Carmen Study Guide by Break a Leg Studios

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The Metropolitan Opera Presents

Carmen Opera in four acts Music by Georges Bizet.

Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.

Based on the novel Carmen

by Prosper Mérimée.

Carmen premiered on March 3, 1875, at Opéra-Comique in Paris.

Sung in French with English supertitles.

January 27, 2024 The Met: Live in HD at the Sunrise Theater

The Cast Carmen ………........…........................….............…............ Aigul Akhmetshina Don José ……….................................................................….. Piotr Beczala Escamillo …..............….........…….............................…….......... Kyle Ketelsen Micaëla …………....................….............…………...........................…. Angel Blue Zuniga ............................................................................................ Wei Wu Le Dancaïre ...................................................................... Michael Adams Le Remendado ......................................................... Frederick Ballentine Mercédès ............................................................................. Briana Hunter Frasquita ..................................................................... Sydney Mancasola Moralès ............................................................................ Benjamin Taylor Conductor: Daniele Rustioni Production: Carrie Cracknell Choreographer: Ann Yee Lighting Designer: Guy Hoare Projection Designer: rocafilm/Roland Horvath Set Designer: Michael Levine Costume Designer: Tom Scutt

SYNOPSIS THE STORY OF CARMEN ACT I A contemporary American industrial town.

Outside a cigarette factory, a group of soldiers guarding the border comment on the passersby. A newly arrived young woman, Micaëla, asks for a soldier named Don José. Moralès, his colleague, tells her that Don José will return when the next shift begins. When the shift change, led by Zuniga, their commanding officer, occurs and José returns, Moralès tells José that Micaëla has been looking for him.

The factory bell rings, and the men gather to watch the female workers—especially their favorite, Carmen. She tells the men that love is free and obeys no rules. Only one man ignores her: Don José. Carmen throws a flower at him, and the women go back to work. José picks up the flower and hides it when Micaëla returns.

She brings a letter from José’s mother, who ives in the countryside. After Micaëla leaves,

1875 lithographic poster for the première of Georges Bizet's Carmen, Published by Choudens Pére et Fils and Imp.

José reads the letter. He is about to throw away the flower when a fight erupts inside the factory between Carmen and another woman.

Zuniga sends José in to remove Carmen, but when he brings her back outside, she refuses to answer Zuniga’s questions, and José is ordered to lock her up. Left alone with him, she entices José with suggestions of a rendezvous at a private party outside of town. Mesmerized, he agrees to let her get away. As he brings her to the lockup, Don José lets Carmen escape, and he is arrested.

ACT II Carmen and her friends Frasquita and Mercédès entertain a group of locals who have gathered in the cargo hold of a tractor-trailer truck to party. Zuniga tells Carmen that José has just been released from custody. Escamillo, a rodeo star, drives along the freeway with his entourage. The vehicles stop, and people spill out onto the road, listening to Escamillo boasting about his profession. He flirts with Carmen, who tells him that she is involved with someone else. Most of the partiers depart with

Opera Comique, Paris

SYNOPSIS THE STORY OF CARMEN ACT II continued Escamillo, leaving Carmen and her friends with the smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado, who try to convince the women to get involved in their smuggling scheme. Frasquita and Mercédès are willing to help, but Carmen refuses because she is in love. Dancaïre and Remendado withdraw as José approaches.

Carmen and José are left at a deserted gas station. Carmen arouses his jealousy by telling him how she danced for Zuniga. She dances for José now, but when a signal sounds in the distance, he says that he must return to duty.

Carmen mocks him. To prove his love, José shows her the flower that she threw at him when they met and confesses how its scent helped him hold onto hope while he was in lockup. She is unimpressed: If he really loved her, he would quit the army and join her in a

Pasquale Amato as the toreador. Herman Mishkin. The Victrola book of the opera

life of freedom in the mountains. José refuses, and Carmen tells him to leave. Zuniga arrives at the gas station looking for Carmen, and in a jealous rage, José fights him. The smugglers return and disarm Zuniga. José, having assaulted his superior officer, now has no choice but to join them.

Pronunciation Guide Carmen: “car-Men” Don José: “DON zho-zaY” Escamillo: “ess-kah-Mee-yo” Micaëla: “mee-kah-aY-lah” zuniga: “zoo-nee-gah” Moralès: “moh-Rah-les” Frasquita: “frah-Skee-tah” Mercédès: “mayr-SaY-dess” Dancaïre: “dahn-kah-ee” Remendado “reh-men-Dah-doh” Scene from the Opera 'Carmen', by Georges Bizet (1838-75)

SYNOPSIS THE STORY OF CARMEN ACT III The truck, last seen flying down the highway, has crashed at a high mountain pass. Smoke rises from the shattered vehicle, and women are climbing out of the back of the truck as smugglers start to remove large boxes of guns to bring them across the border. Carmen and José quarrel, and she admits that her love is fading and advises him to return to live with his mother. When Frasquita and Mercédès turn the cards to tell their fortunes, they foresee love and money for themselves, but Carmen’s cards spell death—for her and for José. Micaëla appears, frightened by the remote location and afraid to meet the woman who has turned José into a criminal. She hides when a shot rings out—José has fired at an intruder, who turns out to be Escamillo. He tells José that he has come to find Carmen, and the two men fight.

