Carmen Fantasy for violin and orchestra, op. 25

Sarasate assembled the fantasy in 1883, eight years after Bizet's death and at the point when Carmen was conquering the stages that had rejected it in Paris. He took five numbers — the Aragonaise, the Habanera, an interlude, the Seguidilla and the Gypsy dance — and rewrote them as a display piece for himself, with harmonics, left-hand pizzicato and double stops in thirds. A Spaniard was thereby playing a Frenchman's imagined Spain. Sarasate's own recordings, made in 1904, are among the earliest documents of nineteenth-century violin playing.