, "against which the voices and the eyebrows of purists have long been raised in vain". Most of the productions outside France followed the example created in Vienna and incorporated lavish ballet interludes and other spectacles, a practice which
Mahler abandoned in Vienna when he revived the work there in 1900. At the Opéra-Comique, after its 1883 revival,
Carmen was always presented in the dialogue version with minimal musical embellishments. However, outside France the practice of using recitatives remained the norm for many years; the
Carl Rosa Opera Company's 1947 London production, and
Walter Felsenstein's 1949 staging at the Berlin
Komische Oper, are among the first known instances in which the dialogue version was used other than in France. Neither of these innovations led to much change in practice; a similar experiment was tried at Covent Garden in 1953 but hurriedly withdrawn, and the first American production with spoken dialogue, in Colorado in 1953, met with a similar fate. Only late in the 20th century did dialogue versions become common in opera houses outside France, but there is still no universally recognised full score.
Fritz Oeser's 1964 edition is an attempt to fill this gap, but in Dean's view is unsatisfactory. Oeser reintroduces material removed by Bizet during the first rehearsals, and ignores many of the late changes and improvements that the composer made immediately before the first performance; Each departs significantly from Bizet's vocal score of March 1875, published during his lifetime after he had personally corrected the proofs; Dean believes this vocal score should be the basis of any standard edition. should this transpire, she says, "we might expect yet another scholar to attempt to refine the details of this vibrant score which has so fascinated the public and performers for more than a century." Meanwhile,
Carmens popularity endures; according to Macdonald: "The memorability of Bizet's tunes will keep the music of Carmen alive in perpetuity," and its status as a popular classic is unchallenged by any other French opera. ==Music==