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🎵 “Habanera” – J’Nai Bridges
“Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime;
Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi!”
“If you don’t love me, I love you;
if I love you, watch out!”
She warns you before singing a single note: love is an untamable bird that no one commands. At the WFMT studios, Chicago’s classical public radio, the mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sings that warning, with Paul Sánchez at the piano — no orchestra, no conductor, no staging.
The melody wasn’t born in this opera: Bizet took it from “El Arreglito,” a song by Basque composer Sebastián Iradier, from 1863 — for years, he believed it was folk music, belonging to no one.
When he found out it belonged to a man dead ten years earlier, Bizet credited the source in writing, in the first edition of the score he prepared himself — but reharmonized Iradier’s song until it was unrecognizable.
In the opera, this is Carmen’s entrance: she teases the men in the square, picks none, and finally throws the flower to the one man who wasn’t even looking at her — Don José, the gesture that drags the whole tragedy behind it.
J’Nai Bridges has played this woman for real, twice: as Carmen herself at San Francisco Opera and Palm Beach Opera.
What convinced you more — the voice alone with the piano, or the melody’s hidden origin?
🎼 Habanera, from “Carmen”
🖋️ Composer: Georges Bizet 🇫🇷 (original melody: Sebastián Iradier 🇪🇸)
🎤 Performers: J’Nai Bridges 🇺🇸 (mezzo-soprano) and Paul Sánchez (piano)
📍 Recording: WFMT studios, Chicago, 08/13/2018
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