Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 7 - Carmen

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 the inverse of that message either, as some recent feminist critics have alleged, portraying Carmen as a feminist icon. These critics, on the whole, see the ending either as Carmen’s defeat at the hands of a world order that cannot comprehend her, or else insist that she has triumphed after all, by living her life with integrity and refusing to yield, right up until the end. There is a different possibility, suggested by Pushkin: We may see Carmen as fettered, so to speak, by human life and the vulnerability that is inexorably part of it. What both the victory-of-patriarchy critics and the feminist critics omit is the great unanswered question of the opera: Why does Carmen meet José outside the bull-ring, and stay there until he kills her? She has a happy new relationship, but she walks away from her new lover’s big moment in the ring to meet an ex-lover whom she has dismissed and does not love. This makes no sense for a feminist Carmen: She should have gone her own way and ignored him. She could have left town, as Frasquita advises, or, more likely, sought the shelter of the crowd and Escamillo’s victory. Instead she waits for him, not attempting to leave until it is clear he is going to kill her. Why? She does not love José. But there is something about him that draws her fatally (for she is a fatalist). Isn’t it the sheer gaping vulnerability of his huge passion, his sheer willingness to give his whole life for love? Perhaps, then, it is a desire for passion, for being bound and vulnerable, that makes her compromise her freedom? (As Janis Joplin said to my hippie/rebel generation, with its own rejection of the bonds of love, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”) Carmen longs, in the end, to be human—so death is what she seeks, and gets. Interpretations that speak of fatal passion, as mine does, are accused by some recent critics of “depoliticizing” the opera. But opera characters are not simply abstract templates for political positions; they are complex human beings, and that is why they move us (and why opera moves us). Even though Carmen invites many re ections about race and class and gender—clearly solicited by Bizet, an atheist and a rebel—the opera also shows its people as searching for something deep about their condition, something that they try to grasp, even at their peril. Andrew Biondo provided research assistance for this essay. Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. Her most recent book is Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibilit y (2023). At left,Katharine Goeldner with Kyle Ketelsen as the Toreador in 2010/11. Above,Ekaterina Gubanova with Joseph Calleja as Don José in 2016/17. Dan Rest Todd Rosenberg