If there were such a thing as Opera noir, Georges Bizet's Carmen would be that thing. This may seem like an odd description for an opera famous for its gaudy, technicolor spectacle -- bullfights, gypsies, Carmen's famous habanara and the show's scintillating melodies. But the content of the spectacle is pretty grim and the theme of the opera is fate -- no one is going to get out of this thing alive. The show relentlessly portrays the destruction of hapless military officer at the hands of a destructive femme fatale - the sort of character that we would call today a "sociopathic narcissist." The puzzle posed by Carmen's character is central to the plot -- is she a passionate free-willed member of a marginalized community (a gypsy called "Romani" for the purposes of political correctness), indeed a kind of freedom fighter for the oppressed or is she some sort of promiscuous monster? The opera holds these ideas in suspension -- it has a great "negative capacity" that keeps these different interpretations in question, never quite settling on one or the other. (I suspect that viewers will interpret the opera's action largely in terms of their gender -- men will be fearful of Carmen's charisma and ruthlessness; women may well imagine her to be a role-model although, of course, she gets strangled in the end.) In 1991, I saw Denyce Graves, resplendent in a tight-fitting yellow dress, sing Carmen with the Minnesota Opera; she now directs the show and, according to comments in the playbill, views the heroine as a sort of courageous guerrilla fighter in the war between the sexes (and the war between the dominant culture and the oppressed Romani). But evidence that Carmen is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" is replete in the libretto and the show's brutal ending remains as disquieting as ever. Carmen, who believes in divination by Tarot card, has been shown that she is doomed. The opera's music features a snaky, semi-oriental-sounding motif, descending by slinky chromatics, which is about as foreboding a tune as anything ever written -- merely by hearing the "Destiny" or "Fate" motif Carmen should know that things aren't going to end well in old Seville. And, in the last scene, Carmen's friends, such as they are, repeatedly tell her that she should avoid the hapless Don Jose. So what does she do? She searches him out, goes with him to a secluded place, and, then, ferociously taunts him into killing her. It's a spectacular example of amor fati, that is, embracing your fate and cheating destiny by willing things to happen that you know are doomed to occur in any event -- it's no wonder that Nietzsche declared Carmen to be his favorite opera turning his back on Wagner with whom had long been closely associated. Carmen knows her destiny -- she's fully aware of what must happen to her, but she, nonetheless, actively coerces her doom into reality.
Of course, Carmen is full of famous melodies. It's a Singspiel, more like a Broadway musical than a classical through-composed opera. Characters speak their parts before bursting into song. The music is splendidly illustrative; unlike a Mozart or Rossini opera in which the music has a life of its own and operates, to some degree, independently of what we see, Bizet's music is a Hollywood soundtrack closely tracking the moods on display in the plot. We first encounter Carmen, the girl from the cigarette factory, in a fight with a co-worker -- she slashes the girl's face with her knife. The authorities arrest Carmen and the hapless Don Jose is told to tie her up -- motifs of being bound are central to the plot's themes that contrast freedom with destiny. Carmen seduces Jose to avoid going to prison. He ends up in the cell in her stead. (She binds him, as it were.) Released from jail, Jose hastens to Carmen. She's never been much interested in him and immediately commences persecuting the soldier -- as a test of love ("proof of concept" as it were) she orders him to stay with her and not report to his regimental barracks, obviously a disastrous decision for a professional soldier. Jose deserts, goes into hiding among the Romani, it seems, and gets dragged into a smuggling operation. The couple don't enjoy any sort of honeymoon. Carmen tells Jose that "(she) loves him less than before" and they are bickering throughout the criminal enterprise, a group endeavor with the Romani clan, that ends with Carmen and two other girls seducing some border guards to get the contraband back to Seville. The opera's third act involving the smuggling is visually strange -- it's generally portrayed as occurring in some misty meadow high in the mountains, somewhere near Gibralter, with black clad smugglers wandering around with big suitcases and valises full of fabric; in this production, the smugglers have totes, old fashioned suitcases, and even 55 gallon drums that litter the stage. The prelude music to Act Three contain some of the most beautiful and haunting melodies in the repertoire and the scene begins with a ballet. Carmen and her friends play with a Tarot deck that announces that Carmen and Jose are doomed; she keeps drawing the "death" card. A handsome matador, Escamilla, has appeared. He's a cocky prick whose aria equates love with death, also foreshadowing the opera's gloomy ending. Escamilla fights with Jose (very unconvincingly in this production) and Jose gets the upper-hand, but Carmen intercedes to save her boyfriend -- she's now carrying-on with Escamilla. In the last Act, Carmen is stalked by Jose. He demands that she return to him. In the arena, Escamilla is fighting bulls. Carmen refuses to be intimidated by Jose who now brandishes a Bible. She harasses Jose into strangling her. As she is dying, Escamilla is gored by a bull and his corpse is hauled on-stage as Jose is murdering Carmen. Escamilla and Carmen lie side-by-side and Jose is hauled off to jail and, presumably, death -- the show begins with a pantomime of a priest and two nuns with a corpse; this is apparently supposed to be a flash-forward to Jose's death and establishes the meaning of the "fate" motif in the score. But wasn't clear to me what we were seeing in this prefatory proleptic scene.
