Product Description
A selection of stories by one of the earliest exponents of the short-story genre, Prosper Merimee (1803-70). His stories are seen to reveal the paradoxical fascination with the cruelty of violence and passion in a man ostensibly urbane and reticent; to an extent they all explore the contrast between primitive and civilized values. "Carmen", based on an anecdote recounted to Merimee by a Spanish countess in 1830, may have introduced the literary incarnation of the "femme fatale", the woman whose aura of mystery and malevolence exerts a fatal charm on the weak and unwary. Apart from the most famous longer tales "Carmen" and "Colomba", this selection includes the shorter stories, regarded by some as his best or most representative work - "Mateo Falcone", "The Storming of the Redoubt", "Tamango", "The Etruscan Vase", "The Game of Backgammon", "The Venus of Ille" and "Lokis". Their subjects range across the tragic enforcement of a Corsican bandit's code of honour, a historical reconstruction of a Franco-Russian battle, illegal slave-trading, overweening, jealous passion underlying a veneer of Parisian civilization, guilty remorse and its consequences, and the seductive and lethal nature of erotic love entwined with apparently supernatural forces.
From the Back Cover
Each Opera Guide contains the complete text of an opera in the original, with a parallel English translation, introductory essays, numerous musical examples and illustrations. Bizet described himself as 'pagan' and Carmen has a savage Mediterranean beauty quite unique in music. These essays suggest some reasons for its legendary theatrical appeal. Martin Cooper describes the traditional mixture of spoken words and song that stimulated Bizet to exclaim 'I want to revolutionise opera-comique!': the translators show the ingenious and inspired ways in which he set about it. Lesley Wright analyses the score and Michel Rabaud shows the uncanny appopriateness of Nietzsche's support in his famous attacks on the decadence of Wagner. This is the first time that the complete text of the verses that Bizet set to music, and the full dialogue (much of it especially translated for this Opera Guide), have ever been published.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.