![]() So how did this remarkable volte-face happen? How did this 1875 flop become a 21st-century blockbuster, one of the most popular operas of the modern era? We brought the question to artists working on the Mill City production. ![]() And now Mill City Summer Opera offers another iteration, opening this week in the dramatic Ruins Courtyard at Mill City Museum in downtown Minneapolis. The 2017-18 season alone racked up more than 3,500 performances globally, second only to Verdi’s tear-jerking “La Traviata.” Recent years saw a slew of “Carmen” productions by local companies including Minnesota Opera (2015), Skylark Opera Theatre (2017), Brainerd’s ascendant Lakes Area Music Festival (2017) and St. Little did he know history would perform a radical redemption, making “Carmen” one of the world’s best-loved operas. The opera, one wrote, depicted “the sewers of society,” and Carmen herself was a “veritable prostitute of the gutter and the street corner.”īizet died three months later at age 36, believing his final opera to be a failure. Only a handful of Bizet’s closest colleagues lingered backstage to offer support and reassurance after the show.Īnd the critics? Some were sympathetic, but many were openly vitriolic. “I know what I am doing,” he said, with great confidence, as he started the composition.Īt the premiere, however, Bizet found the reception disappointingly muted, the audience’s initial enthusiasm all but evaporating by curtain call. ![]() But Bizet was confident this delicate material could be handled with care, forging a successful musical drama. ![]() The opera’s subject matter was certainly scandalous - Carmen, a sexually liberated 19th-century gypsy woman, rejects her obsessive lover Don José, who eventually murders her in a fit of jealousy. As world premieres go, opening night for Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera “Carmen” at the Opéra-Comique in Paris was far from triumphant. ![]()
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