Carmen

Carmen embodies all the clichés associated with Romani women. She is wild and fearless, nonconformist, constantly at odds with the law, and lives entirely in the present. However, her name suggests that she is also burdened by a heavy shadow. Besides the Latin meaning of "carmen" (poetry, song, magical formula), the word "karma" is also hidden within it. Originating from the ancient Indian language Sanskrit, it means "action" or "effect." Every physical or mental action leads to a consequence.

—Ursula Horner, Director

From the early 1880s onward, the opera’s popularity spread with the force of an epidemic. Perhaps the turning point came when the pedantic and morally pretentious bourgeoisie — still guiltily triumphant over the Paris Commune and the dominant social force of the time — realised that it was far more pleasurable and safer to admire immorality on stage than to practise it in life; or rather, to indulge it voyeuristically in the imagination.

The opera’s exotic literary source was Mérimée’s novella of the same name. Exotic subjects and settings were hardly foreign to Bizet either: The Pearl Fishers, Ivan IV, Djamileh, The Emir’s Lute, The Fair Maid of Perth. The experienced librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy — assigned to the composer by the Opéra-Comique — substantially reshaped Mérimée’s restrained narrative. They omitted the geographical and ethnographic digressions, altered the principal characters, removed Carmen’s coarseness and cunning, softened and, so to speak, pastoralised Don José, strengthened the role of Micaëla, and fully developed the barely sketched Escamillo. In this sense, the “naturalism” that shocked the first audiences of “Carmen” had already been considerably softened and romantically toned down in comparison with its literary source.

Yet it is hardly accidental that Tartuffe — the archetypal hypocrite — emerged from the pen of a Frenchman: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Molière. The struggle between curiosity and indignation initially determined the fate of “Carmen”. Even for the relatively liberal audiences of the Opéra-Comique, the quarrels among cigarette factory workers, the bandits’ hideouts and the street urchins proved too much for bourgeois spectators who had encountered these workers and members of the Third Estate not behind the scenes, but on the smoking barricades only four years before the premiere.

Musically, Bizet’s dazzling score stood in sharp contrast to the somewhat faded and pleasantly anaemic background of contemporary French music, despite the latter being institutionally upheld as the accepted bon ton. The music is indeed stylised as Spanish, yet realised with knowledge, invention and taste — brilliantly vivid, without concessions either to the academic pedantry of the Conservatoire or to the touristic kitsch of the superficial Spanishisms of Chabrier or Lalo. One could even say that “Carmen” itself was “un oiseau rebelle” among the respectable productions of the academicians and the biting yet ephemeral operettas of Offenbach.

“Carmen” is an opera of extraordinary musical and dramatic virtuosity, and this quality ultimately prevailed over prejudice, unease and rejection. Originally conceived as an Opéra-Comique with spoken dialogue and separate musical numbers, the work was later revised by Bizet’s fellow student Ernest Guiraud, who replaced the spoken dialogue with recitatives, thus ensuring a more continuous musical flow.

“That Mérimée’s novella, brought to the stage of the Salle Favart, could astonish and unsettle the theatre’s regular patrons, that it might appear ill-suited to the traditions of the Opéra-Comique — this is understandable. But it is incomprehensible how Bizet’s music, filled with light, colour, sincere feeling and charm, failed to conquer audiences from the very beginning; how those audiences remained unmoved by its drama and pathos, by the immense force of its passion.”

These words come from a review by Bizet’s younger colleague Gabriel Fauré, published in Le Figaro on the occasion of the thousandth performance of  “Carmen”.

- Dragomir Yosifov