Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner and his music was complex, contradictory, even paradoxical. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatic allegiance to Wagner in his early years nor his later rejection should be taken literally. The revaluation of the performative moment in cultural analysis is part of a core of thoughts that Nietzsche chewed over again and again from his first years in Basel until his collapse in Turin. His conception of the Attic tragedy is based on the assumption that the tragedy must be considered in the original context, with its cultic background and performative outcome, as opposed to the reduction of the drama to a written text, as introduced by Aristotle and continued by the Alexandrian philologists. It is here that Nietzsche demonstrates the most in common with Wagner. Yet for Nietzsche, performativity becomes a type of thinking and writing through which he ultimately distances himself from metaphysical thinking and from Wagner.

Why a transnational history of Carmen? Because Carmen is intrinsically born of – and about –migration and linguistic fluidity, and because Bizet’s opera has been transcended by the myth or symbol of Carmen, taken to mean many things in multiple contexts. This chapter lays the foundations for the rest of the book by highlighting the main sources – Mérimée’s novella, the opera libretto, its first stagings and scores – as well as challenging the precepts of a transnational history of opera, and attempts to weave the individual chapters together, draw out overlapping themes, challenge expected narratives, point up contradictions. In short, whether in relation to genre, singers or binary oppositions of geography, identity, morality and progress, the chapter outlines the main debates addressed and synthesises the kaleidoscopic nature of the findings of all contributors. From Spanish gypsies to French Hispanomania in music and dance, from Parisian reception to transnationalism in opera studies, from Parisian opéra-comique to international hybrid spectacle, this chapter signals the issues that are omnipresent in the performance and reception of Carmen at home and abroad.