Bizet, "Habanera", from Carmen

To cover the expenses of his innumerable wars and his lavish palaces, Louis XIV increased taxes on peasants in the middle of the second half of the 17th century. It seems perverse but it was the only way to relieve state finances because the nobility and clergy did not pay taxes. But not for that reason we are going to label the Sun King an infamous monarch. Lover of the arts, the Prix de Rome was created under his reign, in 1663. The award would distinguish young artists with a four-year stay at the Academy of France, in Rome, an internship liberally covered by the king or, rather, covered by the French servants.

Prix ​​de Rome for musicians 
A century and a half later, in 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte expanded the universe of beneficiaries to include musicians. The French musician Georges Bizet, an outstanding student of the Paris Conservatoire who had entered at age ten not without difficulties because he was under the age to be admitted, applied in 1857 to the coveted Prix de Rome. He won it on second vote. The award involved a five-year scholarship (usually 4), and the only requirement was to submit an original work each year to the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.

Surviving in Paris
Georges, whose mother was a pianist, became, in turn, an exceptional pianist, but his musical vocation was oriented to drama. It was not a good choice, because he had to get used to accepting scarcely encouraging criticism. The year his mother died, he returned definitively to Paris and delivered a comic opera to the Academy, his last commitment to the Prix de Rome.
From that moment on, the struggle to survive in the French musical world began. He composes operettas that later destroys, gives lessons and publishes small pieces for piano and songs, also makes transcriptions of famous operas for the piano.

The post mortem success

Georges Bizet (1838 - 1875)

After composing in 1872 another work poorly received by the public, he decided to stage the opera Carmen, mainly for overcoming depression than for another motive. The work dated from 1845 but had never been released for fear that his subjects of treason and murder could irritate the audience. The heroine, to make matters worse, was a licentious seducer and not a virtuous woman. As expected, its premiere in March 1875 was a failure. However, seven months later it was performed in Vienna to great acclaim of both public and critics. But Bizet had already died, in June of that year, shortly before his 37th birthday. Carmen is considered today a work of universal category, but Bizet never got to know.

All the above notwithstanding, Georges Bizet definitely transformed the genre of the French Opera Comique (somewhat light and with musical numbers separated by dialogue) and accelerated the cult of realism helping to forge the Italian post-Romantic operatic tradition that will later be known as verismo (Leoncavallo, Puccini).

Carmen
It is an opera in four acts, based on a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. Set in Seville, it is starring Carmen, a beautiful and fiery gipsy woman ("if you do not love me, I love you; if you love me, be careful", are words from the Habanera) who seduces an inexperienced soldier in matters of the heart who out of love for her rejects his former beloved. Regrettably, Carmen will later choose another male as the object of her love, a bullfighter. In jealousy, the soldier will be going to kill Carmencita.

In act I, Carmen shares her philosophy of love by singing the famous Habanera, at the exit of the tobacco factory, right next to the soldiers' barracks.

The rendition is by the Latvian-born mezzo-soprano, Elina Garança, in a performance at the New York Met.

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