If music be the food of love, plates are available. On a video call from his Paris apartment – we are supposed to be talking about 2025’s Bizet celebrations – Palazzetto Bru Zane’s artistic director, musicologist Alexandre Dratwicki is showing me his eBay crockery haul. “This one is Le Petit Faust by Hervé. You can see this is the staging of the trio in Act 2” he explains, holding up a plate on which Mephisto, in regal military-style humbug-striped britches, a feather in his cap, stands up to his knees in large porcelain basin, commanding Faust, submissively presented in monochrome while Marguerite looks on. “And here,” he traces his finger around the notes painted onto a stave that runs around the edge, “the music is written so you know it’s the trio from Act 2. You have the costumes, you have Faust, Mephisto and Marguerite, you have the precise setting of the scene.”
Dating from 1871 – quite the year in France – in its way this little plate is emblematic of a gradual democratisation of urban culture. If you lived in the countryside and couldn’t get to the opera, at least you could taste a bit of the excitement by eating your dinner off it. If you think this is wishful thinking on the part of music historians, Dratwicki will raise you the “little box of beef” hypothesis, in which the European appetite for the arts was assuaged in part through the medium of stock cubes. Inside every packet of Liebig Meat Extract – later to become Oxo cubes – cultured cooks could find collectable picture-cards featuring all sorts of edifying content from the life of Rembrandt to scenes from Bizet’s Carmen. For Liebig’s beef-stock marketing division, the association with bullfighting must have proved irresistible.
It’s 150 years since Carmen first opened in Paris – albeit initially to mixed reviews – and Dratwicki has found a way to revive a flavour of the times. “It started fifteen years ago,” he explains. “I have a friend that told me that she was working on the opera Louise by Gustave Charpentier, and she discovered in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris livret de mise en scène – so staging, libretto and lots of performance indications.” The friend explained that there were 2000 of these livret de mise en scène lurking in the stacks at the BHVP but they’d certainly never been catalogued or digitised. “Well, some old guy did it 100 years ago” says Dratwicki, “but nobody knows where the classification is.”
For a musicologist interested in reaching new audiences through historic performance, it was a chance not to be missed. “We started a partnership between the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris and us, the Palazzetto, and we suggested that we could pay for the complete classification and digitalization. And so they did it! So now it's for free on the internet, on the website of the Bibliothèque. So now everybody can look at the livret de mise en cene of Carmen, of Pelleas and Melisande, Werther, Manon, La Vestale, and the Gounods and all the Glucks played by Pauline Viardot and so on and you have these 2000 titles with all the explanation of the costumes and the setting, of the way the choir should be on stage, where they divide or the soprano goes there, a tenor goes there.”
In fact, as Dratwicki explains, every movement of every character, in every piece, where they enter, exit, stand, sit, sing and stop singing, is all written in exactly bar for bar, just as it was done in each of their first productions. In the 1870s, the livret de mise en scène were sold along with the original score, which means that the Carmen that eventually captured the imagination of the world in the years immediately following its premiere was potentially exactly the same Carmen that had divided critics on its opening night.
Plus ça change. “I will tell you a secret,” Dratwicki says, recalling the opening of Bru Zane Label’s own historic staging of Carmen (now available online and on BluRay) in Rouen in 2023. “Almost all the German press wrote that it was a scandal. They said it was stupid, old-fashioned, that nobody cares about that sort of staging anymore.” (I’ll just mention here to anyone with a heart that Christian Lacroix made the costumes.) “But we had 8 shows with 2000 people, plus they decided to have a big screen in front of the cathedral, so altogether we had 15,000 at the opera house and 80,000 outside. 100,000 people watching Carmen is surely a popular public audience! People who aren’t used to going to the opera house and prefer to sit outside with a Burger King can still watch Carmen. That’s 100,000 people you’re bringing to classical music because of the staging.”
And this, explains Dratwicki, was the German critics’ beef. Meticulous historic recreations are not in keeping with Northern Europe’s penchant for regietheater. “They said the audience don’t know what’s good for them,” he says. “But you ask the audience: would you rather have an ugly modern staging that completely destroys the piece and gets in the way of everything, or do you want this? I would say the audience knew exactly what was good for them!” Bru Zane’s Carmen is now on tour to Hong Kong and Vietnam.
But it wasn’t ever supposed to be all about Carmen. Palazzetto Bru Zane, champions of lesser-known French romantic repertoire, have a lot more up their sleeve to commemorate 150th anniversary of Georges Bizet’s early death. Suffering a heart attack at only 36, during the first patchy run of his most famous work in 1875, Bizet left behind not only a slew of questionable reviews, but also a vast catalogue of works that were yet to see the light of day. “It’s all there in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, it’s very exciting,” says the man responsible for the first Bizet world premiere in a century and a half, the cantata Le retour de Virginie, in Lyon last year.
Written as a student at Paris Conservatoire, Bizet’s work – already ahead of its time – is littered with advisory notes from a bossy teacher not quite ready for what his star pupil was on the brink of unleashing: “too modern, too long, don’t make the clarinet do that, don’t write the cor anglais like this” et cetera. “But when you listen to it,” says Dratwicki, “you think – wait, there is something that reminds of what will come after, more than it reminds me of what came before.”
In addition to the larger works, Dratwicki discovered some 63 songs that were yet to be published or recorded, and these form the backbone of Bru Zane’s Bizet Cycle, currently doing the rounds in Venice. Initial research was reassuringly low-brow. “The best way to know if something is really well-known is to go on YouTube,” he says. “There are 63 songs by Bizet and the only one on YouTube is Adieux de l'hôtesse arabe: a song all the well-known singers have done, all over the world. And you think, is it that nobody cares about the other 62? But you realise it’s just that nobody had ever recorded them.” So Bru Zane did, producing a set of 3 CDs with Harmonia Mundi together with musicologist Hervé Lacombe. “It’s not as complicated as an opera,” says Dratwicki, “but 2025 was a long time to wait for the complete songs of Bizet.”
The wait is over for a historical staging of two more of Bizet’s stage works, l’Arlésienne and Le Docteur Miracle which form the centrepiece of the Palazzetto’s annual festival this May, which also showcases more newly-discovered works. Presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet as a double-bill, l’Arlésienne is a sombre tale based on a short story by Alphonse Daudet, while Le Docteur Miracle is a comedy. Written by the 18-year-old Bizet for a competition run by none other than Jacques Offenbach in 1856 – and for which he shared first prize with fellow composer Charles Lecoq – Le Docteur Miracle is based on a Sheridan farce with an improbable plot that involves low-down cunning, disguise, and poisoning by omelette.
Come to think of it, for anyone who can’t get to Paris to see and hear it for themselves, and in the spirit of Bizet’s times, the one-act opera’s best-loved quartet, “Voici l’omelette” ought really to find its way onto some commemorative tableware.
Palazzetto Bru Zane’s Bizet Cycle runs until July 2025.
The historical staging of Carmen tours to Hanoi’s Ho Guom Opera on 24th–25th April.
The Palazzetto Bru Zane Paris Festival, featuring Bizet’s l’Arlesiènne and Le Docteur Miracle, runs from 24th May to 3rd June at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Later performances throughout Switzerland in July.
This article was sponsored by Bru Zane France.
