Habanera ("music or dance of Havana") is the popular name for "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle"("Love is a rebellious bird"), an aria from Georges Bizet's 1875 opéra comique Carmen. It is the entrance aria of the title character, a mezzo-soprano role, in scene 5 of the first act.

The score of the aria was adapted from the habanera "El Arreglito ou la Promesse de mariage", by the Spanish musician Sebastián Iradier, first published in 1863, which Bizet believed to be a folk song. When others told him he had used something written by a composer who had died ten years earlier, he added a note about its derivation in the first edition of the vocal score which he himself prepared. Although the French libretto of the complete opéra comique was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, the words of the habanera originated from Bizet. The Habanera was first performed by Galli-Marié at the Opéra-Comique on 3 March 1875. Bizet, having removed during rehearsals his first version of Carmen's entrance song, rewrote the Habanera several times before he (and Galli-Marié) were satisfied with it. Nietzsche, an enthusiastic admirer of Carmen, commented on the "ironically provocative" aria evoking "Eros as conceived by the ancients, playfully alluring, mischievously demoniacal." Rodney Milnes, reviewing a range of interpretations on record, described the piece as "after all, [...] a simple, teasingly articulated statement of fact, not an earth-shattering philosophical credo".

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habanera_(aria)