"Carmen" premiered at the Opèra Comique on March 3, 1875. Its premiere shook the structures of what had until then been considered appropriate for the opera-comique genre, also revolutionizing its audience. Carmen opened the door to what would soon be known as verismo, even though it wasn't actually verismo. A genre fueled by the cult of realism that spread throughout Europe, mainly in Italy.

Carmen is a character who remains stable from beginning to end of the work; she doesn't change, so we might think that she is more the representation of an idea than a human prototype with its contradictions and complexities. Carmen is the idea of freedom understood as resistance.

It is not simply the exercise of freedom, as the rational Enlightenment perspective of the novel would have it, which gives it a certain savage and exotic primitivism, to do whatever one wants (as Rousseau's noble savage would have it), but rather a freedom with circumstances, with which she must struggle, remaining faithful to her convictions. putting limits on that which forces it to fit into the molds.