Carmen Abroad: Bizet's Opera on the Global Stage

Description

From the 'old world' to the 'new' and back again, this transnational history of the performance and reception of Bizet's Carmen - whose subject has become a modern myth and its heroine a symbol - provides new understanding of the opera's enduring yet ever-evolving and resituated presence and popularity. This book examines three stages of cultural transfer: the opera's establishment in the repertoire; its performance, translation, adaptation and appropriation in Europe, the Americas and Australia; its cultural 'work' in Soviet Russia, in Japan in the era of Westernisation, in southern, regionalist France and in Carmen's 'homeland', Spain. As the volume reveals the ways in which Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe from its Parisian premiere, readers will understand how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse geographical, artistic and political contexts.

Richard Langham Smith is a Research Professor at the Royal College of Music, London. He edited Carmen for Edition Peters and his translation of the libretto can be found in the Overture Opera Guide. With Cambridge University Press, he is the author of the Cambridge Opera Handbook for Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande and the editor of Debussy Studies. In 1995 he was made Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres for services to French culture and music. Clair Rowden is a Reader in Musicology at Cardiff University. Her work includes collaborating with Richard Langham Smith on Carmen (Edition Peters) and the recent curation of www.carmenabroad.org to accompany this book. The co-edited collection Musical Theatre in Europe, 1830-1945 was published in 2017, and her book Opera and Parody in Paris, 1860-1900 appears in 2020. She regularly writes programme notes for Opera-Comique, Wexford Festival Opera, Welsh National Opera, the Royal Opera House and the Salzburg Festival.

'... Richard Langham Smith ... shows us previously unconsidered sides of the seductive cigariere, first described by French author Prosper Merimee.' Opera Now