Carmen

"Carmen" is a famous opera by Georges Bizet. It premiered on 3 March 1875, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and was not initially well-received, although it ran for 37 performances in the next three months, an average of three a week; it was Bizet's greatest success so far. Bizet had put every ounce of his genius into Carmen, and its lukewarm reception was a bitter disappointment. Praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Brahms attended over twenty performances of it, and considered it the greatest opera produced in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War. The views of these composers proved to be prophetic, as Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. Carmen contains two of Bizet's most famous songs, the "Habanera" and "The Toreador's Song".

References

Zappa quoted the "Habanera" from "Carmen" in the song Big Swifty (1988 - Munich) on Make A Jazz Noise Here.