One aspect of my E-19 argument is this: when operawrights of genius or near-genius hewed close to the metanarrative in its purer tellings, they did their greatest work; when they didn’t, they fell short of that, though their talents and skills showed no other sign of diminution. The narrative, in other words, was the fulfillment of their genius, its necessary inspiration. Bizet is a notable exemplar of that proposition. In his too-short life, he wrote much music, operatic and otherwise , that is enjoyable and emotionally engaging. But in his oeuvre, only one other score is comparable with Carmen, and that is his extended incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne.^(I) It has the same vigor, descriptive color, and captivating dance rhythms we find in Carmen, and in at least two of its sections cuts through to something deeper. One of those occurs in the latter part of the Prelude (rather as the Fate motive seizes hold of the previously celebrative overture to Carmen), and evokes the inner anguish of the play’s male protagonist, Frédéri, over his suddenly crushed dream of marriage to the irresistible but faithless Arlésienne. The other is an adagietto of hushed, painful beauty that accompanies a pantomimed reunion between an old shepherd, Balthazare, and the woman, his master’s daughter, whose love he had renounced fifty years earlier for the sake of perceived duty and honor.These excerpts are heard in numbers 1 and 3, respectively, of Suite No. 1.

And it happens that the plot-and-character distributions of L’Arlésienne and Carmen dovetail with a machine-cut precision. In the first, a passionate, strong-willed mother, in charge of the prosperous family farm, dominates the onstage action; a sweet local girl is the mother’s marriage candidate for her son; the son is under the spell of a big-town temptress, whom we never see; and the unexpected appearance of a rival (a gardien of horses) destroys the son’s fragile balance. He tries to reconcile himself to his mother’s wishes, but after a second visit from the rival, with more devastating news, he cannot, and he commits suicide. In the second, it is the temptress herself who dominates the onstage action; it’s the mother whom we never see; the sweet local girl (an adopted orphan, in this case) is still the mother’s emissary; and the emergence of the rival (a slayer of bulls) renders the son’s situation intolerable. The son kills the temptress. If you are unfamiliar with L’Arlésienne, or even L’Arlesiana, you can imagine how reductive—how lacking in richness, atmosphere, and conditioning circumstances—my telling is by comparing it with that of Carmen.