Carmen Fantasy Op.25 (c1883)

Introduction: allegro moderato - moderato - lento assai - allegro moderato - moderato

Sarasate had his limitations as a violinist. In the Beethoven Concerto, according to Carl Flesch, he was “impossible” and the Brahms he wouldn’t play at all: “Do you really think I’d be so insipid as to stand there on the stage, violin in hand, while the oboe plays the only melody in the Adagio?” He did, however, set new standards in accuracy while cultivating a caressingly flawless sound and a uniquely elegant style - qualities which, happily, are preserved in the recordings he made towards the end of his career. This “ideal embodiment of the salon virtuoso,” as Flesch called him, not only inspired works like Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy but also supplemented his repertoire with dozens of devastatingly brilliant works of his own.

Not a great melodist himself, he drew on ready-made material from any likely source, most often the folk music of Spain but also gypsy fiddle tunes (in Ziegeunerweisen) and popular operas of the day - Carmen, Der Freischütz, Don Giovanni, Faust, La forza del destino, Martha, Mireille, Roméo et Juliette… If Carmen is the only one of the opera fantasies to be heard regularly today it is partly because of the allure of Bizet’s eminently anthologisable tunes and partly because, as a Spaniard steeped in French musical culture, he found its idiom very much to his liking. His delight in the music is clear from the start, in his version of the Aragonaise drawn from the Entracte before the last act of the opera. Sarasate changes the phrasing and interrupts the continuity with a couple of short cadenzas but the colour he applies to the dance tune, covering most of the range between sultry G-string sonorities and whistling harmonics, is a vivid reflection of his exuberant reaction to it.

Without bothering to make a link, as Liszt might have done in another medium, he goes straight on to Carmen’s Act I Habanera (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”) and colours it even more extravagantly than the Aragonaise. Whatever Bizet might have thought of the flurry of left-hand pizzicato and the bowed tremolandos double-stopped in thirds and octaves near the end, he could not reasonably have complained: the original tune was not his but Sebastián Iradier’s El arreglito to which he added the habanera rhythm.

Bizet might well have approved, on the other hand, of Sarasate’s choice of the provocative little tune with which Carmen taunts Zuniga and Don José after she has been arrested. Seductively scored as it is, it leads irresistibly into a highly fanciful treatment of Carmen’s Seguidilla (“Près des remparts de Séville”). From there it is a short step to Lillas Pastia’s and the Danse bohème (“Les tringles des sistres”) performed there by Carmen and her gypsy companions - though, for all their vigour, with nothing like the reckless abandon of Sarasate’s frenzied violinist.