"Carmen" is the only opera I have seen performed live and fully staged. It was an option on a tour of St. Petersburg. This post is more about funny stories of going to it rather than about the opera itself. One evening the tour group was offered the opportunity to see "Swan Lake," and everyone in the tour group decided to go. At a meal the next day we were offered the opportunity to see "Carmen." Nobody else at my table was interested, but I signed up. Eventually the guide came over and said I was the only one in the whole tour group who wanted to go, so neither he nor the interpreter would go. Instead he would put me in a taxi which would take me to the theater and the same driver would pick me up after the performance. That evening, off I went. Even I knew the basic plot of the opera. I figured if the sub- or super-titles would be in Russian so they wouldn't help me, but since the opera was in French I could follow along a little (4 years of French in high school plus one in college, though that was long ago). Upon arriving I was given a one-sheet program that summarized the opera in a few paragraphs in several languages, including English, so I read that. And then the singing began. In Russian. No titles. After the opera I went out to wait for my taxi driver to show up. As the crowd thinned, I began to get nervous. I had no idea how to use a Russian pay phone and no Russian money. (US dollars were accepted--and, I think, preferred as more stable than rubles at that time--everywhere we went.) Eventually a man came up to me and said "Taxi" and the name of the hotel our group was staying at. The problem was, he didn't look like the man who had brought me to the theater. I said that in English, of course, and he just repeated, "Taxi" and the hotel's name. I got into the car. Obviously I made it back safely, but I was trembling all the way. The next morning I told the guide about this and he said the original driver must have gone off duty. Then I told the interpreter that I had expected the opera to be sung in French because it was by Bizet. She said, "Oh, no, operas are always sung in Russian." I said that in the US they are sung in the language in which they are written, which surprised her because she had assumed they were all sung in English here.