Love Hurts - Carmen Remix

Scarcely any classical work lends itself better to being remixed as the ‘Greatest Hits’ from Bizet’s Opera Carmen. And it has been done, in one fashion or another, already over and over again in the past. In other words, it’s actually a senseless task to take these well-worn popular tunes and breathe new life into them, or to want to throw any new light upon them. I was, however, commissioned to do exactly that for a carnival concert, and I definitely never thought that this work would ever be performed in a serious environment — the actions and eye-winking innuendoes are deliberately crude. In the mean time, I’ve heard this piece played with Strauss (Richard) and Schoenberg, as well as with Mozart and Beethoven, and — although I can only clear this fact with my conscience very difficultly - I am to my own surprise, actually never ashamed of this departure into frivolousness. All the same, I sometimes feel it’s difficult, almost schizophrenic, to live in central Europe where one sees consistency as a virtue and where all the works of a composer should be able to be brought together in one oeuvre, and nevertheless to take such an apparently different approach in this piece of music. Love Hurts - Carmen Remix has, somewhat in contrast to my compositions Five Canonical Studies or 20 French Songs, almost nothing to do with New Music. For the sake of the nerves of the few who are interested in that (critics, musicologists, and insiders), perhaps I should have written this piece under a pseudonym.