Carmen

Georges Bizet composed the opera Carmen after a novel by Prosper Merimee for the Parisian Comic Opera.  This was the opera company that had made Jacques Offenbach famous and several of the features is Bizet's popular show derive from its Comic Opera roots.  First, much of the dialogue between musical numbers is simply spoken -- the opera has no recitative, a characteristic of operas written for this stage.  Second, the show features a number of rousing gallop-like tunes that sound similar to familiar works by Offenbach.  Finally, the ramshackle plot always seems teetering on the edge of self-parody -- in some respects, the opera plays like a parody of a verismo work by Puccini or Mascagni; the libretto is self-consciously sordid and garishly sexual -- people are always getting up and there's bondage subtext to several of the scenes. Indeed, I wonder if any director has ever had the courage to mine the opera for its humor -- I think the show could be convincingly staged as pitch-black comedy.  Certainly, the bombastic toreador song, the most famous tune in the show, seems ridiculously over-inflated -- in the Minnesota Opera production that I saw on May 2, 2015, the arrival of the matador in the fourth act riding like a conquering hero in a pretty little convertible underlined comical aspects of the libretto.  The titular heroine has a taste for rough-trade in men -- she seduces a straight-arrow soldier, a big, dumb brute of a man, finds him too sensitive for her taste (he's a momma's boy) and abandons him for an affair with the preening, narcissistic matador.  The brute revenges himself on poor Carmen, who remains resolutely remote and unlikeable in this production, by carving her up O. J. Simpson-style while the matador similarly carves a bull in the adjacent stadium, a piece of heavy-handed, if effective, symbolism.  Directors of Carmen always labor to make the leading lady sympathetic -- but this is contrary to the libretto and Bizet's music.  I think it would be more honest to stage the opera like Berg's Lulu -- Carmen is sexually rapacious and fickle (in fact, her Habanera number sounds like La Donne e mobile); she's disloyal and faithful only to her own pleasure.  Indeed, in the Minnesota Opera production, she hangs around with two nice-looking gals who strut their stuff as if they were lesbians -- they are always groping and embracing one another.  Don Jose, the brutal and vengeful soldier, has a stiff, unpleasant love-interest in a girl sent to him by his mamma to summon him away from Seville (and the tempestuous Carmen) to his home village.  Carmen, the wild gypsygirl  born outside the law, is, at least, fun and probably exciting in bed -- the stiff little emissary of Don Jose's mother is just irritating.  The opera makes no sense from a narrative perspective -- Bizet had no architectronic skills at all and the story is just one crowd-pleasing number after another:  he loads up the action with tavern scenes (for rousing drinking numbers), gypsy dances, and children's choruses whether required by the narrative or not.  A scene set in the mountains involving smuggling always looks ridiculous -- it involves much toting of heavy boxes that have to be dragged on stage and, then, dragged off again -- and I think it would be best to stage that scene for laughs (even though this part of the opera, Act III, begins with the sweetest and most tuneful music in the show, a very beautiful folk-song like overture.)    The production staged by the Minnesota Opera had excellent singers in the main roles and the actress playing Carmen was appropriately sexy and cruel -- I thought she was, however, a little stiff as a dancer.  The Minnesota Opera sets and costumes were resolutely and perversely ugly; Carmen is dressed in dowdy frocks and doesn't get to wear anything sexy until the last Act when she plays the doomed bull to Don Jose's knife-wielding matador.  The sets looked as if they were made of towering panels of corrugated cardboard and they were absurdly overlit.  But none of this mattered on May 2, 2015 -- the audience had come to hear the some of "the world's most beautiful melodies" as tunes from Carmen used to be called when hawked on TV in promotions featuring LP records of classical music and, of course, there was an obligatory, enthusiastic standing ovation.