He worked as a conductor and impresario in native theatres, taught music and married the gifted soprano and interpreter of his works, Isabella Giatrà. At the same time he composed his first nationwide opera, the four-act Marco Bozzari (1858–60), as well as numerous art songs in Greek lyrics, amongst which the celebrated klephtiko, ‘Ho Gero Dēmos’ [Old man Dēmos]. This track, written within the Greek conventional style of dēmoticà, was included within the above-mentioned opera. Marco Bozzari, after a collection of misadventures, brought on by its patriotic and anti-Ottoman content Carrer, opened in Patras in April 1861. It is considered Carrer’s most famous work and the preferred Greek opera during the 19th and early twentieth centuries, with a document of more than 45 different stagings. The work, initially composed to an Italian libretto written by Giovanni Caccialupi, was soon translated and performed in Greek, often inflicting the viewers’s enthusiasm …