The smugglers separate them, and Escamillo

Cassandra Velasco and Richard Ollarsaba in Annapolis Opera’s production of Carmen.

Photo courtesy of Annapolis Opera.

invites everyone, particularly Carmen, to see him compete in the next rodeo. When he has left, Micaëla emerges and begs José to return home. He agrees when he learns that his mother is dying, but before he leaves, he warns Carmen that they will meet again.

ACT IV In a vast rodeo arena, a vibrant and noisy crowd gathers. Carmen arrives on Escamillo’s arm, surrounded by his rodeo entourage.

Frasquita and Mercédès come to warn her that José is nearby and can be seen watching her.

Unafraid, she waits outside the entrance as the crowds enter the arena. José appears and begs Carmen to forget the past and start a new life with him. She calmly tells him that their affair is over: She was born free and will live free until she dies. The crowd is heard cheering Escamillo. José persists in trying to win Carmen back. She takes off his ring and throws it at his feet before heading for the arena. José stabs her to death.

Denyce Graves. Metropolitan Opera Archives.

OPERA

Definitions Opera Comique Opéra-comique, French form of opera in which spoken dialogue alternates with self-contained musical numbers. The earliest examples of opéra-comique were satiric comedies with interpolated songs, but the form later developed into serious musical drama distinguished from other opera only by its spoken dialogue.

Gypsies “Gypsy” is actually a derogatory (insulting) word. The group of people it refers to are more accurately called Roma, and the language they speak is Romanes (or Romani). There are four Roma tribes, or nations (the Kalderash, the Machavaya, the Lovari, and the Churari), plus many other smaller groups (such as the Sinti, the Luri, and the Xoraxai). Most Roma refer to themselves by their tribal name or by “Rom” or “Roma,” meaning “Man” and “People.”

There are approximately 12 million Roma living in several nations around the world, but it is hard to get an exact number since they are not usually included in official census counts. Roma tend to live in their own communities, separate from the gajikané (foreign) society around them.

Centuries of discrimination and ethnic hatred have made them suspicious of outsiders, and they fear that integrating into gajikané society will cause them to lose their cultural identity. Over the centuries, Roma have spread into many different countries worldwide and have adapted to varying degrees to their different cultural environments. For this reason, there is no universal Roma culture, and there are many differences; what is “true Roma” to one group may be “gadjé,” or foreign, to another. However, there are some things characteristic of all Roma, for example: loyalty to family, belief in predestiny, and adaptibility to changing conditions.

The opéra-comique developed in the early 18th century out of the comédies de vaudeville, farcical entertainments performed at fairs. Their characters derived from those of the improvised Italian commedia dell’arte, and they included popular songs, or vaudevilles, which were given new, often satiric words. In 1715 the various performing groups were combined in Paris as the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique.

In the mid-18th century the writer Charles-Simon Favart brought a higher literary level to the opéra-comique texts, and newly composed songs began to be added, eventually replacing the popular vaudevilles. Plots began to centre on characters from everyday life. This emphasis was influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories of the noble, simple life.

Lesser 18th-century composers such as Nicolas Dalayrac, Egidio Duni, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, and François Philidor specialized in opéra-comique. Christoph Willibald Gluck, writing for audiences in Vienna that favoured the French genre, was the only great composer of that era to devote himself extensively to it.

The opéras-comiques of this period were characterized by social comment, light plots of romance or intrigue, and tuneful music.

The tradition continued in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the work of André Grétry, François Boieldieu, and Daniel Auber, who treated more serious and romantic subjects and made a more evocative use of the orchestra.

A subgenre of opéra-comique during this period was the “rescue opera” with its plot of political tyranny defeated. Toward 1830 the opéra-comique developed into serious music drama approximating grand opera and gradually lost its satiric character.

Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) is a late, isolated example of opéra-comique, possessing spoken dialogue but dealing with a tragic theme.

Carmen, Metropolitan Opera, 2024

GEORGES Bizet French Composer

Fast Facts Even though it is considered by many to be the most popular opera of all time, Carmen had a rocky start, and was not well received at its premiere.

Georges Bizet died shortly after Carmen was premiered. Following a production in Vienna later that year, the opera went on to achieve worldwide acclaim.

Carmen remains an extremely well-known and well-loved opera.

Over the past decade, Carmen has been the third-most performed opera worldwide.

The “Habanera” from Act I and the Toreador Song from Act II are among the best-known opera arias.

A habanera is a style of SpanishAmerican dance popular in Cuba in the 19th century. Carmen’s famous “Habanera” is an adaptation of a song by the Spanish musician Sebastián Iradier, although Bizet believed it to be a folk melody when he composed the opera.

