“L’etoile fait tout”
“Maybe this bold staging was a little overwrought. But when you have Ms. Garanca as Carmen, why not?” Anthony Tommasini offers an object lesson in the art of Criticism as Starfucking.
Okay. Here’s “why not.” The idea of turning Carmen’s dance into a lap dance basically strips a whole layer of meaning and irony from the scene. Even working from the recitative text, we have this:
José arrives and tells Carmen he loves her. She tells him that she has just danced for his officers. (She is trying to make him say he’s jealous.) Once he says, “Yes, I’m jealous,” she responds by pretending to believe it’s the dancing is the specific reason for the jealousy. “Very well,” she says, “I’ll put on a little dancing show for you, just as I did for them.” She even says in a mock-grandiose style “Je vais danser en votre honneur.”
The point is, the dance is a ironic game Carmen is playing with José: she’s taking his words literally and acting on them, a sort of pun. Now, a director could choose that he gets into the little comedy and plays along, e.g., pretending to be a serious audience member. Or he might be flustered, not knowing how to read what she’s doing.
But what seems to La Cieca to be out of bounds is simply to abandon the idea, so plainly expressed in the text (and, it can be argued, in the formality of the music) that Carmen is doing a deliberate performance here. In fact, what could be more revolting than the idea that she should say, “Now I will show you exactly how I danced for those other men,” and then commence to dry-humping José’s leg?
Ironic humor is part of Carmen’s appeal; so why should you just chuck all that out because you have Ms. Garanca available (and, so far as we can tell, unable to learn how to play castanets)?
Several problems with the above analysis:
(1) You are making a clear assumption of subtext while claiming that it is textual; subtext is ALWAYS interpretive, not given by the author/composer. You may not like the interpretation, but don’t claim that what you seek is textual. Your backpedaling at the mushy “in the formality of the music” is telling in this regard.
(2) It isn’t clear at all what you mean by “irony” which has a much more specific definition in theatre studies than you seem to throwing it around here. You also don’t even begin to explain (beyond prudery) why a lap-dance cannot be “performative” and thus, following your logic, ironic.
Richard Eyre has directed effective theatre more times than Zeffirelli has farted. If you are going to analyze the semiotics of a moment in the production, please be a bit more precise.
Well, okay, I wrote that really quickly. For “in the formality of the music” how about we try this: the music takes the form of a very simple diatonic dance tune with very regular rhythm. Bizet writes solos elsewhere in the opera that are more chromatic and irregular (e.g., the Seguidilla, the Flower Song) and these seem to be more openly emotional, or let’s say not as performative, as the dance tune Carmen is given in this scene. What I’m suggesting is that if Bizet had wanted to write sincerely emotional music in the dancing scene, he would probably have followed the same pattern of more chromaticism and less regular phrasing.
One clear textual point here is that for a few moments Carmen stops calling José “tu” and calls him “vous.” I can’t think of a serious reason why she would suddenly fall back on formality, so my conclusion is that she is being ironic.
I agree a lap-dance could be done in a performative way. However, that’s not how the dance looked to me in this production: it looked rather like a rather stiff attempt to do a sincere, non-performative non-ironic lap-dance. I would suggest that if it was the intention of the director to put this particular action in quotation marks as “performance,” he didn’t do a very good job of differentiating it from other more straightforward action.
Comparing Eyre with Zeffirelli in this context is a false dichotomy: I never said Zeffirelli did anything better or worse than Eyre. It’s also a little off the point to bring Eyre’s theater work into this, because there are plenty of superb theater directors who flounder when they take on opera, and vice versa. The skills are not directly transferable.
I agree that the text is skimpy here and certainly open to a broad variety of interpretation. However, my opinion is that Eyre’s solution for this scene was both hackneyed as a stereotyped representation of sexuality and at odds with the text. Worse than that, though, was Tommasini’s blithe dismissal of the whole issue.
One point I think we can agree on is that the castanet part is written into the score. There’s no part for drumming half-heartedly a few times on a tin pot.
Well, it’s late and I’m old but La Cieca I rather agree with you. I find the following bizarre from one who disagrees with you: “subtext is ALWAYS interpretive, not given by the author/composer”.
