Operatic Heroines
With Peggy Reynolds.
Carmen, In 1845, the French writer
Prosper Merimee published a novella called Carmen. It was part travel writing, part pastiche and part fiction, and it marked the first appearance of one of the most famous of all femmes fatales. The exotic story and its key themes of seduction and death inspired the composer George Bizet to turn it into an opera; and in this century, his music was given new lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and turned into the musical Carmen
Jones. In Merimee's original, Carmen was prefaced by a quotation in Greek which read "Every woman is as bitter as bile, but each has two good moments: one in bed and the other in the grave."
Producer Fiona Shelmerdine