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50 free Carmen trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Carmen flopped. Its 1875 premiere left the audience 'glacial', the critics called its heroine the incarnation of vice, and Bizet died three months later at 36 believing he had failed. Within a decade Brahms had seen it twenty times, Bismarck twenty-seven, and Nietzsche was declaring himself a better man for it. This quiz covers the opera scene by scene: the cigarette factory and the flower, the Habanera borrowed from a Spanish song, the Seguidilla, the toreador, the fortune cards and the ring thrown down outside the bullring. It also covers the making of it: Mérimée's much nastier novella, the librettists who invented Micaëla to calm a nervous theatre, the soprano who refused to die on stage, Gounod's jealousy at the premiere, the recitatives added in Vienna, and the afterlife from Caruso's earthquake night to Callas, Sarasate, Shchedrin's ballet and Hammerstein's Carmen Jones. It suits opera-goers, music students and anyone who can hum the Toreador Song. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the opera, Bizet, the Habanera, the novella and Carmen Jones, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many acts does Carmen have?
Four
Bizet died after its 33rd performance, never knowing it would become one of the most performed operas in the world.
Q 02Carmen is based on an 1845 novella by which French writer?
Prosper Mérimée
He claimed the tale came from the Countess of Montijo, mother of the future Empress Eugénie, during his 1830 travels in Spain.
Q 03Who wrote the libretto of Carmen?
Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
The pair were best known as Offenbach's operetta writers; the unmusical one wrote the dialogue and the other the verses.
Q 04In which Spanish city is Carmen set?
Seville
Act 1 opens in a square outside a tobacco factory, and act 4 outside the bullring, around the year 1820.
Q 05Where does Carmen work when the opera opens?
In a cigarette factory
She is arrested after attacking another factory girl with a knife.
Q 06What does Carmen throw at Don José after her entrance aria?
A flower
He has been ignoring her; the flower later becomes the subject of his great act 2 aria.
Q 07What is the actual first line, and title, of the aria everyone calls the 'Habanera'?
L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
'Love is a rebellious bird'; the word habanera just means a dance of Havana.
Q 08Bizet based the Habanera on a song by which Spanish composer, believing it to be a folk tune?
Sebastián Iradier
When told the composer had died only ten years earlier, he added a note crediting the source in the first vocal score.
Q 09With which song does Carmen persuade José to loosen her bonds and let her escape?
The Seguidilla
She sings of a night of dancing with her lover, whoever that may be, at Lillas Pastia's tavern; José is arrested for letting her go.
Q 10What is the name of the bullfighter who wins Carmen's love?
Escamillo
He introduces himself with the Toreador Song, of which Bizet reportedly said 'they asked for ordure, and they've got it'.
Q 11Who is Micaëla?
José's village sweetheart
She does not exist in the novella; the librettists invented her as a 'very innocent, very chaste' foil to reassure a nervous theatre.
Q 12What are the names of Carmen's two friends who read fortunes with her in act 3?
Frasquita and Mercédès
Their cards promise love and money; Carmen's keep turning up death, for her and for José.
Q 13What forces José to desert the army and join the smugglers at the end of act 2?
He fights his officer, Zuniga
Q 21How old was Bizet when he died, three months after the premiere?
36
He died of heart disease on 3 June 1875, the day after the 33rd performance and on his wedding anniversary.
Q 22After its first run, in which year was Carmen finally revived in Paris?
1883
It had to conquer Vienna, Brussels, London and New York first; the theatre's manager thought the work immoral.
Q 23Which composer would have 'gone to the ends of the earth to embrace Bizet' and saw Carmen twenty times?
Johannes Brahms
Wagner also praised the Vienna production; Tchaikovsky called the opera 'a masterpiece in every sense of the word'.
Carmen's gypsy comrades restrain the officer, and José has no way back to barracks.
Q 14What does Carmen throw down in the final scene, just before José stabs her?
The ring he gave her
She dies outside the arena while the crowd inside cheers the bullfighter.
Q 15Which of these features of Carmen scandalised its first audiences in 1875?
The heroine is murdered on stage
Low-life characters, immorality and a knife fight among factory girls did not help; one critic called the heroine 'the very incarnation of vice'.
Q 16Where and when was Carmen first performed?
The Opéra-Comique, Paris, 3 March 1875
The same day, Bizet's appointment as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour was announced.
Q 17How did Bizet's Carmen originally handle the passages between musical numbers?
With spoken dialogue
Ernest Guiraud composed recitatives for the Vienna production after Bizet's death, and that grand-opera format ruled outside France for a century.
Q 18Who created the title role of Carmen at the premiere?
Célestine Galli-Marié
She was a staunch ally of Bizet against the management, and gossip held that the two were having an affair during rehearsals.
Q 19Why did the soprano Marie Roze turn down the title role?
She would have to die on stage
The librettists' own preference, Zulma Bouffar, had already been rejected as unsuitable.
Q 20Which composer was overheard at the premiere saying Bizet stole Micaëla's act 3 aria: 'That melody is mine!'?
Charles Gounod
Massenet, by contrast, sent a note the same night calling it 'a great success'.
Q 24Which German statesman is said to have seen Carmen 27 times?
Otto von Bismarck
Nietzsche wrote that he 'became a better man when Bizet speaks to me'.
Q 25Which philosopher admired Carmen, calling its entrance aria 'ironically provocative'?
Friedrich Nietzsche
He set Bizet's Mediterranean clarity against Wagner, whom he had once idolised.
Q 26Enrico Caruso sang José in San Francisco on 17 April 1906 and was woken hours later by what?
A violent earthquake
He had sat up until 3 am reading his reviews before fleeing the Palace Hotel with the rest of the company.
Q 27Which legendary soprano recorded Carmen but never sang the role on stage?
Maria Callas
The part's demand for acting as well as singing has deterred several great voices.
Q 28Which Russian composer turned Carmen's music into a 1967 ballet suite for his ballerina wife?
Rodion Shchedrin
The Carmen Suite was written for Maya Plisetskaya, then the Bolshoi's prima ballerina.
Q 29Which violinist-composer wrote the 'ingenious and technically difficult' Carmen Fantasy?
Pablo de Sarasate
Busoni and Horowitz later wrote their own piano fantasies and variations on the opera's themes.
Q 30Carmen Jones, the 1943 Broadway musical that moved the story to wartime America, had lyrics by whom?
Oscar Hammerstein II
Billy Rose produced it with an all-Black cast, almost none of whom had ever been on stage before.