Left curtain Right curtain
The Sound of Opera

Mêlons, coupons (Card trio)

Frasquita and Mercédès pass their time by furtune-telling from the cards. They predict a future full of love and money, but when Carmen joins in she only reads death in the cards. This trio includes Carmen's solo "Voyons, que j'essaie à mon tour".

The parts for Frasquita and Mercédès have been highly inconsistent in the various scores published over the years. Although it was my intention to follow Bizet's vocal score, there were reasons to deviate from that principle for this particular video. The main reason is that the vocal score seems inconsistent in its assignment of the vocal ranges whereas the autograph score appears to be more consistent in that respect (the original handwriting in ink on folio 380 to 405, not the pencil corrections). In this video, Mercédès is systematically assigned the higher vocal part.

  • Mercédès
  • Frasquita
  • Carmen