And there was something very appealing about a woman who just said, 'Here I am, I am woman, hear me roar." "There was something about casting aside of conventions and all those niceties that we're supposed to have in civilized life. " Carmen hit the world stages at the very height of the Victorian era, and it really spoke to people," Berger says. And to have this woman who smokes and does exactly what she pleases just blew everybody's mind."Ĭarmen might have blown a few minds, but author Will Berger says that, oddly enough, she also pushed just the right buttons. And none of that kind of explicit sexuality had been on the operatic stage at all. "We see her rolling up these cigars on her bare thigh. "This opera is so loaded with sexual imagery, it's not to be believed," McClary says. Musicologist Susan McClary says those first Paris audiences were not exactly ready for a free-thinking, blazingly real woman, who works in a sweaty cigar factory. Within minutes, she'll have a hapless soldier named Don Jose half-crazed with desire.īizet's Carmen premiered in Paris in 1875, at an opera house accustomed to staging family-friendly dramas. In her famous aria, Carmen sings, "Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame." It's the type of carefree mantra she lives by. She smokes and drinks, runs with a band of smugglers and brings men to their knees just by crooning her breathy Habanera. But for all her sexual charisma, Carmen's own fate, in Bizet's opera, says something about how society views strong women.Ĭarmen is the supreme diva of the operatic femmes fatale trope.
Every opera season the perennial favorite, Carmen, by Georges Bizet, takes the stage at opera houses in places like New York, London and Vienna (And Seattle!).Ĭarmen owes its longevity, in part, to Bizet's sparkling music, and to its fearless, flirtatious title character.
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