The piece
In Carmen, first performed at the Opéra-Comique in 1875, the toreador Escamillo enters in the second act singing of his fights in the arena; his refrain, “Toreador, en garde”, is already heard in the opera's Prelude, between two returns of the opening march. This easy version, written for Noctave after the piano version of the Prelude published by Schirmer in 1895, keeps the whole refrain, in F major, without the words.
The right hand plays the tune, with its dotted rhythms clearly marked, as the instruction ben marcato asks; the left hand plays the low note of each chord of the accompaniment, detached, once per beat. Count the sixteenths carefully in bars 1 to 7: the dotted eighth long, the sixteenth short, just before the next beat. In bars 17 to 21, the small sixteenth-note triplets stay light, without slowing down, and the left hand answers the right in bar 20.