A great play is never merely its surface. The author of a play controls subtext; in fact great plays are often great because of the writer’s handling of subtext. The final scene of Uncle Vanya in which the terrible tragedy of Vanya and Sonia is really not spelled out and on the surface it looks as though all has been resolved and they are back to “normal” is entirely subtext. Chekov dramatizes (shows) how horrible this empty endless hopeless dreary loveless life will be. It will be worse than torture. And that both Vanya and Sonia are well aware that they are dead-alive and yet must endure for an undetermined eternity. It is so profoundly sad but it is the sense of routine and the ordinary that makes it so sad, even though Vanya weeps and Sonia has almost an aria of meaningless well meant prayer at the end.
Williams’ controls subtext totally in Streetcar where the unspoken nature of Blanche as a sexual predator and liar is revealed by small hints, despite a few speeches that confirm that impression. I don’t know a scene where a writer captures something so vivid and yet unspoken as her attempt to seduce the newspaper boy — really a matter of small feints on her part. But her entire damaged/pathetic psyche is revealed completely indirectly.
An actor may decide to play a scene with a ‘secret’, that’s a standard acting technique and it helps especially in non naturalistic plays and thus might be said to be providing a subtext the author doesn’t really suggest (one might solve one of Hamlet’s soliloquies with a secret or private adjustment, hoping to fill the speech with an indirect significance the audience may sense). But I think the commentator is mixing up acting or directorial techniques (“suppose you play it as though you have to go to he bathroom badly and he won’t let you get away”) with what playwrights, at least in a certain style, attempt to do and the best do very well.
I also agree with your astute characterization of the music and its cues. There might be many ways to handle the moment, including a teasing or slightly provocative choice but what I saw looked like a version of ‘private dancer’ without Tina Turner’s bold assertion.
superb.
Point taken. Still, Chekhov and Williams suggest the structure of their plays’ subtexts but by definition do not define (control) them; else it would be “text” wouldn’t it? And there would be no need to revisit either in the theatre. There are many different ways to interpret the subtext of Act IV of UNCLE VANYA on the page and the stage. Chekhov may be great because of his subtextual richness, but what he is doing is structuring it (as in a musical score?), not defining it.
In any event, I doubt Bizet was reading his Chekhov (or his Stanislavski) when he wrote CARMEN. Though in hindsight, and following La Cieca’s still-fuzzy (but fascinating and astute) call for irony, perhaps he _was_ lighting on the same thing.
Good going ! it may be treacherous ground as a
generalization but shouldn’t
the manners and morals of the
times the work was written, be
also taken into account . Bizet
had for his time a view of
Carmen and her world , it may not be ours and it could be he was off base but how far do you go away from the original concept ,in this case tricky at
best . What the original audience heard and saw I am sure was quite different from the Carmen we see-just in
singing style and pitch and
manner of orchestral playing alone makes it a total different Carmen .Are we after the truth in what the composer envisioned or are we just “adapting” the music to suit current taste .Can one just
imagine the uproar if the “Nightwatch” was touched up to suit modern taste , but in
music it’s a free for all under
the guise of “interpretation”.
There is this amusing exchange between Rossini
and a famous soprano who
decided to interpret on his concept “Mde. you were wonderful!!! Even I recognized
some notes I had written ”
Would be interesting if in music especially opera the
thought of serving the composer entered the picture .
Some might recall the wonderful moment when a famous conductor after an ovation for his conducting
turned like a priest to his audience and raised the score
overhead to remind them who they were applauding .
As always, you prove how much more critically interesting you can be with more space. Still, you are dodging the “irony” issue by not defining the term or at least providing an explanation for how it functions in this instance: what does it mean that “she is being ironic”? How is that different from “it is ironic”? Your recalling her vousvoiement is directly on point. But it still seems that you are conflating the character’s intentions (and self-awareness) with the moment’s dramatic irony. Are we are defining irony differently?
My comparison between Eyre and Zeff was well taken. For me, opera (and ballet) is theatre plain and simple, not a separate art form in any formal respect (except historically and socially). From the perspective of the audience, there is no difference between theatre and opera as dramatic art, just different emphases within theatrical semiosis. In the theatre Beckett is just as ‘musical’ as Strauss, who got the dichotomy wrong: drama is more than just words; it is the mode of both theatre and opera, or should I say ‘spoken theatre’ and ‘musical theatre’? Directing CARMEN is still “theatre work”. There is no “transfer” because there is no change in the fundamentals of the art form. [This is the change in perspective toward which Gelb seems to want to move, to the chagrin of the old guard.]
