Carmen
Prosper Mérimée · first published 1847
Everyone knows the opera. The novella it came from is shorter, colder and far more brutal.
25 versions · 1915–2022 · screen, stage
Bizet’s Carmen reached the stage in 1875, thirty years after Mérimée wrote the story, and it is the version the world kept. Two silent films appeared in 1915 alone — one by Cecil B. DeMille, one by Raoul Walsh — and Chaplin burlesqued them both within the year.
What the opera adds is warmth. Mérimée’s tale is told at second hand by a travelling scholar who is more interested in Roman ruins than in the murder he is recounting, and it is over in eighty pages. There is no aria in it and no crowd. There is a man explaining, quite calmly, why he killed a woman.
Spain through French eyes, 1845
France had spent thirty years being fascinated by Spain — its wars, its bandits, its supposed savagery — and travel writing about Andalusia sold extremely well. Mérimée had made the journey himself, as a professional inspector of historical monuments, and knew the country better than most of the people writing about it.
So the story is framed as a scholar’s traveller’s tale, complete with a fourth chapter on Romani language and customs, and its violence is delivered in the flattest possible voice. The romantic Spain of the century is in the book, but it is being reported by a man taking notes.
On screen
22Film and television, earliest first.
- 1915 Burlesque on Carmen Leo White
- 1915 Carmen Cecil B. DeMille
- 1915 Carmen Raoul Walsh
- 1918 Carmen Ernst Lubitsch
- 1919 A Carmen of the North Maurits Binger
- 1926 Carmen Jacques Feyder
- 1927 The Loves of Carmen Raoul Walsh
- 1932 Carmen Cecil Arthur Lewis
- 1945 Carmen Christian-Jaque
- 1948 The Loves of Carmen Charles Vidor
- 1954 Carmen Jones Otto Preminger
- 1959 A Girl Against Napoleon Tulio Demicheli
- 1968 Pride and Vengeance Luigi Bazzoni
- 1983 Carmen Carlos Saura
- 1984 Carmen Francesco Rosi
- 2001 Carmen: A Hip Hopera Robert Townsend
- 2003 Carmen Vicente Aranda
- 2003 Carmen Aleksandr Khvan
- 2005 U-Carmen eKhayelitsha Mark Dornford-May
- 2011 Carmen's Kiss David Fairman
- 2011 Carmen Jacques Malaterre
- 2022 Carmen Benjamin Millepied
On stage
3Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.
- — Carmen Georges Bizet
- — Carmen
- — Carmen Frank Wildhorn
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.