The opera Carmen has been at the centre of vivid debates on Spanish national identity since its premiere. Praised abroad for its Spanish melodies, Bizet’s work could hardy be taken as authentic in the country where Mérimée set his 1845 novella. This chapter explores the interpretation of the opera by intellectuals and music critics from Andalusia and the Basque provinces, the two most prominent geographical references in the work.

The chapter offers a contextualisation and charts the reception of the opera within the Spanish cultural politics of the period which coincided with the blossoming of peripheral regionalisms, and nuances existing accounts of the opera’s reception in Spain. First it surveys the case of Andalusia, placing the arrival of the opera alongside the assimilation of its culture as the quintessential expression of the nation’s identity. Secondly, it shows Basque reactions to Carmen, which further exemplified the difficulty of consolidating the one-size-fits-all idea of Spanishness that the opera transmitted abroad. The chapter presents a cultural history of the reception of the opera together with a discussion of the cultural politics of the rich web of ethnic identities that constitute modern Spain.