Was the moment indeed hackneyed _or_ stereotyped? I think you’re on more solid ground here without impotent calls for textual fidelity. The castanet part IS written in the score (I assume), but alas that doesn’t make it necessary or sacrosanct. In this case, the director changed the channel on which the sign intended by the composer was to be effected. Silly? Probably. But “being at odds with the text” does not automatically result in bad theatre. Textual fidelity is a quaint but mythic critical yardstick.
“The castanet part IS written in the score (I assume), but alas that doesn’t make it necessary or sacrosanct.”
Are you being serious or ironic here?
You sound like someone who should direct in gelb’s house.
it’s lost on you the EFFECT of the castanet and why it is called for there. I won’t bore you with that of course, the composer wanted it, but hey, who the hell is he anyway? The meat to feed off to show the world the great talents feeding like parasites on someone else’s creation deciding willy nilly what’s necessary or not.
“Textual fidelity is a quaint but mythic critical yardstick.”
You are the illustration of that exactly.
Well, as I see it there are two kinds of “being at odds with the text,” the intentional and the unintentional. For the moment, I’ll confine myself to Tommasini’s take on the scene in question. He writes
No, this is not “what is really going on here,” or at least it is not by a long shot the only dramatic action consistent with the text. Now I’m veering into opinion here, but I think playing this scene as a heavy, carnal seduction is a particularly uninteresting dramatic choice because it is so familiar. (That’s perhaps why Tommasini mistakenly or at least reductively thinks seduction is “what is really going on.”)
Particularly with so familiar a work, I think it’s important to try to find a novel approach to using the text. If we are satisfied with only one interpretation, then there really is no need for new productions, new musical preparation, or even new singers: we can just stay home and listen to our recordings and watch our DVDs.
One thing that vexed me at the time was that the castanet part was played, but only the most meager and unconvincing gesture was made toward making it diegetic. (There are very clear indications in the score that the castanets, Carmen’s singing and the offstage trumpets are all diegetic elements.) The Eyre/Wheeldon solution seemed particularly weak since the supposed onstage source of the castanet sound, the drumming on the tin pot, ceased early on — but the clicking continued. If there was some meaning attached to this midstream shift from diegetic to extra-diegetic, I sure didn’t grasp it. What it seemed like was just sloppiness or ignorance. (That Eyre committed the classic blunder in Act 1 of having the cigarette girls enter from the factory instead of arriving from various directions after a midday meal further suggests that he didn’t delve very far into the text.)
I’m interested in where and how in the score does Bizet “clearly [indicate] that the castanets, Carmen’s singing and the offstage trumpets are all diegetic [sic] elements.” Evidence would be useful for you analysis to be convincing. Certainly the style of theatre prevalent when Bizet created the score would suggest so, but where are these clear indications? In stage directions? Is there not a formal disticntion between a stage direction and “dialogue”?
Second, you co-opt the term “diegetic” from film studies and this belies a very interesting take about your conception of opera or musical theatre as cinematic rather than as theatrical. Musical theatre and opera’s co-optation of this terminology mirrors film studies co-optation of narrative theory. The use of the terminology treats both film and musical theatre as narrative rather than performance.
In the crux under consideration, the performed moment in this prodution, let me propose it’s narrative equivalent: “… as if she were playing castanets.”
But your analysis here relies on a telling assumption: “Particularly with so familiar a work …” Familiar to whom? Are you suggesting that a director must direct a work so as to assume that the audience has already seen it, indeed is already familiar with it. No wonder you keep pleading for more irony. On the one hand La Cieca mocks regie-direction and on the other pleads for “a novel approach.” Which is it?
I haven’t seen this Carmen, but Richard Eyre’s Traviata at Covent Garden is traditional ‘culinary’ kitsch (not far off Zeffirelli) with relatively tasteful sets and frocks. And the Jose-kills-Carmen/Escamillo kills bull tableau at the end of the Eyre’s Carmen sounds tooth-gratingly banal (and lacking in irony).
In general, I would say modern Carmens DO need more irony. That 1967 Karajan DVD might be cheesy as hell, but you gotta love Grace’s sang froid.
