Jean-Luc Tingaud is the associate conductor at the venerable Opéra-Comique in Paris, the same theater at which an opera called Carmen premiered in March of 1875.

Three months later, Carmen’s composer, Georges Bizet, died of runaway strep throat at the tragically young age of 36. Tingaud says the theater still has the original conductor’s book used during the first mounting of the piece 135 years ago.

"We know exactly what happened during the production, which is very interesting, because Bizet made a lot of decisions," Tingaud said. "That’s when he realized that some moments during the opera were dramatically too slow, and he had to cut."

Today, Tingaud will be at the podium for the first of four performances of Carmen, the last production of the season for the Palm Beach Opera. Carmen is likely the best-known opera in the world, filled with wonderful tunes that are widely known by members of the general public who aren’t otherwise fans of the art form.

Written for the workingman of late 19th-century France, Carmen is based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée and tells the story of a free-spirited Gypsy woman who works in a tobacco factory in the Spanish city of Seville. She falls in love — or at least in lust — with Don José, a soldier billeted there, who goes to prison for her and abandons his military career to join a band of thieves in the mountains.

But Carmen is fickle, as she makes a point of noting early on, and soon she has tired of José, throwing him off for the handsome bullfighter Escamillo. José confronts Carmen outside the bullring, demanding that she return to him, and she refuses. In a fit of rage, José stabs her to death.

The two principal characters will be played by two different teams of mezzo-soprano and tenor: Hungarian mezzo Viktoria Vizin plays opposite the Italian tenor Andrea Carè on Friday night and Sunday afternoon; the Polish-born mezzo Magdalena Wór plays Carmen on Saturday night and Monday afternoon to the Don José of the Puerto Rican tenor Rafael Dávila.

For Vizin, the role has become something of a specialty. She’s sung it in London, Chicago, Phoenix and Pittsburgh, among other places, and in January sang it at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, when she went on in place of an indisposed Olga Borodina.

Vizin has very definite ideas about who she thinks Carmen is, and director John Pascoe’s vision, which contends that Carmen feels real love for her men, and isn’t just manipulating them, is something of a departure for her.

"I’ve never done this style before, which is to emphasize the love part, the passion part, not the so-called bitchy part," said Vizin, whose other roles have included Judith in a mounting of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle in Budapest.

The popularity of Carmen can obscure Bizet’s achievement. It is nothing less than the greatest French opera of the 19th century, Tingaud said, and there are three good reasons for that.

"First, he was a master of orchestration, in the French school of that time," he said. "And the melodic inspiration: that’s genius. And the third thing is his sense of harmonic writing. He writes harmonies that no one before him had the idea to put in an opera.

"Carmen breaks something, it’s coming from nowhere. It’s the beginning of real drama in the opera," he said.

Carmen:

Today through Monday by the Palm Beach Opera at the Kravis Center, West Palm Beach. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday and Monday. Information: (561) 833-7888, (561) 832-7469, or visit pbopera.org .