| The novella that was the basis for perhaps the most popular opera of all time, Prosper MAA(c)rimAA(c)e's Carmen is the swashbuckling story of a nineteenth-century Spanish soldier who deserts his post to pursue the fiery gypsy beauty, Carmenwho is as brave as she is fickle. The opera's plot, it turns out, is based only on part of the larger adventure that is Carmen. The story opens, for example, with the narrator, a historian like MAA(c)rimAA(c)e, researching the lost site of an ancient Roman battle on the plains of Andalusia, when he meets a notorious bandit, Don JosAA(c) Navarro, on the run from the law. Feeling a certain sympathy for Don JosAA(c), whose face is ',at once noble and fierce,' and a vicarious thrill at this brush with danger, he helps the bandit to escape. When they next meet again, Don JosAA(c) is in jail in Cordova, due to be hanged for his crimes. In his last days, he tells the narrator about a wild gypsy woman he met back in Seville . . . What follows is an iconic and highly entertaining tale of doomed passion full of chases, sword fights, bullfights, smuggling, wild dancing, and moreexcept no mezzo-sopranos.From the Trade Paperback edition. |