Georges Bizet was born in Paris into a musical family: his father was an amateur singer and his mother was sister to François Delsarte, a renowned vocal teacher. His parents fostered his interest in music, and enrolled him at the Paris Conservatory when he was barely 10 years old, the minimum age required for entry into the conservatory. There he studied composition with Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Geneviève he later married. He also developed into a virtuoso pianist, noted for his technical proficiency and full-score reading (playing the piano from an orchestral score). In 1857 Bizet won the Prix de Rome scholarship for study in Italy; his first opera dates from the same year, the one-act Le Docteur Miracle. Besides composing, he often worked as a rehearsal pianist and orchestrator, which gave him an uncommon familiarity with the works of the Parisian theater. Today Bizet is remembered primarily as an opera composer, although he did not win fame as such during his short lifetime. In his 37 years he wrote six operas that survive in a performable format, as well as nearly 30 unpublished or incomplete works. The first of Bizet’s operas to reach the professional stage was Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers), which lasted 18 performances after its premiere at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863. Of the various opera projects on which he worked, two more were staged - La Jolie Fille de Perth in 1867, Djamileh in 1872 - without establishing him as a major talent. Though discouraged by the indifference of theatre managers and the public, he continued to pursue his great love. With Carmen, at the Opéra Comique in 1875, the tide of fortune started to turn, but Bizet died that year, thinking he had written another failure. The work caught on soon afterward and, together with the incidental music for Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne, has carried Bizet’s reputation. Bizet seemed to have trouble finding direction as a composer; he frequently began operatic projects, but then abandoned them before completion.

He often borrowed from these, incorporating their material into later projects. Bizet paid more attention to the meaning and emotional content of the words than to the rhythm and metrical patterns (called “word painting,” because the composer uses music to “paint” or illustrate the word’s meaning). His choice of subject matter and compositional style presaged the development of verismo opera. Carmen was drawn from a popular short novel of the same title by Prosper Mérimée (1845), inspired in turn by the writing of George Henry Borrow, an Englishman who had lived among the Spanish Gypsies. Bizet’s libretto, conventionalized for the conservative, bourgeois audience of the Opéra Comique, was the work of Ludovic Halévy (a cousin of his wife’s) and Henri Meilhac. Since the opéracomique genre called for spoken dialogue, sung recitatives had to be added if the work was ever to be performed at a grand-opera theater. This was done after Bizet’s death by his friend Ernest Guiraoud. The work’s initially poor reception is attributable to the novelty and daring of presenting “low life” in this genre and allowing the heroine to die instead of contriving the customary happy ending. Gypsies smoking cigarettes onstage was another risqué element, as was the “immoral” character of the heroine. Carmen survived to become one of the most frequently performed operas in the world.

LUDOVIC HALÉVY Librettist

LUDOVIC HALÉVY

HENRI MEILHAC

VOICE TYPES Since the early 19th century, singing voices have usually been classified in six basic types, three male and three female, according to their range.

Soprano: the highest-pitched general type of human voice, normally possessed only by women and boys.

Mezzo-Soprano: the female voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto (Italian “mezzo” = middle, medium).

Contralto: the lowest female voice, also called an alto.

Tenor: the highest naturally occurring voice type in adult males.

Baritone: the male voice lying below the tenor and above the bass.

Bass: the lowest sounding male voice.

Librettist Ludovic Halévy was born in Paris on Dec. 31, 1833, into a family of musicians and playwrights. His father Léon was a scholar and playwright and his paternal uncle, Jacques François Halévy, was a well-known composer.

Halévy followed in the family tradition and, even though he became a government official, he started his career as a librettist in 1855, working with Offenbach. Thereafter, he wrote libretti with Hector Crémieux and Henri Meilhac for other operas and operettas. His collaboration with Meilhac was all-important because together they created the ideal libretti for Offenbach and, most memorably, also wrote the libretto to Carmen for Bizet. Among Offenbach’s operas the most important are Orphée aux enfers, La Belle Hélène, La Vie parisienne, La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein and La Périchole.

HENRI MEILHAC Librettist Librettist Henri Meilhac was born in Paris, Feb. 21, 1831.

After finishing his secondary school studies, Meilhac was employed in a book shop. However, he also devoted himself to drawing, as well as working as a cartoonist and humorous writer with the newspapers Journal pour rire and Vie parisienne, employment in which he initially used the pseudonym Ivan Baskoff. In 1856, he made his debut as a comedy writer in a one-act musical comedy La Sarabande du cardinal and subsequently wrote exclusively for the theatre. He created at least 115 works of various genres, including musical comedies, five-act comedies and opera libretti. Many of his works were written in collaboration with other authors, in particular with Ludovic Halévy, and their combined literary output greatly influenced the style of comic libretti of the 19th century.

Together, they wrote libretti for Offenbach, which included La Belle Hélène, La Vie Parisienne, La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein and La Périchole, the libretto for Bizet’s Carmen and opera libretti for other French composers.

Meilhac became very popular in England, thanks to Offenbach’s operas. He was elected a member of the Académie Française for his artistic talents in 1888, and died in Paris on July 6, 1897.

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