Carmen: English National Opera Guide 13

by Nicholas John (Editor)

English National Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. Bizet describes himself as 'pagan' and Carmen has a savage Mediterranean beauty quite unique in music. The essays included in this Guide suggest some reasons for its legendary theatrical appeal. Martin Cooper describes the traditional mixture of spoken words and song that stimulated Bizet to exclaim 'I want to revolutionise opera-comique!': the translators show the ingenious and inspired ways in which he set about it. Lesley Wright analyses the score and Michael Rabaud shows the uncanny appropriateness of Nietzche's support for Bizet in his famous attacks on the decadence of Wagner. This is the first time that the complete text of the verses that Bizet set to music and the full dialogue (much of it especially translated for this Opera Guide), have ever been published.

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[DW]

I'm obsessed with this opera right now, so having the actual text helps as you follow along with the singers. The editor's comments and intro were also really great.

Unfortunately, the translation work into English was really subpar. I can read the French and whenever I glanced at the English, it was so off. The translator took liberty with every single line, sometimes breaking with the semantic meaning to try and preserve tone, but usually gutting the meaning for some sloppy and lazy translation (sometimes with results even more obtuse than a purely direct noun for noun translation would have been). Why abuse every single line so that there are 2 or 3 nouns that weren't even in the original line? And do so for nearly every single line of the text? What a mess!