The plethora of documents pertinent to the first runs of Carmen both inform and confuse: no single document captured what it looked or sounded like in its first creation. Yet there are many rich sources that elucidate each other in a number of ways. Only by considering them together – and in the context of the Opéra-Comique at the date of Carmen’s premiere in 1875 – do we begin to get a sense of the importance of Bizet’s opera – particularly its role as the seed-bed of French realism.

The path to the stage had begun in June 1872, when Bizet had announced to the composer Paul Lacombe that the Opéra-Comique had commissioned a new work from him, Meilhac and Halévy. It was to be ‘une chose gaie’ (we might say a ‘happy piece’) and ‘aussi serré que possible’ (‘as succinct as possible’).This may well have referred to the tendency of some opéra-comique plots to become too complex and convoluted. The various hurdles Bizet and his librettists encountered on the rocky road to the stage of the Opéra-Comique, especially his brushes with the directorate there, have been many times recounted and will not be revisited here.

For a new opéra-comique the essence of the process of publication was that the text and score were always published separately. The livret (libretto), with both the spoken and sung text would be produced by a literary publisher, usually in a small format. The musical score would be handled by an established music publisher (in Carmen’s case, Choudens) accustomed to producing and distributing orchestral matériel. The vocal score did not include the spoken dialogue, but only répliques (cues) from the text to indicate when each musical number should start.

There were two different printings of the libretto published in the year of the first production:

1. • Henri Meilhac et Ludovic Halévy: Carmen. Livret. Opéra-comique en 4 actes. Tiré de la nouvelle de Prosper Mérimée. 8o. 87pp. Paris, Calmann-Lévy. n.d.

2. • Henri Meilhac et Ludovic Halévy: Carmen. [Livret] Opéra-comique en quatre actes. Tiré de la nouvelle de Prosper Mérimée. 12o. 68pp. Paris, Michel Lévy frères. Paris, 1875.

It was also included in Meilhac et Halévy, Théâtre, vol. VII, in a new printing.There are only minor disparities between these three sources.