Hervé Lacombe’s investigation into the Carmen première celebrates the beauty, intensity and audacity of the original staging at the Opéra-Comique. This handsomely produced, relatively brief hardback, with 120 pages of text and fifty pages of supporting material, includes more than 100 illustrations (many of them in colour) drawn from nineteenth-century prints, engravings, lithographs, photographs, reproductions of paintings and so on. The commentary shows great sensitivity to these visual sources and an excellent command of nineteenth-century documents and publications as well as modern studies of French opera, art and nineteenth-century culture.Footnote ¹ There are more than 375 endnotes.Footnote ²

Carmen à sa création increases appreciation of the opera’s connections with the world of the arts in nineteenth-century Paris and deepens understanding of the impact that this innovative spectacle d’art had on its audience. ‘Spectacle’, as Arthur Pougin defined the term in the nineteenth century, is derived from scenographic elements like staging, sets, costumes, large cast and dancing, or, in other words, ‘everything … that, ultimately, contributes to visual pleasure and dazzling beauty’.Footnote ³

Hervé Lacombe, professor of musicology at Université Rennes 2, is a widely known specialist in the history of opera and French music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His extensive publications on Bizet include his esteemed biography Georges Bizet: Naissance d’une identité créatrice (Paris: Fayard, 2000), which received the Prix Bordin and the Prix des muses; La Habanera de Carmen: Naissance d’un tube (with Christine Rodrigues) (Paris: Fayard, 2019), and even more recently his Introduction to the new critical edition of Carmen edited by Paul Prévost (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2024).

A Prelude and Postlude frame five chapters that show how the Carmen libretto and score were shaped into spectacle during rehearsals. Lacombe also outlines the visual culture that gave rise to the images of Carmen and then considers the spectacle itself as the public encountered it on the stage of the Opéra-Comique on 3 March 1875. His discussion starts with a description of the Opéra-Comique as a building and an institution, a detailed look at the administrative, technical and artistic teams working there in 1874–1875, and the search for the singer who would play the title role. After that he looks at Carmen’s journey in that theatre from its initial reading through staging and rehearsals. Next comes an examination of Spain as understood by French culture and reflected in nineteenth-century art, as well as Spanish presence on the Parisian opera stage and Hispanic influences in Carmen. Turning to the spectacle itself, Lacombe explores sources for the conception of the sets, how they served the drama and how they were judged by critics in 1875. Finally, in the fifth chapter, he evaluates the costumes and accessories, with particular emphasis on those designed for the first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié (1837–1905).

The concise text abounds with perceptive observations. For example, the reader is introduced to all the Opéra-Comique personnel involved in the premiere, not just those amply covered by previous studies – like the general director Camille Du Locle (1832–1903). Figures with much smaller duties are given names, like the hairdressers (Rogier for the women and Dieudonné for the men) or the two prompters (Doche for the libretto and Menneson for the singing).Footnote ⁴ There is biographical information about the performers, ranging from those in leading roles, like Paul Lhérie (1844–1937) (Don José) and Jacques Bouhy (1848–1929) (Escamillo), to those in minor spoken roles, like Elias Nathan (1822–1884) (Lillas Pastia) and Amédée Test (1840–?) (Micaela’s guide in Act 3). The singers were largely youthful, and Lacombe observes that Marguerite Chapuy (1852–1936) (Micaëla), then only twenty-three, was just a few years older than the seventeen-year-old character she portrayed. The Don José was thirty and the Escamillo, twenty-six. In such a context, it is easy to see why certain critics commented on Galli-Marié’s maturity and the hoarseness and fatigue evident in her voice, for she was almost thirty-eight.

Supporting the analysis of the original staging is an appendix with the entire staging manual from 1875, reset in modern type; diagrams printed in red show the placement of the singers. Scenes with complex stage action (like the opening of Act II) receive particular attention from Lacombe, but he also mentions striking nuggets of information, such as the direction that the only cast members smoking cigarettes were to be six extras placed in the middle of the chorus during the cigar girls’ entrance. (This contradicts what the press reported in 1875 and has been repeated many times since.) Since the emphasis of the study is visual and scenographical, there is only one image of Bizet’s score (Ill. 31): the opening page in the autograph manuscript for the Act 4 chorus (‘A deux cuartos’). Placed in the section about preparations in the theatre, it is used to show how Bizet’s stipulation that a ‘demi-chœur’, divided into six little groups of vendors, created a musical structure that took precedence over the staging, ‘which had to be adjusted, taking care to coordinate these groups’ (p. 46).

