For her a hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the heroine of Bizet in Majesty | EUROtoday
PWhat begins? The information of Prosper Mérimée, together with her terrifying epigraph, “any woman is bitter like gall; But she has two good hours, one in bed, the other at her death ”? In the summer time that Georges Bizet spends in his Bougival home writing almost a thousand pages of a miraculous rating? The decisive function of the singer Célestine Galli-Marié who refuses the doorway air that Bizet composed, impressed on the similar time the well-known Habanera ? It’s quite simple, in terms of Carmen, The opera of all superlatives (220 productions worldwide for the 2024-2025 season alone), every part is thrilling.
We uncover it in Carmen, beginning of a fablethe formidable documentary that Jean Rousselot, already the writer of a novel on the topic (Georges and Carmen to Phebus editions), devotes to La Sevillane. He opens the movie on an enigma: how may the opera have been a failure to create its creation on March 3, 1875, the day of the primary calamitous on the Opéra-Comique remained well-known, precipitous the disappearance of its younger writer (Bizet died three months later) then grow to be, from October of the identical 12 months, on the Staatsoper de Vienne, a blockbuster of lyric artwork which appears immortal at this time?
Carmen, determine of freedom
At the time when he’s about to compose Carmen, Georges Bizet, whose musicologist Henri Lacombe remembers apparent expertise from childhood, goes from failure to fail. But when he has the thought of adapting the information of Prosper Mérimée (printed in 1846), inspiration transports him. He additionally has the intelligence to take heed to the instinct of the singer Célestine Galli-Marié, the one one to simply accept a job deemed too scandalous by most of her rivals, when she claims that he composes one other entrance air. Bizet then imagines what’s going to grow to be one of the well-known tunes on the earth, a dance reworked into song-La Habanera-, and himself writes the well-known phrases: “Love is a rebellious bird, he never, never known …”-For the remaining, the booklet is signed by the well-known Meilhac and Halévy.
Worker in a tobacco, Andalusian and gypsy manufacture, Carmen has every part to be dominated by males of his time. And but, she resists any try and tame her formidable intuition of freedom. What the nice singer Elina Guaranta underlines, frequent interpreter of the function, evoking the modernity of a heroine who imposes her want and her regulation. The one who was his Don José, Roberto Alagna, tells with nice vivacity his juvenile love for the Opera, born from the profitable movie by Francesco Rosi, with Julia Migenes and Placido Domingo, and who pushes him to find all Carmen Never shot – together with the superb 1915 Charlie Chaplin movie and due to this fact the documentary reveals passages.
A narrative of at this time on human-female relationships
This dive into the origins of Carmen Allows you to raised perceive the rejection that the work first aroused. The conductor Louis Langrée says that the opera-comic attracted a household viewers on the time. We prepare marriages there, for instance, and the scandalous imaginative and prescient of affection provided by Bizet’s work scares spectators. With a scarcity of lucidity to thrill all of the criticisms, the newspaper Time Judge, relentless: “Mr. Bizet has not but discovered his approach. »»
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
Today, notion is reverse. The violence of the story, the tragic of what he tells of men-female relationships resonates strongly in an period which grew to become conscious of the scourge of feminicides. This is what the sociologist Margot Giacinti with nice finesse, by noting how the modern spectator can discover reflection within the devouring jealousy of Don José and his deadly gesture. This enlightening perspective instantly makes you need to overview your complete opera. The Arte platform exactly gives two staged variations.
“Carmen, birth of a myth”, documentary by Jean Rousselot, 52 minutes, broadcast Sunday June 8, 2025 at 6 pm and already out there on Arte.television.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/carmen-naissance-d-un-mythe-pour-ses-150-ans-l-heroine-de-bizet-en-majeste-07-06-2025-2591477_3.php