Along the same lines, the NEW YORKER listings of 2/1 issue make reference to:
“excellent singing from… Marcello Giordani and James Morris” in BOCCANEGRA
“The impressive Jose Cura” in STIFELIO
“Yet I was fascinated by his larger point”….. is what our questionable fellow from the palid times writes.
It is an opera tommy,notice in operas that boasts ballet and dance…? It is the corp de ballet that dances them, if lucky, with visiting guest artists as leads.
Professional? I could give two flicks of a lamb’s tail to see an opera singer truly dance anything and then NOT sing it well.
The dietrich reference lives and dies with Mattila at the tuxedo. ntohing oozed sex appeal better than Marlene. and sorry, I am in the minority that does not find Ms. Mattila remotely successful in Salome’s dance of the seven veils. didn’t work for me at all.
Stevens was admired for her Carmen, hardly set the standard and was reveled and exploited in it by a company taking advantage of her movie star status. I found her a freezing carmen with a german approach but a fluid and beautiful real mezzo.
Miss Borodina, for my taste, is the absolute correct, plummy rich sound needed for this very difficult role. Miss Garanca, sings everything angry, biting, the legato is supported by glass chards. Don’t really examine closely or you will get cut. All music from her is this way. She makes a figure like Waltraud Meir, with BLUE eyes yet, this most smoldering of spanish enigmas is brought to life. I cared not a dime she gets murdered at the end. Never thought I could say that, as I usually care because of the music. Didn’t work for me.
With the equally blue eyed or so it seemed, Borodina, I did what I am supposed to, interesting articles in the lame paper of employment, I LISTENED to the great singing. Altho it is tinged a bit ala’Bolshoi it was a pleasure to hear the right weight given the phrases, and a feeling of latin fire.
Curiously, It remains and is a very french rendering by an obviously french Bizet mind of a Spanish woman, and as such uses liberally, and sometimes too much to my ear, the rhythms associated “back in the day” with Spain and the Spanish people. With the right mezzo it is a very compelling rendering of an endlessly fascinating woman.
I saw nothing but anger and no opulence in the first Carmen, and nothing but rich “opulence” in the latter.
Eyre is yet another “director” who doesn’t begin to understand the medium and yet gets hired by a house more eager to do broadway than real opera. Like Dessay, this house seems to be embarrassed by the real opera.
well thought out answer btw to La Cieca. Not so blind at all.
There is no formal aesthetic difference between the media of opera and theatre. Indeed, if opera is a medium for anything, please define what you think it is a medium for. Eyre and Gelb have it right.
There is no such thing as “the real opera”; it’s a figment of your imagination, a projection of your queer desire.
“There is no formal aesthetic difference between the media of opera and theatre. Indeed, if opera is a medium for anything, please define what you think it is a medium for. Eyre and Gelb have it right.
There is no such thing as “the real opera”; it’s a figment of your imagination, a projection of your queer desire.”
How cute, someone left the stencils box open and you are playing.
You jest at scars that never felt a wound.
Not surprising you think Gelb and Eyre got it right.
Define your terms, what is medium to you?
What is theater to you? Olivier and Guilgud “sang” their shakespeare, but it was not required,however well done.
What is opera to you? This should be fun.
You try to inflame with that clumsy “queer desire”?
Cyrano would have had a field day with you. Really.
I am not surprised you don’t think real opera exists, being a disciple of Eyre/Gelb.
Wither wilst thy answer come, and wilt I find it of import when it doth arrive?
Cyrano? Really? Which? Rostand’s confection or the ‘real” one? Both were bottoms; I am not interested.
I am being rather clear: An artistic medium (by definition) is a conduit for SOMETHING; in the case of both theatre and opera, it is a conduit for drama (though I am well aware that some [most?] consider opera to be a conduit for music or some post-Wagnerian hybrid. I don’t. Theatre and opera are the exact same art form with different semiotic emphases.
As for “getting it right” … I mean, Gelb “gets” the only way that opera can proceed in the artistic culture in which we live, and even so he might fail. I do not mean to imply that there is a “right” way to produce any given opera (or any moment in any given opera, as do some). Theatre (including opera, which is just a style of musical theatre — gasp!) is an allographic (two-stage) and collaborative art. With some others, I agree that Bizet is more creative than Gelb, Eyre and Garanca, who merely interpret, but he is also dependent on them (as well as an audience that he never wrote for) if his art is to live.
