Carmen, Agusan del Norte
Carmen was created into a municipality in 1949, when the "barrio"s of Carmen, Tagcatong, Cahayagan and San Agustin were separated from the municipality of Nasipit and constituted into the newly created town, by virtue of "Republic Act No. 380" which was approved on June 15, 1949. This law was sponsored by Congressman Marcos M. Calo. The town came into being on July 1, 1949.
Carmen
The popularity of "Carmen" continued through succeeding generations of American opera-goers; by the beginning of 2011 the Met alone had performed it almost a thousand times. It enjoyed similar success in other American cities and in all parts of the world, in many different languages. Carmen's habanera from act 1, and the toreador's song "Votre toast" from act 2, are among the most popular and best-known of all operatic arias, the latter "a splendid piece of swagger" according to Newman, "against which the voices and the eyebrows of purists have long been raised in vain". Most of the productions outside France followed the example created in Vienna and incorporated lavish ballet interludes and other spectacles, a practice which Mahler abandoned in Vienna when he revived the work there in 1900. In 1919, Bizet's aged contemporary Camille Saint-Saëns was still complaining about the "strange idea" of adding a ballet, which he considered "a hideous blemish in that masterpiece", and he wondered why Bizet's widow, at that time still living, permitted it.