Letter from the Artistic Director

The General and Artistic Director position is generously supported by The Jerry W. Zachary and Henry Bernstein Fund for the New Orleans Opera Association.

Iam always delighted to see the great public interest and affection with which Carmen is now embraced by music lovers beyond the core opera audience.

This was clearly not always the case. Its premiere in March of 1875 was a complete scandal because so many aspects of the title role’s character reached well beyond French operatic traditions of the day. The shameless amorality of the anti-heroine and the violent lawlessness of her gypsy culture premiered at Paris’ Opéra Comique, a theater associated with lighter, more family-friendly fare. Shocked critics were harsh in their judgement of the lurid aspects of the brutally realistic plot culminating in Carmen’s death on stage in the opera’s closing moments.

Because it originally used spoken dialogue to connect the enormous wealth of “character music” that makes up the score (which is what is meant by the term “operacomique,” having nothing to do with comedy), this form of operetta was not performed in Europe’s greatest houses like the Paris Opera or the Vienna State Opera. Following Bizet’s sudden death only three months after Carmen’s premiere, it fell to Ernest Guiraud, a composer born in New Orleans in 1837 who relocated to Paris in 1853, to transform Carmen into a “lyric” opera by setting the dialogues to music (recitative).

It is in this form that Carmen began its amazing path to worldwide popularity today. Even better is the fact that today, the opera can be produced in its original form with spoken dialogue or by using those recitatives that Guiraud created to give it new life in the nineteenth century.

The German composer Johannes Brahms greatly admired the wonderful colors of Bizet’s orchestration and the Russian composer Tchaikovsky observed shortly after the premiere: “In ten years this opera will be the most popular in the world.”

Vive, Carmen!

ROBERT LYALL

General and Artistic Director