Langham Smith demonstrates that 'rather than sparking French nineteenth-century hispanomania (as it is often thought to have done), Bizet's opera appeared at the mid-point of the craze, which then extended well into the twentieth century in the works of Debussy and Ravel, among others' (p. In this study, by contrast, Langham Smith seeks firmly to reanchor Carmen in the nineteenth century, and in the context of the French fascination with Spain (specifically, with Andalusia, the region furthest from France and therefore imaginatively the most potent) which had been growing in France since the end of the Peninsular Wars. Postcolonial and feminist readings in this volume suggest how the opera transcends its nineteenth-century operatic origins, for Carmen herself is 'une figure protéiforme, à la fois transnationale, transdisciplinaire et intersectionnelle, qui appartient à l'imaginaire collectif mondial' (cover copy). The essays in Claire Lozier and Isabelle Marc's collection 'Carmen' revisitée/Revisiter 'Carmen': nouveaux visages d'un mythe transversal (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2020) analyse recent reimaginings of the opera. The companion website (live since 2018) houses a map and timeline and a number of important textual and visual resources, not least Langham Smith's English translation of the original 1875 mise-en-scène. Richard Langham Smith co-edited, with Clair Rowden, a collection analysing adaptations of Carmen around the world and the ways in which the opera is reshaped within different performance and narrative traditions ( Carmen Abroad: Bizet's Opera on the Global Stage (Cambridge University Press)). Two books published in 2020 explored the opera's multivalence as well as its perpetual travels and reinterpretations. Carmen, first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1875, is one of the best-known operas in the canon, and is frequently adapted in other media-in film, for example, we have some eighty adaptations, including Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones of 1954, but also Carmen: A Hip Hopera, notable for providing Beyoncé with her debut acting role in 2001.
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