We restored the dialogue to Carmen and the running time went up by nineteen minutes
Guiraud’s recitatives are not what Bizet wrote. Taking them out is easy; living with what replaces them is not.
Carmen is an opéra comique. It has spoken dialogue. What most houses perform is a version completed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet’s death, which replaces that dialogue with sung recitative — smoother, shorter, and much easier to cast.
Restoring the dialogue costs nineteen minutes and requires singers who can act in French without the orchestra carrying them. The first week of rehearsal was genuinely difficult and there was a point at which the director offered to go back.
What you get for it is the thing the recitatives sand off: the abruptness. In the original, characters stop singing and simply talk to each other, and the drop from music into speech is where the danger in the piece actually lives.