Take the Spanish airs and mine out of the score, and there remains nothing to Bizet’s credit but the sauce that masks the fish.

-Charles Gounod (1818-93) on the premiere of Carmen, 1875, quoted in W Dean, Bizet (1975)

and

This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and yet it retains a popular appeal.

-Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), quoted in C Headington, The Bodley Head History of Music (1974)

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