Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 7 - Carmen

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 24 Carmen. Thus, the story is mediated through two layers of male narration. In the opera, by contrast, we are confronted by the characters with no lter, and we respond to their immediacy with our own complicated emotions. Carmen becomes more dangerous, her insistence on freedom more threatening. She certainly does not seem “softer, tamer.” Indeed, the libretto removes some details that serve to soften her (her skill as a healer, her impressive uency in many different languages), leaving the accent squarely on her outlaw daring and her transgressive sexuality. Don José is altered too: He is not Mérimée’s Satanic master-brigand; he is a naïve soldier from the country who never chooses the life of crime, but is led helplessly, pathetically, into dishonor by an overwhelming passion. Micaëla is indeed an addition, but in Bizet’s hands she becomes far more interesting than the “virtuous girl” promised by Halévy. First of all, she exempli es courage and autonomy as much as Carmen does. Pursuing her attachment to both José and his mother, she ventures into extremely hostile terrain not once but twice. She searches for José at the soldiers’ barracks, where they rudely taunt her and seem bent on sexual assault; later she braves the mountain haunt of the smugglers all alone (with only an employed guide). So although she is a conventional woman, exemplifying bourgeois virtues, she is an unconventionally strong and daring conventional woman, and her soaring lyricism is as memorable as Carmen’s much more radical and daring music. Second, her presence in the opera shows us something signi cant about Don José—namely, that he is at home in her bourgeois world and not at all at home in the world of the outsiders. (Mérimée’s Don José, by contrast, is a natural brigand, who quickly rises to the head of the criminal gang.) From the moment they sing together, we hear how easily he slides into the phrases of her bourgeois lyricism– whereas the “Flower Song” that he addresses to Carmen, overheated and slightly crazy, shows us a man driven by some alien force to be what he cannot manage to sustain. He loves Carmen because she is not Micaëla, but he keeps trying to turn her into a bourgeois wife. We see, then, the tragic mis t in his passion. One more character has been added: Escamillo, who replaces Mérimée’s young picador, Lucas, as Carmen’s lover. He is depicted as vain, bombastic, and highly conventional, and Bizet gave him music that he himself despised, though he knew full well that the public would embrace it. (“If they want trash,” he said, “I’ll give them trash.”) In the score, Escamillo’s signature aria is even marked avec fatuité (conceitedly). In an important sense he is Micaëla’s counterpart, the man suited for Carmen. He understands her need for sexual freedom, which suits him perfectly, since he has no capacity for deep passion. He is glad to tell everyone that each of Carmen’s loves lasts only six months. Meanwhile he will enjoy her and show her off. Such a lover perfectly ts Carmen’s own desire to avoid deep love and its vulnerabilities. From left: Giulietta Simionato as Carmen in 1954; Grace Bumbry took the title role in 1964; Mark S.Doss as Escamillo in Lyric’s 1999/2000 production. Dan Rest David H.Fishman