Carmen uses every trick in the book to mercilessly badger Jose. She's a walking repertoire of taunts that have resulted in women being battered, abused, and murdered throughout recorded history. Carmen accuses Jose of being a mama's boy; she sarcastically mocks him by repeating his words back to him, actually imitating his voice; she obstructs his professional obligations only to cast him away when he has committed to her to the disastrous detriment of his career -- she turns him into a deserter and criminal; she parades her other admirers before him and forces Jose into fits of jealous rage. In this version of the opera. Carmen's excuse for this behavior is that she is a "little Romani girl without the law" and that she is "a bird too free to be caged." Bizet's music and the libretto based on Prosper Merimee's story treats Carmen's story as a clash between personal freedom and destiny; you can be free as a bird, but this dooms you to an early death. The Romani are contrasted with the soldiers who are dressed up like black-shirted thugs from the Franco era, sexually harassing any woman in sight, and, generally, strutting around like Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd. Everyone is gay, beautiful, doomed.
The opera is staged against a towering backdrop that seems to represent a great impenetrable wall. An arch, seemingly made from massive stone blocks covered in disfigured plaster, appears on the left side of the stage. People come and go through the huge entrance gate. The opera's morbid last scene is played against a blood red wall on which there is displayed an 18 foot tall figure of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven -- a rigidly hieratic doom-goddess with stiff hands and wildly staring eyes. When the bullfighters enter, picadors with long lances march down the theater aisles. There is poetic use made of a scrim that softens figures into an impressionistic blur -- this is particularly effective in the ballet prelude to the Third Act. The big crowd scenes are full of the raunchy tomfoolery that characterizes opera street scenes: lots of kids playing pranks, lovers groping one another, and noisy street vendors. There are effects that are important to Graves' directorial vision of the opera that don't exactly work. In the First Act, Carmen throws a flower at Jose. Normally, the actress appears with a big white or red flower, at least fist-sized, in her hair. Graves imagines Carmen to be like the bulls destroyed in the arena. So she equips her heroine with two buds, one on each side of her temple -- the horns of a demon or a bull. But when Carmen has to throw the flower at Jose, it's like she's pitching a piece of popcorn at him. In the show that I attended, Carmen was played by Zoie Reams, a statuesque African American singer. She's excellent. However, Graves creates some confusion by casting an equally statuesque Black singer, Symone Harcum as Micaela. (Micaela is the virtuous counterpart to Carmen, the good girl that Jose's dying mother wants her son to marry.) At first, it wasn't clear to me that Carmen and Micaela were two different people -- they look pretty much alike and are both mezzo sopranos. (I should have paid closer attention to the summary of the plot in the program). Rafael Moras played Don Jose; he has one thrilling tenor aria in which he hits his high note with a little catch or sob in his voice that signifies that he is completely and authentically in love with Carmen. From where I sit, to the far left of the stage, I can see the actors assembling behind the backdrops on the right hand side of the stage. Furthermore, I look down into the orchestra and could see the back row of instrumentalists departing for off-stage so they can play the remote-sounding flourishes that signify the bullfight in the last Act. Since there's a catfight in the show, the intimacy coordinator doubles as assistant fight director.
No comments:
Post a Comment