As always, there will be polka aplenty, with a half-dozen oom-pah acts performing during the event.īut beer and brass bands are just the start of a proper observation of Oktoberfest, which in Munich is more like a country fair than an American craft beer fest.

They’re poured by the plastic stein to a crowd of ten thousand-plus people who gather under big white tents. Among the offerings are traditional lagers in the style of Munich and Vienna, plus a Hef, an IPL and even a cider. After he died, many of his contemporaries were quick to applaud his achievements with no less a figure than Tchaikovsky declaring that he had written a masterpiece.You won’t go thirsty at Kansas City Bier Company’s annual Oktoberfest, which returns to Crown Center on October 7 and 8. But as tastes changed, so the opera’s fortunes rose for it to become rightly recognised as one of the great works of the genre. Premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875, by the time of Bizet’s premature death exactly three months later, Carmen was playing to half-empty houses. Blazing a trail for the pioneers of Italian verismo that would follow him, Bizet’s work was such a departure from the traditions of French opera that at first Parisian audiences of the late nineteenth century simply failed to understand it they could neither accept an opera that championed what they considered the debauched world of an underclass, unable to rein in its passions, nor entertain a piece of theatre whose heroine was a confident, sensual and, in their view, immoral gypsy woman, a character the likes of which had never been seen before.Īs a consequence, Carmen’s initial run was little short of disastrous. Yet Bizet himself was never to know the great success that Carmen would become.

Carmen includes two of opera’s most popular arias, the Habanera and the Toreador song, so well-known that even those who have still to enjoy Georges Bizet’s magnificent final opera in full can hum their tunes.

Carmen opera vienna