CARMEN
The only truly successful opera written by Bizet, Carmen, despite carping from Parisian critics at the outset, entered the repertory shortly after its premiere and has remained there ever since. The story of the wicked, fatalistic Gypsy girl and her romance with Jose (presented rather sympathetically in the libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, but a thoroughgoing cad in the novel by Prosper Merimee) has fascinated opera audiences for more than a century. One of the opera’s earlier exponents was Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an intellectual rebellion against Wagner, wanted to distance himself from the doctrines of the Bayreuth blusterer.
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The unavoidable impression is that Lyric management knows that it can sell out as many performances of Carmen as it can mount, and that it simply doesn’t care much that the production could have been and should have been much better.
