Leonard Bernstein & Metropolitan Opera Orchestra - Bizet: Carmen (2017) [Hi-Res]

In June 1830 Prosper Mérimée left Paris for Spain. The French capital had become a little too warm for comfort. During the previous few years Mérimée had lived the life of a literary lion cub: he had argued and drunk through many hours with Stendhal, he had gone whoring with Alfred de Musset, he had become a good friend of Eugène Delacroix. But he had also behind him a trail of broken love affairs, including one with Mary Woolstencraft Shelley, and he had fought a duel, which left him with a damaged arm, over a matter of sexual honour. It was time to slow down the pace of life, to allow the wounds, physical and emotional, a chance to heal.

The Spanish journey was financed by Mérimée’s father and the purpose was to look over a number of museums. Léono Mérimée was secretary of the School of Fine Arts in Paris and his son Prosper was entrusted to make notes on a number of Spanish pictures of interest. However, as Mérimée has made clear in several letters, the Spanish outdoors was considerably more interesting to him than the Spanish indoors. The travels and the people encountered, particularly those on the wrong side of the law, were the thing.

Some of these meetings are included in Mosaïque, a collection of Mérimée’s occasional writings. Among them is the story of a brief stop at an inn for a bowl of gazpacho. Mérimée records that the moment he had left the place his guide turned round and claimed that it was a bad house. ...

Colette Boky, soprano
Marcia Baldwin, mezzo-soprano
Marilyn Horne, mezzo-soprano
Adriana Maliponte, soprano
Raymond Gibbs, tenor
The Manhattan Opera Chorus
John Mauceri, conductor (Chorus)
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Leonard Bernstein, conductor

Digitally remastered