5 - Synopsis and analysis

Summary

Prelude (A major)

The prelude has three principal thematic sections, each of which reappears later in the opera in conjunction with specific characters or situations. It thus introduces highlights and also the affective tensions that compel the opera. By the time it returns in the final act, the prelude's various sections will have become so heavily thematized that it may be heard in retrospect as having contained the opera's central dramatic dilemmas. But when we first hear it, it serves a more immediate function: it establishes the opera's exotic; deceptively festive atmosphere.

The first section introduces the flashy, pseudo-Spanish music that returns in the Bullfight Scene of Act IV (Ex. 1). Two features of this segment seem noteworthy. First, it is composed of the four-bar phrases typical of opéra-comique. This regularity is violated only four times in the entire prelude. Yet the expectation of four-bar phrases becomes so ingrained that even a slight alteration constitutes a dramatic event. An extraordinary degree of order is set up by this phrasing – an order that is extremely resistant to change or difference.

Second, while each four-bar strain is static within itself, each pivots harmonically in its last measure – under a flamboyant trill - to the next segment, which sets out a contrasting key (A major, D major, A major, C major, A major). Here too we have a high degree of certainty, with the constant, reassuring returns to tonic.