This performance took place on the 22nd June 1878 with Miss Minnie Hauck, the young American Prima Donna, performing the role of the eponymous heroine. Musical history records plenty of similar examples but few so sad as Bizet died only three months after his Carmen has been so coldly received and just a short time before it began to receive the praise and success it deserved.īut with the first performance (in Italian) of the Carmen in England its ever increasing popularity truly began. Carmen limped on but closed after only thirty-seven performances. His music displayed startling and novel features for which the polite tastes of the French public were not prepared.

Furthermore, the suspected German influence which Bizet’s clever use of guiding themes implied was in itself enough to alienate the sympathies of the average Frenchman in the early 1870s so soon after the Franco-Prussian war.īizet, with his masterpiece, had managed to break loose from the classical French style. Its passionate force was mistakenly labelled as brutality. However, apart from that the evening could not have been called a success.įrench audiences were essentially conservative and Carmen burst upon them like a storm. The Quintet and the Toreador’s Song made favourable impressions and the prelude of the Act II was encored. Now probably the most popular opera in the world, Carmen scandalised its earliest audiences with its raw depiction of lust among the poor and dispossessed of 19th-century Seville.ĭuring its first production at the Opéra Comique in March 1875 much of the public was puzzled and indifferent although a few well-wishers ventured to applaud occasionally.

Carmen opera first performance