NPR World of Opera
Carmen, by Georges Bizet

Let's face it. Even the most enlightened among us tend to enjoy all manner of less than enlightening entertainments. For example, you may be a fan of those blatantly tittilating "femme fatale" movies, like "Basic Instinct" with Sharon Stone, or "Body Heat" with Kathleen Turner.

Or, you may have a taste for dramas that exploit human misfortune and tragedy for its entertainment value - like those mini-series that depict sensational, real-life murder cases, or deadly natural disasters.

At times, you might even have been drawn to a film out of literally morbid curiosity. That is, because someone died while making it - like "The Crow" with Brandon Lee or, more recently, Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."

Or you may be a fan of mob stories - and willing to overlook both the ethnic stereotypes they sometimes reinforce, and the appalling violence that's often their stock and trade.

Well, today's opera has been hooking audiences for more than a century-and-a-half, and for some of those same reasons. Maybe all of those same reasons.

It's title character is one of the great "femme fatales" of all time. The opera's early audiences were scandalized over her overt sexuality, and her bloody death; but they went to see this opera, anyway. That charcter is also a Gypsy, and the opera presents Gypsies in a decidedly unflattering, and sterotypical light. To top it off, at a point when the opera's long-term success was still up in the air, the composer suddenly died - and the lines at the box office immediately got longer.

The opera, of course, is the one that's featured this week on NPR World of Opera, George Bizet's Carmen. Tune in to catch all the action in a production from the Houston Grand Opera. To hear more about the opera, you can also visit our audio archives, At the Opera.

LINKS:

Houston Grand Opera
Synopsis of Carmen
Libretto: Libretto of the opera, Carmen, in French
NPR's At the Opera