Georges Bizet, Carmen (1875)

You know, I've seen 'round about thirty operas. Slightly more. But about that. OKAY OKAY, according to my list, I've seen thirty-three. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?!? It's conceivable that I've forgotten something near the beginning, when I was a bit fuzzier. But thereabouts. So naturally, there are a lot of big names I haven't seen. This being one of the biggest. Until I saw it, via the Met's Live in HD transmission.

Well, it's Carmen. There's a reason it's popular. The music is glorious, including a number of parts that you (or me, anyway) knew but didn't know where they came from, resulting in that "Ah ha!" moment (specifically, Carmen's first aria and the toreador song). You probably know the story: the soldier Don José falls in love with/is seduced by the beguiling gypsy Carmen, leading him to desert the military and go off with the gypsies to Do Crimes and things (yes yes, the Problematic aspects are obvious, but sometimes I find stuff like this just really tedious to talk about). However...things do not turn out as more or less anyone would have hoped they would. Hmm. Yes. Indeed. It's kind of funny that the opera was originally written for Paris' Opera Comique. It's...not what most people would consider "comique." Very far afield from La Fille du Régiment.

The title role is--or so I'm told--a specialty of French mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine. I think it's a difficult role to really wrap one's head around (more on this soon), but she's, you know, fine. In my experience, less than fine operatic performances are rare. I mean, honestly, she didn't make my head explode with awesomeness, but that's okay. There was some sort of quirk with the HD thing, I assume, such that you could really noticeable hear her inhaling between lines. It wasn't super-disruptive, but it was a bit irksome, and once you noticed it you couldn't stop noticing it. Roberto Alagna is very good, very tortured as Don José. You can see how this guy would be driven to murder. Russian bass Alexander Vinogradov is, I guess, okay as the bullfighter Escamillo, though I'm sort of prejudiced against him due to his asinine comments about bullfighting in his interstitial interview (it's good because both the bull AND the toreador put their lives in danger--yeah, let's put YOU in a ring against your will where some dude's trying to murder you and THEN we'll see how you feel). But the real surprise of the show was Aleksandra Kurzak (Alagna's real-life wife) as Don José's fiancée Micaëla. On paper, it looks like kind of a thankless role--the pure, virtuous woman to contrast with Carmen herself--but Kurzak endows the part with considerable strength and grit, such that I kind of wished there were more of her.

This production is set in the 1930s.  I don't know what else to say about that.  Even more than Shakespeare plays, directors feel absolutely free to move the settings of their operas to whenever.  I personally have no problem with that, and I think people who do are excessively narrow in their thinking.  It's such an artificial form anyway, that worrying about verisimilitude seems kind of incoherent.  Still, if setting it during the Spanish Civil War is meant to say anything in particular, I don't know what it is.  

So but the very big question is: why does Carmen allow herself to be killed? She has every opportunity to avoid her deranged ex-lover, and even if she doesn't take it to nonetheless avoid goading this obviously unstable dude--but she doesn't. She seems to be embracing death. This is a question that I find extremely difficult to answer. It seems to demand some kind of concrete response--the answer should certainly inform the performance--but I just don't know. I mean, one of the main things about her is that she flits between lovers like a bird ("L'amour est un oiseau rebelle," goes her famous first aria). It seems like if she's gonna let this guy do her in, there hasto be something--beyond increased murderousness--differentiating him from previous lovers. There's a scene where she reads cards and reflects on the inevitability of death, but that is not a theme that is exactly well-formed. If at all possible, I really want to resist the temptation to say, well, it's just because the libretto is kind of incoherently written, but I dunno, man. And the fact that it's hard to really get her deal seems to make her just a hard character to play. As I said above. On balance, the music is great so it doesn't matter, but it's definitely a thing.