La la la'), but her song is joined by a distant bugle call from the barracks. Carmen treats him to a private exotic dance ('Je vais danser en votre honneur. Frasquita and Mercédès are keen to help them, but Carmen refuses, since she wishes to wait for José. When only Carmen, Frasquita and Mercédès remain, smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado arrive and reveal their plans to dispose of some recently acquired contraband ('Nous avons en tête une affaire'). Bizet may first have encountered the story during his Rome sojourn of 1858–60, since his journals record Mérimée as one of the writers whose works he absorbed in those years. It may have been influenced in part by Alexander Pushkin's 1824 poem 'The Gypsies', a work Mérimée had translated into French it has also been suggested that the story was developed from an incident told to Mérimée by his friend the Countess Montijo. Mérimée's story is a blend of travelogue and adventure yarn, possibly inspired by the writer's lengthy travels in Spain in 1830, and had originally been published in 1845 in the journal Revue des deux Mondes. It was Bizet who first proposed an adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen. The subject of the projected work was a matter of discussion between composer, librettists and the Opéra-Comique management Adolphe de Leuven, on behalf of the theatre, made several suggestions that were politely rejected.

Bizet was delighted with the Opéra-Comique commission, and expressed to his friend Edmund Galabert his satisfaction in 'the absolute certainty of having found my path'.

Carmen opera first performance