The great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky attended one of the later performances and hailed it as a masterpiece. He was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, (later to be joined by Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison amongst many others). His sudden death resulted in full houses for the remainder of the run and the same critics who had written so scathingly of it after the opening night now lauded it. After its opening night, it often ran to half-empty houses until Georges Bizet died suddenly on the day after the opera’s 33rd performance. Conservative opera-goers in Paris were scandalised by the first serious opera to be concerned mainly with people of ‘ordinary’ status – poor, immoral and inclined to petty crime. It was not so when first performed by the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875. Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” is and has been a favourite of the operatic canon for many years and there are few who do not recognise any of the arias from its tale of doomed love in Seville, Spain between the naïve soldier Don José and his femme fatale, the eponymous gypsy Carmen.

Carmen – Bord Gáis Energy Theatre – Review

Carmen opera philadelphia