Thanks for the intro, Doc. I'm afraid I've started late, more like Mountain time.
Hello, rapt audience, Doc speaks truly about the opera being in English due to its being a bit of a mash-up. The original score was composed by a Frenchman, Georges Bizet, about 1875 and the libretto, in French, by a couple of no-account Europeans of uncertain provence. Despite being French rather than German or Italian, the Gypsy cast has endeared itself to generations of opera lovers.
In the early 1940s the American Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a new libretto in a dialect of English that was his attempt at Ebonics, for a cast of African Americans, and it was staged a few times. And then in maybe 1954 Hollywood made a movie of Carmen, titled Carmen Jones. With a few exceptions such as Pearl Bailey, who both acted and sang, the movie cast were primarily actors who lip sync'd while other black opera singers sang for them.
Carmen Jones was a big deal to me, becase I had gone with my folks only a couple of years earlier to see the traditional opera Carmen, my first opera ever, and of course I couldn't understand a word of it.
And here we go.