Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 7 - Carmen

23 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Is the heroine a victim of a judgmental society or a feminist icon? Or something far more complex? By Martha C. Nussbaum Dan Rest Katharine Goeldner (center, in red) played Carmen in Lyric’s 2010/11 revival,joined (left to right) by then-current Ryan Opera Center members Paul Scholten,René Barbera,Emily Fons,and Jennifer Jakob. In any list of the most-performed operas, Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) ranks at or near the top. It has even been called a “perfect opera,” and this seems justi ed. The work has everything: daring, melodically and harmonically complex music, with superb orchestration and intricate ensembles; local color and a vivid sense of place and time; and, perhaps above all, compelling characters who have fascinated audiences for many decades—ever since its disastrous rst night, when it was denounced on all sides for immorality. It has won the admiration of composers as diverse as Brahms (who saw it 20 times), Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and even Wagner, who exclaimed, ”Here at last for a change is someone with ideas!” The philosopher Nietzsche, meanwhile, thought it the best antidote to what he took to be Wagner’s otherworldly pieties about love. Unfortunately its creator died before he could see the success his wonderful creation attained, after the initial shock it delivered to a conservative Paris music world. Carmen got its start when Bizet, a musical prodigy and de ant anti-conservative, along with his librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy (nephew of the composer Fromental Halévy, who had been Bizet’s teacher), proposed to the directors of the Opéra Comique an opera based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845). One director approved, but his more conservative partner objected. Halévy placated him (so he reported 30 years later) by promising a “softer, tamer” heroine, and the inclusion of a virtuous young girl, not in the Mérimée, as a counterpoise to the shameless Carmen. He also promised that Carmen’s death would be “glossed over” by a noisy public celebration. Whether he was insincere, or whether Bizet successfully fought with them for his own ideas, neither of these promises was kept. The death of Carmen is searing, its effect only heightened by the contrasting offstage music of the bull ring. And, as we shall see, Micaëla’s character and function are more complicated than the librettist revealed, or, perhaps, knew. In many respects, the opera followed its source, emphasizing Carmen’s transgressive insistence on freedom, though with signi cant changes that heighten the allure of its heroine and weaken the character of Don José. In Mérimée, we learn the story of Carmen and Don José through a male narrator, a detached intellectual who is doing research on the history of the Roman Civil Wars. He meets up with a band of Roma people, and eventually hears from Don José himself the story of his tragic obsession, as the outlaw lies in prison after having killed Carmen’s freedom