On the contrary, it was at first an outright failure. Here is what the appalled Jean-Henri Dupin, a libretto writer himself and a friend of Henri Meilhac, Carmen’s second libretto writer, said on the morning of the premiere:

I won’t mince words. Your Carmen is a flop, a disaster! It will never play more than twenty times. The music goes on and on. It never stops. There’s not even time to applaud. That’s not music! And your play-—that’s not a play! A man meets a woman. He finds her pretty. That’s the first act. He loves her, she loves him. That’s the second act. She doesn’t love him anymore. That’s the third act. He kills her. That’s the fourth! And you call that a play? It’s a crime, do you hear me, a crime!

The setting alone should have made Carmen a success. Spain used to be the most popular setting in the entire (non-Spanish) opera literature of the 18th and 19th centuries; consider Verdi, who set four of his operas in Spain: Ernani, Il Trovatore, La Forza del Destino, and Don Carlo. And Seville seems to have been the town in Spain best for nourishing fantasies. Let’s point here to a few examples besides Bizet’s Carmen: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Rossini’s Barber of Seville.

Spain and Seville were chosen to underline the exotic character of the subjects and settings, a feature becoming more and more fashionable in the second half of the 19th century, when other European places had stopped being “foreign” enough, a development that later takes us as far as Peru (Verdi’s Alzira), the Wild West (Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West), Egypt (Aida), Japan (Madame Butterfly), and China (Turandot).

The exotic element is an important feature for the audience of the past and present alike as it represents the unknown, the foreign, and thus, danger. As long as it is not a personal experience, but something we can watch on a stage, danger has quite a potential for entertainment.

The opera is based on Mérimée’s novella “Carmen,” for which the author chose the motto: “There are two highlight moments for a woman: one in bed, the other in the grave.”

We could interpret this motto as an expression of Mérimée’s, let’s say, “ambiguous” attitude towards women. It could also mean that his description of Carmen as a woman is not the most favorable.

But this is also arguable. Teresa Berganza, one of the best Carmen interpreters of the 20th century (and a Spaniard), wrote in a letter to Peter Diamond, the organizer of the Edinburgh Festival, on the occasion of a new Carmen production, “I am convinced that Mérimée’s Carmen is a figure in which the feminine finds its realization to full extent.”

It seems typical for this piece, be it the novel or the opera, to polarize the audience as well as its interpreters. Its capacity to trigger extreme emotional and intellectual reactions is one of the intriguing features of the piece. How shall we judge Carmen’s complex character (if indeed we should), as we do short-tempered José, boastful Escamillo, or obedient Micaela?

The merit of Bizet and his libretto writers is to have transformed these would-be clichées into modern emotional portraits of characters, or even better, persons.

And speaking of emotional portraits: Sigmund Freud is supposed to have been an opera fan. His most favored pieces were The Magic Flute, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Die Meistersinger, and Carmen. If that is true, then Don José would likely have been his favorite character. Don José on Sigmund Freud’s couch--what a fascinating session! A macho who has never doubted himself, who has not become independent of his mother, who is prone to aggressive fits, and who always blames others, never himself. Freud surely would have enjoyed this mixture of megalomania and servility.

It is of prime importance for every opera singer who has the pleasure to partake in a Carmen production to deal not only with his or her own role, but also with the social tensions inside the Carmen world. This is, of course, true for the professional preparation of any opera, but for a number of reasons Carmen requires special attention. First, there is the presence of all those clichées: Spain and the bullfight, the femme fatale and the erotic, gypsies and smuggling. Then there is that second level of emotional constraints: those repressed and unprocessed marginalizations and stigmatizations, those childish and adult longings and deceptions. All this calls for a more intense role-empathy and the willingness to embark on a discovery journey, which is even more thrilling as it can lead to abandoning old role perspectives.

And this is especially true for the role of Carmen. The two libretto writers have transformed Mérimée’s witch, compulsive thief, and prostitute, an utterly spoiled and a priori cursed woman, into a young woman driven by an overwhelming striving for personal happiness and love.

In his famous Turin letter of May 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following about the difference between Bizet’s and Wagner’s attitude towards art:

For, all in all, the artists do what everyone else does, or even worse: they misunderstand love. Wagner misunderstood it too. They think they are being altruistic because they pursue the advantage of another being, often to their own detriment. On the other hand, they want to possess that other being...

This kind of altruism, which is nothing but another form of egotism, is alien to Carmen. She first focuses all her energy on becoming happy in a self-responsible way and tries then to pass this happiness on to others.

According to Nietzsche, José acts in a diametrically opposed way:

I know of no other case where the tragic joke that makes up the nature of love is being expressed so grimly, becoming such a frightful formula as it does in Don José’s last cry ending the piece: “Yes, I have killed her, my adored Carmen!”

Winning someone’s favor is not Carmen’s nature. As a beautiful woman and a member of a marginalized social group, she is bound to choose wrong paths. The precise description of her social and psychological circumstances brings her so close to today’s audience that, in spite of her weaknesses, it is impossible for us to deny her our sympathy.

As Bizet’s, du Locle’s, and Meilhac’s creation, Carmen never attempts to be more than a young, modern woman, who believes that, in spite of all social obstacles, she has a right to personal happiness. This makes her an exception among the opera heroines of the 19th century, a status that at first was bound to be met with misunderstanding and rejection, and finally idealization and mythification.

Ruxandra Donose sings Carmen in Cincinnati Opera’s 2009 production of the Bizet opera.