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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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