Carmen à sa création

Bizet’s Carmen is known the world over. Nevertheless, while we know much about its reception at the time of the 1875 premiere, little attention has been given to the production itself, its beauty, and also its audacity: women smoking cigarettes in public, the colourful but bloody world of bullfighting, Carmen herself – flirtatious, seductive, provocative, free in her ways – embodied by the exceptional Célestine Galli-Marié, and a man who stabs to death his former mistress on stage...

The costumes, designed by Édouard Detaille and Georges Clairin, two artists very well-known at that time, imparted unprecedented authenticity and splendour to the performance, and this book, based on sources some of which have never been published, aims to convey this as accurately as possible, while also seeking to understand the conditions in which the work was created at the Opéra-Comique and the impact it had in Paris in the 1870s.

Now firmly rooted in the history of the arts, this opera – marked by resounding scandals and impregnated by the visual culture of its time, that of artists such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Doré, Alfred Dehodencq and Henri Regnault, Carolus-Duran and Mariano Fortuny – reflects forcefully the image of Spain as it was then envisioned in France.


The series of books published jointly with Actes Sud – collective works, musicological essays, symposia proceedings, period writings – gives a voice to those who played a part in and witnessed the artistic history of the years 1780-1920, as well as to their commentators of today. The series takes a multi-faceted approach to the French Romantic repertoire and to musical life of that time, looking at the careers of both well-known and little-known composers, and also at the history of the public concert, musical genres, and performers.