No, actually, I am not trying to inflame. I am not referring to your personal desires (which are probably quite similar to my own given this site’s name, but who’s to say?). Rather, I am referring to some pretty standard queer theory that posits that your desire for “real opera” stems from your subject position. [Cue Beavis and Butthead ... and Cyrano if you must].
Of his recent review of Carmen :
Before the performance a company spokesman announced from the stage that both Ms. Borodina and the evening’s Don José, the American tenor Brandon Jovanovich (who had made his Met debut in the role on Jan. 27), were grappling with colds and would sing, though they asked for the audience’s understanding.
Not much indulgence was required. Mr. Jovanovich, just 29, has a strong, rich-textured and expressive voice. Except for a rough vocal patch now and then, he made a dashing, impulsive and, finally, pitiably distraught Don José. Though Ms. Borodina seemed a little short of breath at first, she soon warmed up and sounded terrific. Her smoldering voice is ideal for Carmen.
Mr. Tommasini lied or at least sensationalized the article about Jovanovich’s age by 10 years. For Proof all he had to do was have his fact checker read this annuncia via playbill, which took me 30 seconds-
http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/6314.html
thanks for clearing that up. I saw Jovanovich here in October and thought he must have had a very hard life… He looks good, but not for 29 years.
Aw, you guys have gone and tarnished Tony T’s strapping chicken fantasy!
He also refers to “the wholesome Don José”, not seeming to know or care that Jose was reduced to his current rank for having committed murder previously.
Thanks, Nerva, for mentioning that yet again–it can’t be mentioned too often. If Carmen is reduced to being just a Victorian moral lesson about an innocent young boy destroyed by the big bad vamp for her own amusement, then it ceases to exist as the story Merimee, Bizet and his librettists intended. Yes the story was cleaned up a bit in getting it ready for the Parisian stage, but the central facts remained–Jose killed a man in a squabble over the outcome of a tennis match. He has a very short fuse and deep-seated insecurities.
The central fact of the opera is that Carmen, who will read in the cards that death is the fate first for her and then for Jose, and who may have read those cards before, knows what’s going to happen and chooses THE man to make it happen, unconsciously or maybe even consciously on some level. That is a far more interesting, dramatic and significant story than gypsy seductress corrupts school boy.
And, once again, as was pointed out last time this topic came up, there is no reference to Jose’s having committed a murder anywhere in the libretto of Carmen. In fact, one could argue that it’s a piece of information that Bizet, Meilhac and Halevy CHOSE to excise from the Merimee original.
Groundhog day…
One of te better touchs in Eyre’s staging was having Jose give a long l;ingering look at Carmen in Act Three when she first mentions him killing her, as iof to say: how did she know about my past?
Merimee was well enough known on its own and in stage adaptations, it seems to me, for Jose’s past to be relevant without explicit mention.
At all events, “wholesome” is not the word that comes to my mind, even if the tenor is “29″ and handsome.
‘Everyone knows this bit, we don’t need to put this in the opera’
That’s not how people write things.
This is absolutely not true. In the libretto for the original opera comique version of Carmen (as reflected in the complete works of Meilhac and Halevy, as well as in the recent critical edition of the opera by Robert Didion), Don Jose and Zuniga have a dialogue exchange in between the children’s chorus and the next number (“La cloche a sonne”).
In a passage lifted straight from Merimee, Jose tells Zuniga about the circumstances of his exile from Navarre: “j’aimais trop jouer a la paume . . . Un jour que j’avais gagne, un gars de l’Alava me chercha querelle; j’eus encore l’avantage, mais cela m’obligea de quitter le pays.”
Whether this detail was excised from the Guiraud recitatives and editions based thereon is something I have not looked up. But absolutely not true that it was excised by Bizet and his librettists.
Groundhog day once more… as was previously pointed out, that exchange is not explicit and could mean any number of things.
Ah, meaning. Imagine an interpretive art that can bear interpretation and not adherence to some mythic subtextual, supertextual, or textual fidelity. Suppressing castanets and previous murders, adding prurient lap-dancing! Oh my! What might happen to the cherished STYLE of theatre if we let these things continue?! Did anyone create an Hernani-like riot and stand up and stop the performance on not hearing those fucking castanets?!
