Bizet's Carmen runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 29 October to 21 November 2026, in Damiano Michieletto's production.
Bizet’s Carmen opened at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875 and scandalised the house it was written for. The Opéra-Comique was a family theatre where the tickets were bought by fathers taking daughters to meet suitors, and Bizet gave it a heroine who smokes, works in a cigarette factory, sleeps with whom she chooses and is stabbed to death on stage. The reviews were poor and the audience thinned. Bizet died suddenly after the thirty-third performance, aged thirty-six, believing he had failed. It is now one of the two or three most performed operas in the world.
What survived the scandal is a score in which almost every number is famous and none of them is decoration — the Habanera, the Seguidilla, the Toreador Song all do plot work — and a title role that requires a mezzo who can act with her back to the audience. Nietzsche adopted it as the antidote to Wagner and wrote that it made him a better philosopher, which is the strangest compliment in the opera’s history.
Damiano Michieletto’s staging runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Thursday 29 October to Saturday 21 November 2026, sung in French, and it is relayed to cinemas during the run. It overlaps Manon in the same house for four weeks, which puts Bizet’s doomed woman and MacMillan’s on the same stage in the same month.