Bizet Carmen
Opera in four acts
Music by Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy based on Prosper Mérimée's short story
Premiere: Paris, Opéra-Comique, hall Favart, 3 march 1875
It is hard to understand why Carmen was a failure when first performed at the Opéra Comique in 1875. The reason must have been its story – an impossible love between Don José, an honourable but in many ways naive soldier, and Carmen, a free-spirited gypsy girl, who arouses sympathy because of her blunt honesty and independency from social conventions, which she defends to the death.
Georges Bizet’s music contains a great number of song – and dancelike pieces which are based on Spanish folklore, rather than the traditional couplets and arias that audiences expected at the time.
At least we can forgive them for their initial disapproval because Carmen was performed a hundred times more in Paris during the next ten years and has remained popular ever since.
For us, its subject matter fits perfectly with the themes of our season. Moreover, Carmen shares its librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy with Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne, which we present a few weeks later.
We have assembled a spectacular cast for you. Mainly of French-speaking origin, it is led by Marina Viotti, who gives her debut with at Monte-Carlo, and Benjamin Bernheim, who sings the part of Don José for the very first time.
RAINIER III ACADEMY CHILDREN'S CHOIR
The Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra
Act I
In the Sevillian square bordering the tobacco factory, the soldiers kill time by watching the crowd. Among them stands Don José, a naturally reserved brigadier, whose impeccable conduct promises him an honourable career. Nothing, until now, has ever disturbed the simple order of his existence. As the female workers leave the factory, a young Gypsy girl catches everyone’s eye: it is Carmen. Free and fickle as the wind, as elusive as cigarette smoke, she strides through life recognising no master other than her own whims. Men are drawn to her like moths to a flame. She mocks them, teases them, then sings that love obeys no law, that it comes without warning and vanishes without a trace. Eventually her gaze lingers on Don José, the only one who seems to remain indifferent. This resistance teases her. Before she disappears, she tosses him a flower – a silent challenge to which he pretends not to respond, but which has already set his simple heart aflutter. Micaëla arrives, sent by Don José’s mother; she hands him a letter in which his mother urges him to marry the bearer of the letter, for “there is none wiser or kinder”. Micaëla takes her leave; Don José rereads the letter and is glad to have come to his senses after nearly succumbing to Carmen. Soon turmoil breaks out in the factory. Carmen has fought with a female worker and seriously injured her. She is arrested and entrusted to Don José’s custody. Whilst he is taking her to prison, she alternates between flattery, seduction and promises: the man of duty is not long in succumbing. He loosens her bonds, and she flees. He is left alone to answer for this offence, whilst the gypsy girl disappears, laughing.
Act II
A few weeks have passed. Don José has paid for this first moment of weakness with his freedom. No sooner has he been released from prison than he finds Carmen in Lilas Pastia’s tavern where soldiers, smugglers and dancers mingle. She sings, dances and welcomes the officers with a frivolity that wounds the young sergeant’s budding love. Among the patrons appears the famous bullfighter Escamillo, a man of glory and daring, cheered by the crowd wherever he goes. He immediately notices Carmen, whose beauty seems worthy of his triumphs. But the gypsy girl remains unaffected; she is waiting for another man. As the guests take their leave, Don José finally joins the woman for whom he has already sacrificed his honour. She demands an even more striking proof of his devotion: to desert the army and henceforth share the adventurous life of the smugglers. Don José falters, for he still clings to military discipline as much as he already loves this woman. Fate hastens his decision. His superior appears unexpectedly, a quarrel breaks out, and to defend Carmen, Don José draws his sword against his own officer. From that moment on, there is no turning back. Cast out by his own people, he follows the gypsy woman into the mountains, where a life on the run begins, but also a servitude even harsher than the one he thought he was leaving behind.
Act III
In the wild mountain gorges where smugglers hide their contraband goods, the initial enchantment has waned. Don José, consumed by ever-growing jealousy, discovers that Carmen’s love bears no resemblance to his own. Where he demands fidelity, she recognises only the right to change as she pleases. During a game of cards, the women ask them to divine their fate. For some, they promise wealth or happiness; for Carmen, they inexorably foretell death. She accepts this prophecy with an almost fierce resignation, as though there were no escaping the path that fate has mapped out. Escamillo appears in the mountains to seek out Carmen. The two men immediately lock horns, and soon their rivalry escalates into a duel. The smugglers intervene to prevent bloodshed, but the hatred is now irrevocable. Then Micaëla appears; having come at the risk of her own life, she tells him that his mother is dying and is asking to see him one last time. Torn between his filial duty and his destructive passion, Don José finally agrees to leave, after swearing to Carmen that he will return. Carmen watches him walk away without any visible regret; already her spirit seems to be following another destiny.
