One of the principal differences between the first Opéra-Comique vocal score of Carmen and subsequent editions was that it contained a soon-abandoned ‘Scène et Pantomime’ placed after the opening chorus, which disappeared from the stage around the time of Bizet’s death. It appeared in the copied conducting-score used at the Opéra-Comique and in the hand-copied orchestral parts used in performances until printed parts were produced in the 1890s.

Many commentators have written about it, but only a few recent editions have included it either within their main text or as an appendix.Most subsequent writers, from Pigot in his Bizet of 1886, to Macdonald in his biography of 2014, have expressed the view that cutting it improves the opera, largely without considering the case for its inclusion.Important biographers in between these gave it short shrift: Mina Curtiss mentions it as a ‘a typical little opéra-bouffe pantomime in which a young woman on the arm of her elderly husband flirts with her lover as they cross la place while the brigadier, Moralès, describes the episode in song’.Yet it certainly was not ‘typical’, and nor does Moralès really sing much! Malherbe and Winton Dean briefly mention it, but Streicher, Maingueneau and Lacombe fail to give it time of day. Most influential in its subsequent demise was probably Pigot in his first biography of Bizet.

Pigot had not changed his mind about the scene in his revised and substantially altered edition of 1911. Quite the reverse, he expanded his critical section on the scene, possibly influencing twentieth-century producers of the opera by suggesting that they forget it, and advising them not even to muse upon its meaning.It was duly forgotten until late into the twentieth century. The trouble was, no-one remembered or understood what it was really about, and only a few recorded it.

The scene unfolds as follows, arising out of a focus on two characters in the plaza. It begins with a detailed stage direction both in the score and libretto (which is unusual), setting the scene: