L’Arlésienne & Le Docteur Miracle

L’Arlésienne began as a short story by Alphonse Daudet, published in the daily newspaper L’Événement in August 1866, and later included in his Lettres de mon moulin (1869). It was inspired by the suicide of a nephew of the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral as a consequence of unrequited love. Daudet himself adapted the story for the stage: it became a play in three acts and five tableaux, with incidental music by Bizet. Hervé Lacombe has now created a text, spoken by a narrator, telling the story of L’Arlésienne more concisely, while enabling us to hear the full score of the work for chorus and orchestra.

Le Docteur Miracle was written for an opera competition organised in 1856 by Jacques Offenbach. Candidates were to set the one-act libretto of Le Docteur Miracle. Georges Bizet, aged barely twenty, was awarded first prize jointly with Charles Lecocq. Rather surprising in Bizet’s operatic career, this one-act farce reveals his comic talent.