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The Opera is set in the year 1820, in Seville, Spain.
The lead heroine is Carmen (a mezzo-soprano). She is a cigarette girl of who is passionate, gorgeous, temperamental and deliciously mysterious. In no time she wins the heart, mind and soul of Don José (a tenor) who is a corporal of the dragoons (an elite group in the army). He has a promising career, but throws it all away, forgetting honor and duty, totally blind to love, goes AWOL, and joins Carmen and a band of smugglers.
Having destroyed her lover’s
career,
she tosses him off like a child bored with a new toy, and turns her
affections
to a new man – a handsome and popular bull fighter Escamillo (a
baritone).
Unable to accept her rejection, Don José confronts Carmen
outside the arena where she awaits her new lover and he stabs her with
a knife. The bullfighter, victorious in the ring, victorious in love,
emerges
to claim the woman with the crowd shouting his praises and they all
find
Don José with bloody hands sobbing over the lifeless body of
Carmen.
-- Fini (jssgallery.org)