Carmen

Year in, year out, Georges Bizet's Carmen works its magic around the world. With her unashamed sensuality, the popular opera heroine still has the power to stir our imaginations.

Passion and loning for death

While Bizet’s Carmen is a femme fatale of almost mythic appeal, it was above all the exoticism that she personified as a gypsy which originally made the opera such a great success. Answering to no one, Carmen embodied the desires suppressed by nineteenth-century bourgeois propriety, as well as the freedom to live and love unfettered by petty morality.

In the world of opera, Carmen is the female counterpart of Don Giovanni, the master seducer. As much as we sympathise with her ‘victim’, Don José, there is no resisting her allure. Brimming with passion but never pathos, the story unfolds to its inevitable tragic end, fuelled beneath it all by a profound longing for death.

De makers

Spanish soul

According to Robert Carsen, who is directing this immensely successful production of Carmen, the opera has an intrinsic ‘Spanishness’. Far from the superficial, kitschy picture-postcard image of Seville, the French Bizet managed to capture the true Spanish soul in his music.

Bullfight with 400 extras!

In the fourth act of Carmen, some 400 extras witness the bullfight and Carmen’s violent death from semi-circular stands erected on stage. This situation creates a large circle that brings the singers and music as close as possible to the audience.

The young Columbian conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada leads the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Having already worked with several of the largest orchestras in the world, Carmen is his debut at DNO.