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May 26th, 2016 
Awake Goy In a letter dated October 1866, composer George Bizet (1838 – 1875) went straight to the heart of opera:
As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
George Bizet freely sprinkled the human experience into his opera Carmen. One hundred and thirty-five years after its premier it remains the world’s most popular opera. It was a performance that pioneered the grittiness of real life characters and events.
This self-effacing composer joined the echelon of Europe’s great composers from an early age. Before his eighteenth birthday he had composed his first symphony said to rival anything composed by the teenage Mozart or Mendelssohn. Bizet had also won a competition sponsored by theatre impresario Jacques Offenbach and was later awarded the coveted Prix de Rome.
This composer of Spain’s most celebrated musical masterpiece delighted in most of his compositions and was puzzled when they weren’t as popular as he thought they deserved to be. However, unimpressed with Carmen he could not fathom why his opera about the steamy love affairs of a beautiful senorita could be so popular.
A story of love and lust, Carmen was the forerunner to today’s television soap operas. From Carmen flowed a new genre of performance that inspired Pietro Mascagni’s Cavallaria Rusticana, Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. Gustav Mahler, one of the greatest composers of all time considered George Bizet’s Djamileh a masterpiece.
Carmen is the story of a coquettish factory worker of questionable morality. By feminine guile she uses, abuses and seduces her way through a rich tapestry of gypsies, thieves, soldiers and smugglers. Carmen’s flirtatiousness finally brings the seductress to a sticky end at the point of a dagger wielded by her jealous lover. The finale of this nail-biting drama takes place outside the arena as her matador lover triumphs over the dying bull.
It is a mystery how the young Bizet could consider Carmen a flop. He had been paid the considerable sum of 25,000 francs and awarded the Chevalier of the legion d’honneur. This risqué opera played an impressive 33 performances.
George Bizet died of a heart attack at just 37-years of age. Had he lived just another three months he would have seen Carmen triumph. Within three years it was playing to packed houses throughout the world.
Bizet was hardly a one opera wonder, though it cannot be denied that Carmen was more of a box office success than his Pearl Fishers. This opera’s duet Les pêcheurs de perles (In the Depths of the Temple) has often been voted by radio listeners as their all time favourite piece of classical music. For sheer musical whimsy Bizet’s music set to Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne takes some beating.
Before he died George Bizet considered himself to be a failure. Yet, at the last count there have been fourteen screen versions of Carmen, not to mention the famous Hammerstein stage adaptation Carmen Jones (1945). One can only wonder what this remarkable composer might consider success. “Ah music!” he is quoted as saying: “What a beautiful art but what a wretched profession.”
Source Article from http://www.renegadetribune.com/musical-notes-carmen-worlds-popular-opera/
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