Carmen was of course based on Mérimée’s novella, but it was also inspired by and often alluded to representations of Spain known to Parisians through the arts. This knowledge shaped expectations of the opening-night audience, and because he wanted to intensify their theatrical experience, Du Locle supported the substantial expenses of a visually attractive production that paid attention to authentic details. As Lacombe explains, ‘For Du Locle, the picturesque reality he desired was both a means and an end: a means of affirming his operatic vision, of situating the performance more effectively and intensifying its character, and of providing spectators with a poetic musical experience’ (p. 65). Lacombe’s lavishly illustrated discussion of the Spanish influence, with images on 16 of its 20 pages, identifies models for character types and scenes in Carmen and compares them to paintings known via the Salon and/or images from travelogues about Spain. Perhaps most intriguing are more than 300 woodblock engravings by Gustave Doré (1832–1883) included in Baron Jean-Charles Davillier’s Le Voyage en Espagne. These illustrated articles for Le Tour du monde, a French travel magazine, appeared between 1862 and 1873 and were then republished as L’Espagne, a 799-page book issued by Hachette (1874).Footnote ⁵ Doré’s scenes – such as a gypsy dancing on a table, a duel with navajas, a gypsy dancing in a patio in Seville, a toreador describing his victory and so on – are often mirrored in Bizet’s opera (see Ills. 29, 30, 37, 38, 53, 55).

The fourth and fifth chapters incorporate some 47 illustrations as part of the analysis of the spectacle. Stage designs used at the Opéra-Comique are juxtaposed with paintings or engravings of similar scenes and with décors from other operas performed in Paris. Lacombe points out how the sets relate to visual models and how they were viewed by critics. The reader can compare the 1875 lithographs by Pierre-Auguste Lamy (1827–1883) for each of the four acts with eight engravings published by Léon Sault (dates unknown) in La Comédie illustrée (28 March 1875) and then republished in the Album rose, 1875 (Ill. 52, 58, 62, 64; pp. 162–3).Footnote ⁶ The chapter ends with drawings by Hyacinth Royet (1862–1926), which animate Lamy’s four tableaux with 15 scenes from all four acts and come close to transforming the illustrated Choudens piano-vocal score (c. 1890) ‘into a comic strip’ (p. 91) (Ill. 70–73).Footnote ⁷

To depict Spain more realistically than in earlier stagings at the Opéra-Comique, the production featured new sets rather than simply recycled old ones. This was also true for the costumes. Young artists who were already well known – especially Georges Clairin (1843–1919), an orientalist painter who designed Carmen’s costumes, and Édouard Detaille (1848–1912), a master of military painting, who designed costumes for protagonists, as well as the soldiers – gave the spectacle ‘authenticity, vibrancy and brilliance’ (p. 15). In addition, the fifth chapter includes a set of pen-and-ink sketches by Paul Renouard (1845–1924) showing ten characters in costume and in poses and gestures appropriate for their roles (Ill. 74–8). These are an unusual and possibly unique form of artistic journalism, for they were captured in the theatre during performance (p. 17). Along with Renouard’s sketches of Bizet and his librettists, plus views of the stage at a key moment in each of the four acts, they were first published in 1875 (Ill. 8; Ill. 48–51).Footnote ⁸

Preceding the Table of Contents and following the last page of the Postlude are full-page images of Galli-Marié. In all, a half dozen images of her (paintings, drawings, a bust of her as Carmen as well as a photograph of her in the role of Mignon) draw more attention to this star than to anyone else in the spectacle. Known for her ability to inhabit any character she played, she thrilled some but outraged others in 1875 with her realistic portrayal of Bizet’s gypsy. A sampling of the critics’ comments, including some of the most scathing, appear in the Postlude. There Lacombe compares Bizet’s mixture of high and low genres in Carmen to that of Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), a primary figure in the Realist movement, whose works gave everyday scenes of peasants and workers the monumental scale of historical painting. He also credits Galli-Marié as Bizet’s partner in his quest to ‘communicate the fullness of the experience of things’ in a harsh and wild Andalusia.Footnote ⁹

The bibliography, although selective, is quite extensive. Due to the enormous quantity of Carmen literature, it has been restricted to sources and studies directly concerned with the performance of 1875, and Lacombe acknowledges that he has omitted important works by Winton Dean or Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz.Footnote ¹⁰ Documentation in the endnotes confirms the author’s magisterial command of materials in the major Parisan research libraries and archives. Some of these were previously overlooked or simply little used. For example, the État du personnel au 1^er février 1874, a manuscript in the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra (Archives of the Opéra-Comique), specifies the family name, job title and salary of every Opéra-Comique employee at that time. Here one can find the names of the hairdressers as well as statistics about the chorus, the very personnel who threatened to strike during the problematic rehearsals in 1875.

Especially early in the book, references to much later illustrations do necessitate some page-flipping. Given the extensive documentation, a conscientious reader might also wish for footnotes instead of having to turn to endnotes several times per page. Footnotes, however, would have distracted from the open and uncluttered layout. In the end, these are minor quibbles, for the text can be read as is, with consultation of later material set aside until a second read-through.

Lacombe’s investigation opens up how the context and design of the spectacle shaped this masterpiece, helped to immerse the audience in another world and played a role in the opera’s reception in 1875. Bizet, along with his librettists, intended to reform the genre of opéra-comique with a scintillating and complex work about a liberated woman unfettered by bourgeois mores; the originality of the work-as-text, however, was also supported by the committed performance of its star, effective staging and the visually satisfying and realistic scenography created by imaginative contributions from an entire team. With scholarship at the highest level coupled with beautiful iconography, Carmen à sa création is a welcome addition to Carmen research.