We only fight like this because the stakes are so low. Or are they?
100% agreement with that statement here. For operas based on actual books or theatre works, reading those works provides an interesting background. But the operas should be interpreted based on the libretto alone. A major part of the work that the librettist and composer do is precisely picking, choosing and adapting the source of their inspiration to create a new work of their own. Plots, locales, motivations, timing, and endings can and are often changed. New characters are created and others eliminated.
Comparing with the original sources provides an interesting way to see what the librettist and composer had truly in mind, what was it that caught their imagination. One can even judge their ability to create a workable product.
With Carmen, we have two different works to enjoy or dislike: the opera by Bizet and the novel by Merimee. Any similarities are almost coincidental.
Amen, amerjacquino! Take the common topic when living composers talk about some Opera they have created, or are about to compose. If it derives from a source be it play or book, it always is ‘What had to GOING TO HAVE TO BE CUT AND LEFT OUT OUT? …from the original source material through to the finished opera product. Knowing full well that it can create development problems and holes, unless other modification or changes of emphasis , even to characters’ make-up are made. The problem always happens today…..and it did, back in Bizet’s time.
And where does it say in the libretto that Carmen plays castanets. I thought the point is that she can’ find her castanets and breaks a plate to make a similar sound – or is that just directors’ inventing stuff?
When this topic came up before I posted the following (which I have edited heavily) late in another thread entirely — the discussion between just four or so of checkers in late at night was about the adaptations of Eugene Onegin, Werther and Carmen, all popular works of fiction first. About Carmen I wrote:
… Don Jose is indicted in the eyes of those posting because he killed someone in a fight before coming to Seville.
But first things first: Carmen is married — so we must of course have her hubby Garcia in the opera at least as a mute. Garcia is a vicious criminal but so is Carmen, he whores her out with her permission to abet his criminal enterprises and in fact she is working in the cigarette factory so as to let Garcia and his band in to steal the merchandise and money.
In the fight, which she provokes, she carves x’s all over her opponent’s face just for the hell of it. So if we must use part three of Merimee’s so-so but in its time shocking novella rather than the opera’s libretto and most importantly the opera’s music we have to see Carmen’s victim, horribly scarred and wounded. And that’s why Carmen is arrested in the story not for being naughty or insolent as in the opera.
Of course, later, Carmen flirts with a picador, a bit player in the bull ring. No matador (the star) would look at her, Merimee makes it clear that she is filthy, a slut. Matadors had eyes for great ladies, married and not, who they conquered as they did the bulls. So in the opera therefore we must demote Escamillo, change his name to Lucas and do away with the Toreador Song, the crowd’s acclaim and his grand entrance with Carmen in act four.
Instead of dancing and singing, Carmen cooks a savory pepper soup in the story and that’s how we must start act two, with maybe an ensemble of sneezing and retching that perhaps Herr Oeser could cook up…
Bizet initially seems to have wanted to preserve more of the louche atmosphere of Merimee (and by the way, Don Jose is garroted by the police, not executed by firing squad, he is too low rent to waste the bullets on). But even Bizet saw that the appalling people who figure briefly in Merimee’s pseudo-autobiographical recounting of probably fictional adventures in Spain and quasi-anthropological ‘research’ into roma or gypsy people — all of it made up and some taken from Pushkin’s the Gypsy — had to be changed for an entertainment.
Carmen needed to be beguiling, a flirt, a charmer, high spirited and perhaps free spirited but not a common whore and criminal, and that’s how the music characterizes her. In fact she’s rather taken with Don Jose on sight and shrugs off Zuniga as well as Escamillo (at first) both of whom would be more advantageous to her than a solider who has just been demoted and served time in jail.
She is not clearly a member of a criminal enterprise though she is out of work, rather the two smugglers use her and her gal pals (who don’t exist in the novella, I guess we need to cut them, but then only one of the smugglers is mentioned in the novella, he is in a stretch of about two hundred words) as a way of distracting (rather than killing) the border guards.
She seduces Jose into coming along, not as a bandit but as her lover and a free spirit — free as she is — la liberte as she and all sing at the end of act two.
