Bizet/Gounod: Carmen and Faust Suites

These orchestral suites often appear together on recordings and are accessible to almost everyone. Bizet and Gounod are "single evening"composers as you can listen to all their best work in a couple of hours. Gounod was Bizet's mentor.

Bizet's short working life was spent in Paris during a few decades when society was in turmoil

and for various reasons no new operas could get a hearing. So he had no way to get his music performed. The first performance of Carmen was revolutionary as it portrayed characters acting and singing naturally for the first time and it flouted conventional ideas about Opera. The singers had to act; heroines smoked cigarettes on stage and even died. Bizet died soon into this opera’s first run believing that he was a professional failure.

Carmen has become one of the most popular pieces of classical music of all time – and one that will change a listener for the better every time it is played.  Nietzche said that listening to this piece always made him happy and Bizet was his favorite composer.

Gounod is famous for this one piece and his life parallels Weinberger

who also wrote a world wide opera sensation about the story of Faust - the man who sold his sold his soul to the devil - and neither  was able to achieve much success after.

A record of the suites from Carmen/Faust was the first classical record I ever owned, it raised goosebumps on me when I first heard it at age 13, and still does today. Back then I traded the recording for a particularly valuable hunting knife I had. In the Boy Scout troop I belonged to, an essential pastime of Boy Scout outdoor activities was surreptitious competitive throwing of hunting knives and hatchets at targets for nickels and that knife I traded was particularly good for throwing.  The teenage boys I grew up with loved and collected classical music although none of our parents or the adults around us did. Our main priorities then were girls, sports, boy scouts and classical music. Our #1 favorite recording wasCarmen/Faust.

Also below is the Paray Mercury Living presence recording with both Suites. Both these recordings are on the audiophile's TAS (The Absolute Sound's) list of best recordings ever made. Audiophiles are record collectors that prize well engineered recordings and  high end audio equipment and prize recordings that demonstrate their highly refined ear for fine recorded performances (e.g. show off their 100k stereo systems).

Below are pictures of the 50 year old original vinyl records of both albums. Even with modern technology most audiophiles believe the best recording are ever made were done between 1955 and 1965 on the tube electronics in use at that time. (I think so too.) Last week on Ebay a mint Gibson vinyl recording on the left sold for $600 and a Paray on the right for $70.

Note: when famous vinyl recordings is re-released on CDs there is often more room so additional filler material is sometimes added. The playlists below include what was on the original recordings not everything on the current CD's they were re-released on. The Paray playlist below is part of a  multi-cd set..

                                                  Original Vinyl



                                                       CD re-release