![]() ![]() ![]() In The Gypsies of Spain, Borrow called them the Zincali, Gitános, or Bohemians, “wild and sybilline,” frequently beautiful but never vulgar. When he returned home and wrote about his experiences, he described the girl as “savage and unsociable,” but his attraction to her was clear, and she may well have been the model for his Carmen.Īnother source contemporaneous with Bizet was George Henry Borrow, a British writer and translator who explored Madrid, Granada, Seville and Cordoba. But it’s possible that his view of this subject was more complex, since he had visited Spain and had a relationship with a Gypsy girl. This kind of story, representing female sexuality as a corrupting influence and southern peoples as dangerous, was common in pulp novels of Mérimée’s day he wrote at a time when Gypsies were seen by most Europeans as a mysterious, filthy, dangerous people. He is depicted as a rather ordinary man with a troubled past who undergoes a rather extraordinary disintegration. In Mérimée’s novella Carmen we learn more about Carmen’s doomed lover Don José than we see in the opera. Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré, the librettists for his opera The Pearl Fishers (12 years earlier than Carmen), reportedly said “if we had known Bizet would write such beautiful music, we would have written a better libretto.” And just three years before Carmen, when Bizet composed the incidental music for the play L’Arlésienne, playwright Alphonse Daudet supposedly described his own play as “a glittering flop with the loveliest music in the world.” Tragically, Carmen would prove to be Bizet’s final masterpiece. And though his early operas did not hint at the boldness of inspiration in Carmen, they did reveal the freshness of his melodic inspiration and his gift for evoking the vividly detailed, richly textured scenes in music. He also won most of the prizes available to be won, including the fabled Prix de Rome - the Conservatoire’s highest award for composition - at age 19. He was one of the youngest pupils ever admitted to the famously rigorous Paris Conservatoire and, as one critic wrote, quickly learned everything the professors could teach. Composer Georges Bizet (1837-1875) and his Carmenīizet composed Carmen in 1875, when he was 37 and had a decent reputation as a composer, but was not classed as one of the most important in France in fact, considering the high expectations of him in musical circles, his career so far had been something of a disappointment. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |