Carmen Prelude

Chabrier was neither the first nor the last French musician to find fresh inspiration in the music of Spain. Far from it. The most prominent among those who followed his example were Ravel and Debussy and the most distinguished of his predecessors were Lalo, composer of the Symphonie espagnole, and Bizet, composer of Carmen. Bizet’s use of Spanish material in Carmen is not as idiomatic as that of Chabrier in España - still less that of Ravel in the Rapsodie espagnole or Debussy in Ibéria - but it is no less exciting for that. The Prelude to the opera, which was first performed three months before the composer’s death in 1875, sets the scene immediately with the festive music associated with the the bull fight in Seville where Carmen is to have a fatal last meeting with her rejected lover Don José. It is based on a lively march signalling the entry of the toreadors, including her new lover Escamillo, represented here by what must be the most famous tune in the whole opera. The Prelude also includes, in stark contrast, a dramatic anticipation of the violent end lying in wait for her.

A Spanish Fiesta

The last composers to realize what a fiesta there was to be had with Spanish folk song and dance were the Spaniards themselves. It wasn’t really until the first performance of Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat by the Ballet Russes in London in 1919 that a Spanish composer made a big international splash with music derived from his own culture. Of course, Falla had his predecessors, the most influential of them being his older contemporary Isaac Albéniz who, though he spent much of his working life in Paris, celebrated the music of just about every region of Spain in dozens of highly attractive virtuoso piano pieces. Debussy and Ravel both owed more than a little to Albéniz but it was they who became the supreme masters in the art of translating the Spanish idiom into piano music, orchestral music and even (in Ravel’s case) opera. Before Debussy and Ravel there were Chabrier, Bizet, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Lalo… And that’s only a few of those at the French end of the Spanish connection which also extends to Russian composers like Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov and goes at least as far back as the Italian harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Carmen Prelude

Bizet never went to Spain. The composer of Carmen claimed that knowing too much about the country and its music would only “get in the way.” Much of the Spanish element in his last and greatest opera comes from printed sources and, in comparison with the real thing or even the impressions recorded by Chabrier in España seven years later, it is distinctly civilised. But that is just what the Parisian audience at the time required and, although the opera was not a great success at first, it was not long before Bizet’s realisations in Carmen of such dances as the jota, the habanera and the seguidilla were accepted as the standard version by the French music-loving public.

The Prelude to the opera, which was first performed three months before the composer’s death in 1875, sets the scene immediately with the festive music associated with the bull fight in Seville where Carmen is to have a fatal last meeting with her rejected lover Don José. It is based on a lively march signalling the entry of the toreadors, including her new lover Escamillo, represented here by what must be the most famous tune in the whole opera. The Prelude also includes, in stark contrast, a dramatic anticipation of the violent end lying in wait for her.