March 3, 1875: The Premiere of "Carmen" & The 1st Indoor Hockey Game

Georges Bizet

March 3, 1875, 150 years ago: Carmen, an opera by French composer Georges Bizet, premieres, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. It is based on the 1845 novella of the same title, by French writer Prosper Mérimée. He died in 1870, and so did not live to see the opera.

The opera is not comic: It is set in southern Spain in 1820, in the wake of the country's devastating defense of itself against Napoleon in the Peninsular War, and with the loss of its Latin American colonies in progress.

Don José, a naïve soldier, is seduced by the wiles of the fiery Romani woman Carmen. (She is referred to as a "gypsy," but that term for the Romani is now considered a slur.) He abandons his childhood sweetheart, and deserts from his military duties, but loses Carmen's love to the bullfighter Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage.

The depictions of proletarian life, immorality, and lawlessness, and the tragic death of the main character on stage, broke new ground in French opera, and were highly controversial. It has become part of the trope that every opera is a tragedy, which is far from true.

Bizet died just 3 months after the premiere, on June 3, 1875, at 36, from a lingering fever and 2 heart attacks.

Just as most 20th Century Americans came to know "The March of the Swiss Soldiers," the end of the the Overture to Gioachino Rossini's 1829 opera William Tell as the theme from the 1949-57 TV show The Lone Ranger, many Americans came to know the songs "Habanera" and "The Toreador Song" from their inclusion in the 1976 baseball film The Bad News Bears.

*

On the exact same day, across the Atlantic Ocean, but also in a French-speaking city, the first recorded indoor ice hockey game took place.

Just as a young man named James Creighton was the 1st great pitcher in baseball, before a bizarre injury took his life at the age of 21, another James Creighton organized the 1st indoor hockey game. He put it together at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, between a local team and the Victoria Skating Club, a team captained by Creighton.

The game featured 9 players on each side, as opposed to the modern 6. And here is the entire report of the game, from the next day's Montreal Gazette -- originally a single run-on sentence, but I've added paragraphs for easier reading, although this writer uses the term "shinty" instead of the more common "shinny":

HOCKEY – At the Rink last night a very large audience gathered to witness a novel contest on the ice. The game of hockey, though much in vogue on the ice in New England and other parts of the United States, is not much known here, and in consequence the game of last evening was looked forward to with great interest.

Hockey is played usually with a ball, but last night, in order that no accident should happen, a flat block of wood was used, so that it should slide along the ice without rising, and thus going among the spectators to their discomfort. The game is like Lacrosse in one sense – the block having to go through flags placed about 8 feet apart in the same manner as the rubber ball – but in the main the old country game of shinty gives the best idea of hockey.

The players last night were eighteen in number – nine on each side – and were as follows: – Messrs. Torrance (captain), Meagher, Potter, Goff, Barnston, Gardner, Griffin, Jarvis and Whiting. Creighton (captain), Campbell, Campbell, Esdaile, Joseph, Henshaw, Chapman, Powell and Clouston.

The match was an interesting and well-contested affair, the efforts of the players exciting much merriment as they wheeled and dodged each other, and notwithstanding the brilliant play of Captain Torrance's team Captain Creighton's men carried the day, winning two games to the single of the Torrance nine. The game was concluded about half-past nine, and the spectators then adjourned well satisfied with the evening's entertainment.

Artist's depiction of the game

What the Gazette didn't report was that there was a fight after the game -- not between players, as would become so common in the sport, but between the players and the fans, as some members of the Skating Club didn't like that their rink, so used to the leisure of skating, was being used for a competitive sport, and causing damage to the ice.

Creighton went on to become the law clerk for the Canadian Senate in Ottawa, and lived until 1930. 

The Victoria Skating Rink opened in 1862, on a block bordered by Drummond Street, St. Catherine Street, Stanley Street and Dorchester Boulevard (now Boulevard René-Léveseque). In 1886, it became the home of the 1st amateur hockey league, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada. In 1894, it was the location of the 1st Stanley Cup Playoff games. (The Cup was a challenge trophy, and when the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association won the AHAC title in 1893, no champion of another league challenged them, so there was no playoff that 1st season.)

Moving the sport indoors forced, for the 1st time, a standardized rink size, which became 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. On March 3, 1925, 50 years to the day after the 1st game, the last game was held there, a tournament semifinal for an amateur league. But times had changed: The Rink was in bad shape, and, a mile to the west, the Montreal Forum had opened the previous November. The Rink was soon demolished, and a parking garage was built in its place. The garage still stands.

No, it doesn't look much like a historical site. But, while not the place where hockey was "invented," it can legitimately be called "the place where hockey as we know it was born."