BBC Music Magazine

Books

Carmen Abroad

Richard Langham Smith

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48161-8 350pp (hb) £75

Having met in the 1950s, I’ve long assumed I had a fairly good idea of what the opera was ‘about’. This wonderfully illuminating and widely researched volume proves we all have our fantasies. One of the key subjects is ‘alienation’. I had never taken in that all the main actors are ‘playing away’: soldiers go to where they’re posted, gypsies, smugglers and bullfighters to where the money is. Alongsideimmune. A witch, or a proto-feminist paying men back in their own kind? Or both? The general reader can easily pass over the more erudite paragraphs (names and dates) to reach the many fascinating insights this book provides. No question, my Book of 2020. ★★★★★

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from BBC Music Magazine

BBC Music Magazine1 min readMusic
Welcome
We were excited to get our hands on the world-premiere recording of Fausto, Louise Bertin’s 1831 operatic retelling of the Faust story. Given just three performances in the year of its composition, the work then vanished for nearly two centuries! Now
BBC Music Magazine6 min read
Mark Elder
It’s the end of an era in Manchester. And at the centre of their last season together – the 24th year of one of the most successful and long-running partnerships in British orchestral history – conductor Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé are playing one o
BBC Music Magazine1 min read
Bonang Goes Pythagoras’s Theory Of Numerical Harmony
Did Pythagoras get it wrong? In the 6th century BC, the great polymath showed that certain numerical ratios between sounds are what makes music sound pleasant to us – and dissonance occurs when there’s a deviation from such ratios. But scientists in

Related Books & Audiobooks