8 - The Unstoppable March of Time: Carmen, and New Orleans in Transition

Summary

This chapter explores the early performance history and reception of Carmen in New Orleans following its premiere in the city on 17 December 1879. While New Orleans had for long time been home to a resident French opera troupe – indeed, for a period of some thirty years, this was the only permanent opera company in North America – Carmen’s premiere there was given as part of a season mounted by a visiting Italian opera company, under the direction of Max Strakosch. Using local critics’ reflections on change and progress as a starting point, this chapter argues that Carmen’s somewhat cursory initial reception in New Orleans (followed by its swift adoption on the city’s stages in various forms) yields insights into both specifically local conditions and processes of operatic globalisation in the period. Their assessments of Carmen, set alongside other documents such as programme booklets, reveal a rupture with New Orleans’s operatic past in the post-Civil War period, and at the same time reflect fundamental changes in the broader operatic culture of the United States, as well as the wider internationalism of operatic performance in the late nineteenth century.