The scenic aspect of the first productions of Carmen sprang from impetuses that had burgeoned since the 1830s, fuelled particularly by French and English travellers to Spain who became inquisitive about what they saw as a curiously beautiful, wild and dangerous country. Included among these travellers were many who were in some way involved in the operatic productions. First, there was interest in the legacy of Spain’s buildings, ancient and modern. Second – and this came later – was an interest in its customs, traditions and ceremonies, which were very different from those even in meridional France, and extremely different from those in London.

For these professional travellers – some earning their keep by the pen, the pencil or the brush – Spain began to romanticise itself, particularly by exporting its image in terms of Andalusia, the region furthest from northern Europe geographically and in many other ways, being, as it was, half-European, half-African. In the scenography of the two Parisian set-designers who fashioned Carmen’s first production (1875), and its second staging in 1898 with new sets by Lucien Jusseaume, both features are clear: representation of Andalusian customs is set against the architectural background of Seville and its environs, which opera-goers were invited to travel to in the imagination, aided by realistic sets and, in the outer acts, the ubiquitous tower of the Giralda in the background.

The stage-directions to the opera show a knowledgeable exploitation of the stereotypical customs and costumes documented in jottings and portrayed in images increasingly disseminated from the 1830s onwards. At curtain up, revealing the goings on in an urban plaza, the principal players are the costume-designers and the scenographers, who create an unusually lively tableau vivant of a busy square in Seville, populated with majos and majas engaging in flirtation and banter, and no doubt some petty crime. The music need not be terribly interesting at this point: more important is the audience’s appreciation of this exotic scene: the ‘drôles de gens’ (‘strange people’) neither behaving nor dressing like the French or, for that matter, like the people of Spain’s more northerly provinces. Bizet appropriately provides a few bars of nothing much to go under the customary applause as the opening set is revealed.