Act IV
Seville celebrates the bullfight amidst a blaze of music, colour and cheering. Il the city’s main square, Escamillo appears as a triumphant hero. At his side walks Carmen, now his companion. Both stride with the confidence of those who believe they hold happiness in their hands. Yet, in the shadows of the crowd, Don José lies in wait; he is no longer the disciplined soldier of earlier days, but a man consumed by obsession. He begs Carmen to return to him, to start their life anew far from this city and this lover. He implores her as much as he threatens her, yet the gypsy remains true to herself and refuses to yield to either fear or remorse. She declares that she once loved Don José, but no longer does, and that no force in the world will make her give up her freedom. As a sign of their final break, she throws the ring he had given her at his feet. Driven mad by despair, Don José strikes her a fatal blow. Whilst the cheers from the arena hail Escamillo’s victory, Carmen breathes her last outside the walls, free until death. Don José, crushed by his own crime, surrenders without resistance.
Five facts to discover before the curtain rises
1
In Prosper Mérimée’s short story, which inspired Bizet and his two librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, Don José is actually called Don José Lizarrabengoa – a Basque, in other words; and as the story unfolds, we learn that he killed Carmen’s husband, called Garcia, as well as an officer with whom he had caught Carmen. And the famous bullfighter Escamillo from the opera is, in Mérimée’s story, merely a modest picador named Lucas. As for Micaëla, she was invented for the purposes of the opera, no doubt to provide the good, somewhat bourgeois Parisian public with the image of at least one respectable female character; since all the others are thieves, gypsies, and at best vulgar cigarette-manufacturing girls…
2
Since 1996 – that is, over the past thirty years – the number of performances of Carmen is estimated at some 24,000, amounting to a total of around 6,600 different productions by all the major opera companies across the globe. Year in, year out, this works out at 800 performances a year, or more than 200 different stagings. It must be said that it is one of the three most frequently performed operas in the world, alongside Die Zauberflöte and La traviata. Tchaikovsky was spot on when he wrote to a friend as early as 1880 that he was “convinced that within ten years or so, Carmen would be the most popular opera in the world.”
3
Originally, Carmen was interspersed with spoken dialogue, in the true style of an opéra comique. Shortly after the composer’s death – three months, in fact, after the work’s premiere in March 1875 at the Paris Opéra-Comique – his close friend, composer Ernest Guiraud, decided to replace the dialogue with recitatives accompanied by the orchestra, in order to bring the work into the realm of traditional grand opera. It was not, however, until 1959 that Carmen made its definitive entry into the repertoire of the Opéra Garnier in Paris, the “main” opera house, and not just the smaller Opéra-Comique – apart from a single gala performance in 1907 – even though it had been performed in Vienna and Berlin (with Guiraud’s recitatives as early as 1875), London, New York, Tokyo, Naples, Rio – in short, all the world’s major houses – in the few years following its world premiere.
4
In the wake of the thousandth Parisian performance of Carmen in 1904, composer Gustave Charpentier wrote in Le Figaro: “In the face of Carmen’s universal triumph, who would suspect the sort of failure this masterpiece initially had to endure? On the evening of the premiere, the audience was ice-cold; even the most beautiful scenes failed to warm them up – and the next day, the critics were unanimous in their condemnation! Carmen must have made a most peculiar impression; it was a drama brimming with life, impetuous, like a formidable eruption of lava. How could one not have cried out against its vulgarity and crude inspiration? In the future theatre of the people, there will be a need for tragedies of pure line, teeming with life, and unfolding without any miracles amongst true characters.”
5
Several films have been adapted from the opera. Among others, there is a farce (a silent film shot in 1915) directed by Charlie Chaplin, in which the famous Tramp swaps his cane and bowler hat – already created in 1914 – for Don José’s costume; rest assured, he doesn’t actually kill Carmen at the end. Not to mention another film from 1945 starring Jean Marais as Don José and… Bernard Blier as Remendado! In a more African-American vein, Otto Preminger transposed the action to the Southern states of the USA, adopting a jazzier style even though the score remains firmly that of Bizet. Marilyn Horne provided the voice-over for the actress Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte played Joe – Don José – and the entire cast were Black. The bullfighter became a heavyweight boxer, a role more suited to the North-American public’s tastes for whom a torero does not particularly represent a hero.