Carmen - Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet's Carmen premiered at the Paris Opera-Comique on March 3, 1875, and its stage birth was witnessed by the most important composers of the time, including Léo Delibes, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, Ambroise Thomas and Jacques Offenbach.

The work, which suffered a legendary failure at its premiere, today is in the repertoire of almost every opera house in the world. Bizet's brilliant compositional artistry and the dramaturgic construction of the libretto, based on the famous novel by Prosper Mérimée of the same name, have become a timeless work. Between the worker of the cigar factory, from whose name the opera Bizeta took its title, and the young soldier Don José, a fiery feeling is born, the fire of which in its essence will engulf the main character. This story can be summed up in a few words - love, lust, jealousy, death...

The director Maria Sartova talks about her staging of Carmen at the Wrocław Opera:

“There are quite a few differences between the work of Prosper Mérimé and the opera of Georges Bizet. On the one hand, Bizet is faithful to the epic; he creates a story based on two main characters - Carmen and Don José, on the other he introduces characters that do not exist in the novel and that have a symbolic meaning. Escamillo is the identifier of all Carmen lovers, while Micaëla is the symbol of Don José's mother. Bizet and Mérimé's Carmen is a story about love, death, jealousy and the pursuit of individual freedom. Both are set in the magical, mysterious and dark world of Spanish Gypsies. Carmen is the axis of the whole work, although paradoxically she is not the main character for me. Carmen is more than an object of desire. Strong, charismatic, uncompromising, mysterious, she fascinates everyone regardless of gender. To femme fatale — sister Salome, Cleopatra, Dalila... It is a woman who lives in opposition to established moral, religious or cultural laws.

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage within the framework of the Opera Młodych project

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