San Diego Opera - Carmen

Experience Bizet's Hot-Blooded Masterpiece

Bizet's electric Carmen opera shocked and scandalised polite society when it was first performed by Paris' Opera-Comique in 1875. His pulse-quickening take on the tale of the ultimate femme fatale was filled with turbulent emotion, scintillating sensuality and a score that would go on to become one of the opera canon's most widely performed works thanks to its brilliant marriage of melody, harmony and orchestration. Experience the hot-blooded drama as performed by the San Diego Opera, featuring Italian-American mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson and American tenor Robert Jackson as the ill-fated lovers at the centre of the story.

Bizet's Habanera and Toreador Song, perhaps the most celebrated of all arias, punctuate a thrilling narrative driven by Carmen, a fiery, provocative gypsy woman at odds with the conventions of Spain in the early 18th century. Able to seduce men with her dulcet tones and feminine wiles, Carmen ensnares the heart of Don Jose, who drops everything, including his betrothed Micaela, to be with her. When Carmen tires of her latest conquest, she leaves him for the handsome bullfighter Escamillo, setting off harrowing and ultimately fatal events fuelled by jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.