Chorus of the Cigarette Girls (Carmen)

Bizet took Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella to the Opéra-Comique, a theatre whose audience came in family parties; one of its directors resigned over the subject. The premiere on 3 March 1875 drew notices ranging from disappointment to outrage, and Bizet died three months later, aged thirty-six, having seen thirty-three performances. For the Vienna production that October, Ernest Guiraud replaced the spoken dialogue with recitatives, and that grand-opera version travelled the world for nearly a century.