Carmen March

In days when there was no opportunity to get to know music better by repeated listening with a radio or CD, playing through it oneself after hearing a piece at a concert was the only option. This explains the proliferation of fantasias, paraphrase settings and arrangements of popular operatic melodies in the 19th Century: these were a regular feature of musical life, both in the concert hall and in households. The popularity of Carmen by French composer Georges Bizet, which stood at the top of the list of most popular works, is entirely understandable: the catchy and exotic character of the music was captivating. Reinhardt undertook a series of operatic adaptations for Schott publishers including this March from Carmen, which brings together a few of those rousing melodies in a little medley. Plate no. 02523, published in about 1913