Although the world première of “Carmen” in Paris on 3 March 1875, only three months before the death of its composer Georges Bizet (1838–1875), caused a scandal, the work soon developed into one of the most often performed operas in the world. Its thousandth performance in Paris took place as soon as 1905, and the enigmatic figure of Carmen is still today often presented to us as the woman of every man’s dreams.

When it was published in 1845, Prosper Mérimée’s short story “Carmen” introduced a new sort of woman to the cultivated metropolis Paris. As a gipsy with her outlandish and untamed glamour she was easily identified as an object of desire pure and simple. At the same time she claimed her right to do as she was inclined to an extent which in the 19th century men regarded as exclusively their privilege. That was what society found in a way enticing and in another sense evil, leading to the tumultuous objections to the first performance. In Bizet’s opera Carmen is, on stage, free to give full vent to this approach to life; what she feels about love she lets us know from the start with the Habañera: total freedom for her desires, total freedom also from moral inhibitions. That is Carmen’s final downfall: she demands an insouciant approach to love and relationships with which Don José cannot cope – desperate with jealousy when she opens amorous contact with the bullfighter Escamillo, he kills the object of his love.

In settings by Rifail Ajdarpasic recalling the visual world of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, director Carlos Wagner’s acclaimed staging at the Opéra National de Lorraine in January 2011 highlighted with poetically sombre images how Carmen insists on freedom and how her fascination is too much for the sergeant Don José to handle. The specialist magazine Classique News wrote of the great finale, “The last scene is unforgettable and is proof of a great stage-director’s flaming inventiveness, between reality and longing, poetry and expressionism, shadow and light”.

 
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Georges Bizet

CARMEN
Opéra comique in four acts
Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée

 
In French with German surtitles
 

Musikalische Leitung Christoph Altstaedt
Inszenierung Carlos Wagner
Bühne Rifail Ajdarpasic
Kostüme Patrick Dutertre
Licht Fabrice Kebour
Chorleitung Gerhard Michalski
Choreographie Ana Garcia
 
Don José Sergej Khomov
Escamillo Boris Statsenko
Remendado Florian Simson
Dancaïro Mark Bowman-Hester
Zuniga Adam Palka
Moralès Bogdan Baciu
Carmen Janja Vuletic
Micaëla Anke Krabbe
Frasquita Iulia Elena Surdu
Mercédès Theresa Kronthaler
Tänzerin Anna Roura-Maldonado, Michèle Lama, Carmen Mar Canas Salvador, Irina Castillo
Tänzer Joeri Burger, Victor Villarreal, Sara Blasco Gutiérrez, Jonas Tilly, Victor Villarreal
Leitung Kinderchor Justine Wanat
Chor Chor der Deutschen Oper am Rhein
Kinderchor Düsseldorfer Mädchenchor
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker