Porgy and Bess echoes the French operas of Ravel and Debussy that Cecilia Bartoli has been programming at the Monte-Carlo Opera since the start of her tenure. George Gershwin's admiration for Ravel can be heard clearly in his piano concertos, while Ravel himself was impressed by Gershwin's compositions and, more broadly, fascinated by American popular music, which was introduced to France in the 1920s by figures such as Josephine Baker.
It is hard to understand why Carmen was a failure when first performed at the Opéra Comique in 1875. The reason must have been its story, an impossible love between Don José, an honourable but in many ways naive soldier, and Carmen, a free-spirited gypsy girl, who arouses sympathy because of her blunt honesty and independency from social conventions, which she defends to the death.