The story of the Spanish gypsy girl comes from Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, published in 1845. It caught Bizet’s attention, and he proposed that he adapt it for opera with two leading Parisian ...

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 ...

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, ...

It’s regularly voted the most popular opera in the world, but Georges Bizet had no idea that his final work would become such a triumph, as Martin Buzacott explains. Prosper Mérimée was a French ...

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 ...

That proved to be Bizet’s unlucky number; 18 performances were also all his operetta La jolie fille de Perth (The Fair Maid of Perth) could sustain in 1867, although at least it did get a second ...

Sally Macarthur does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

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