Premiere 15.08.2025

Musical Summer Kufstein

The story of Carmen - origins and reinterpretation

Carmen and Don José are among the most famous lovers in world literature - alongside Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde or Don Juan and Donna Anna. Carmen in particular has become a symbolic figure: self-determined, fascinating and dangerous. She has her origins in the novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, who published her in 1845. He was inspired by a story that was allegedly told to him by the Countess Maria Manuela de Montijo during a trip to Spain. Mérimée turned the character into a freedom-loving gypsy woman - mysterious and unpredictable.

The novella was published in a travel journal for the educated middle classes, who were looking for exotic impressions and cultural distance. The story was staged as a mixture of travelogue and ethnographic observation - an ingenious way of appealing to curiosity about the foreign.

However, Carmen only became world-famous thanks to the opera by Georges Bizet, which premiered in Paris in 1875. The libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac took some liberties: Characters such as Carmen's husband Garcia were deleted, others such as Micaela were reinvented. The bullfighter Escamillo - only a minor character in the novella - was also developed into a central role. Since then, Carmen has not only become a literary figure, but also a musical myth - the sound of her name immediately brings melodies to mind.

Gasa Valga's approach to the music is striking. Instead of relying on a purely classical realization, he draws on a multi-layered soundscape: in addition to well-known arrangements of Bizet's famous melodies, he also incorporates traditional Spanish musical styles - such as flamenco, folk songs or rhythmic elements from the Andalusian cultural area. The result is a lively musical texture that grounds the story and at the same time opens up new emotional spaces.

This combination of classical operatic tradition and folkloric sounds reflects the inner conflict of the main character: the tension between social order and individual freedom, between convention and instinct. Gasa Valga makes targeted use of this musical diversity to enhance the emotional depth of his interpretation of Carmen and to make the characters tangible in all their contradictions.