Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 7 - Carmen

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago But we must now introduce one further source. In 1827, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin published a long narrative/dramatic poem, The Gypsies , which was clearly a source for Mérimée, who translated it into French in 1852. We know that Meilhac and Halévy had that translation and used it, but there are decisive reasons to believe that Bizet read it too. Bizet was utterly dissatis ed with the libretto text of the Habanera, and completely rewrote it, again and again, with the help of his Carmen, the singer Galli-Marié, until he was nally satis ed. It was during these rewrites that the phrase “un oiseau rebelle” (a rebellious bird) was introduced. This phrase does not occur in the Mérimée novel. But the bird is in Pushkin, as an image of the restless freedom of the Roma world. So: Bizet knew Pushkin. Pushkin is important because his poem contains insights about freedom and the bonds of passion that are not present in Mérimée, but prove central, I believe, to Bizet’s opera. The poem, dramatic in form, tells the story of a young man from the city who is drawn to the Roma world and forms a liaison with the beautiful Zem ra. He does not understand the relaxed and tolerant mores of the Roma people, called by Pushkin “children of a humble freedom,” and is determined to possess Zem ra, despite her own preference for freedom. When she has an affair with a man from her own community, he kills her—and is immediately dismissed from the Roma world, since, as the Roma elder says, his people cannot live with murderers: “Not for freedom were you born,/ You want it for yourself alone.” The poem clearly prefers the Roma world to the urban bourgeois culture that teaches young men to dominate women: “We are shy and good at heart,” says the elder. This might suggest that these outsiders are immune to the darker passions. But in the end the poet doesn’t agree. As the poem concludes, he tells us that there is no lasting happiness in that “innocent” world either. Even there, violent emotions surge up in dreams and presage disaster: “Catastrophe in hiding waits,/Dark passions everywhere run deep,/There is no refuge from the Fates.” Bizet’s message, I think, is Pushkin’s. The opera sympathizes with Carmen and her demand for life on her own terms. It characterizes Don José’s possessiveness as both ugly and pathetic, part of a culture of misogyny that is also suffused with racialized “othering” of the Roma, who simply want to live on their own terms. To that extent, the political stance of the opera is diametrically opposed to that of the conservative critics who assailed it for immorality and lawlessness, and to those who continue to see in the opera’s tragic ending the just punishment of a woman who de es society’s rules. But its message is not In the 2005/06 Season,Denyce Graves took the title role with Sir Andrew Davis at the podium. Dan Rest