Bizet’s Carmen has everything you want from an opera: high drama, passionate characters, a love story. And what’s more it’s absolutely packed with great melodies – even if you don’t know the opera, ...

Carmen is 150 years and still smoking! Georges Bizet’s Carmen is set in Seville, Spain, and tells the story of a captivating and fiercely independent woman whose desire for freedom collides with a ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The 150th anniversary of Bizet’s death this year has not received much attention. Only aged 36, Bizet had ...

What can Bizet’s great opera – and the globetrotting singers who perform it – tell us about our own disconnected lives? Playwright Simon Stephens on how the characters and music of Carmen inspired his ...

After the composer’s one-act opera Djamileh (1871), a director of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, Camille du Locle, suggested that Bizet collaborate with two of Paris’s leading librettists: Henri Meilhac and ...

Bizet’s famous heroine first appeared in a novella by Prosper Mérimée in 1845. Thirty years later, Bizet adapted the story into an opera that has since become one of the world’s most loved, with the ...

Carmen’s rhythms set her body in perpetual motion – contagious and seductive. Nancy Fabiola Herrera as Carmen & the Opera Australia Chorus, photo: Branco Gaica The fictional character of Carmen – the ...

A pattern has emerged which sees Jonas Kaufmann release a disc of operatic arias each autumn in time for the seasonal market.