Musical Structure

Carmen is a "numbers opera" with no written-through music but rather a collection of arias, duets, ensembles, and scenes structured in the work's original form as an opéra-comique, the French term for operas with spoken dialogue that are not necessarily comedic. In other versions like we've extensively discussed elsewhere in this set of articles, it contains recitatives - not composed by Bizet himself - linking the numbers.
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