Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The 150th anniversary of Bizet’s death this year has not received much attention. Only aged 36, Bizet had ...

The story of the Spanish gypsy girl comes from Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, published in 1845. It caught Bizet’s attention, and he proposed that he adapt it for opera with two leading Parisian ...

After the composer’s one-act opera Djamileh (1871), a director of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, Camille du Locle, suggested that Bizet collaborate with two of Paris’s leading librettists: Henri Meilhac and ...

My first reaction when I heard of a new animated feature film adaptation of Georges Bizet‘s 1875 opera, Carmen, was that despite the animated form it was taking, this had to be for adult and fans of ...

It’s regularly voted the most popular opera in the world, but Georges Bizet had no idea that his final work would become such a triumph, as Martin Buzacott explains. Prosper Mérimée was a French ...

"Sweet money, you'll make my heart happy," young Toby suddenly exults, to the rhythm of a light waltz. His mad hope contrasts with the terrible predicament he has been addressing since the beginning ...

Georges Bizet was just 24 when he wrote his first full-scale opera. He soon wished that he hadn’t. The Pearl Fishers, wrote one caustic Parisian critic, had “neither fishermen in the libretto nor ...

Bizet came from a very musical family – his father was a composer and his mother was a pianist – and his own musical talents were obvious from an early age. In fact, he was such a talented child that ...