The four act opera Carmen was composed by George Bizet based on the novel written by Prosper Merimée. Bizet followed the old tradition of setting operas in Spain.

Carmen opened in Paris 1875 at the Opera Comique with a more complicated storyline than Merimée's original. The libbrétists Meilhac and Halevy added more characters, exeggerated a little and complicated things more.

The original story had to be adapted to conform to the conventions and expectations of the audience accostumed to bourgeois melodrama. The result was a little too shocking for the family theater (Carmen was a public enemy, a threat to law and order, conjuring revolutionary ghosts, and nevitably had to die in the end, something unseen in the Opera Comique) but also a little too diluted and denaturalised for the purist, who considered it basically a French opera imbued with Spanish gypsy motifs, perhaps a Spanish reflection of a moment in French history, after the failed revolution of the Paris Commune. It was not a success, initially.

Carmen soon become the most popular opera of all time and the Spanish Gypsy the enduring symbol of the exotic romantic construction of Spain. This can be testified by the numerous versions and resurrections of Carmen, on stage, on screen, even on ice. Amazingly,  as to this day Carmen is still often claimed, in academic discourse and in popular culture, to represent the pure -unmediated- spirit of Spain.