And what about the opera’s Jose? Well the first person to appear is his intended from the country, Micaela — a total invention for the opera. That she feels secure in Jose’s love is why she has made the difficult and dangerous journey. He pointedly ignores Carmen because he loves Micaela and when she returns he is thrilled to see her. Micaela signals to the audience that Jose is a ‘good boy’ in the opera — even if like a lot of people who leave the country for a big city he is leaving in part a checkered past.
Bizet of course understands that Carmen’s allure is sexual at first — that’s why he gives her two crucial dances in act one. The rhythms of both Habinera (stolen from Yradier after Bizet tore up his 18th draft) and Sequedilla have an explicitly sexual implication in the music — BUT — there is that flower that Carmen tosses at Jose, a symbol of love chained to sex (fate motive). A chain that proves impossible to break in the opera, and often in life. The chain makes neither Carmen nor Jose a nut or vicious, when it binds two people that becomes their destiny, which is what Tchaikovsky felt immediately when he saw Carmen during its first run and felt immediately the urge to write an opera about ‘fated’ love that ends in spiritual not physical death (Onegin, Tchaikovsky in a letter refers to this as ‘fatum’).
What are we to make of Jose? Well, his first singing is the really sweet and innocent duet with Micaela. Then there is a passionate not violent outburst in response to Carmen. Then he takes a fall for her (literally). Then in act two, offstage, we can hear him sing an innocent tune in time honored light opera style. He enters and is aroused by Carmen — interrupted by the recall — fights with her — a moment of anger in response to her sadistic goading.
And then there is the marvel of the Flower Song, especially at bar 34, where on the second beat of the bar after a pause, on the high A flat Jose begins a heartbreaking descending scale, related to the fate motive magically accompanied by French horn, clarinet harp and light strings. It is as intense a sound of longing, of need as exists in romantic opera and it is out of that the great phrase to the high B flat comes — the high note doesn’t end the aria but stops it for a magical second as Jose, his spirit spent, can barely utter the crucial words (pp, a piacere) “Carmen je t’aime”.
Even in the last act he pleads with Carmen, long before he threatens her and she could easily have left with him and run away at the first opportunity. But she wants that penetration, it is the last penetration she will get — and she gets it from the only man she has loved, even though it is his knife that penetrates her and she has done the most devastating thing, killed love in herself.
I think the opera’s greatness despite the Comique trappings that intrude now and then is that is touches on something profound and real in human experience and does so through the most immediate and powerful medium, music created by a genius.
And this is today’s thought: the difference between a play and and opera is always the music. Music dramatizes (it doesn’t merely accompany or mood set) which is what makes opera, opera. Music articulates and deepens character and can contradict the words and change the intent of what a character is saying when s/he is singing it. To be indifferent to that or unaware of it or dismissive of it is to hate opera. And many people do, finding the music annoying and wishing to make it irrelevant. But here one thinks, the feeling is for the primacy of the music (and the evil nature of those who are not overwhelmed by poor Madame Tebaldi).
Though I can’t support the opinion with MrsJC’s eloquence, I agree. The opera, to me, is about two people getting in over their heads. If Jose is a psycho from the start (or if, as in some performances, Carmen is coldly controlled throughout), the movement from the early lightness of tone to the darkness (and, to me, moving for all its craziness) of Jose’s final line loses its meaning. Jose is weak–hence stupidly falls for Carmen’s wiles at the end of the first act–and Carmen is witty and charming, for all her annoying and even criminal qualities; that’s what makes them both human, therefore both capable of being ruined by parts of themselves out of their own control; so that their tragedy really is one, rather than a case study. Anyway, that’s my take on the opera’s characters.
But MrsJC, you haven’t seen Francesca Zambello’s gripping production in London. It’s great insight into Don Jose’s character is that he can abseil.
Quite a good treatise on the subject of Carmen .
many only go to Carmen to
hear the arias and to note if Carmen wiggles enough to bring on sexual passion.One wonders
should the opera be performed as the” appalling” low life they were or the sanitized version
of a Spanish seductress singing
memorable tunes , The music
implies through the” motif” nothing but tragedy. As a play
it would
come off quite squalid and
probably not hold the boards-
with the music it is a tolerable
story of lives governed by the
3 Fs’ – Feeding , fighting f**king and being sung more presentable
to a refined opera audience
who look down on such goings on ,except when it is set to music .
Essentially MJC’s overview of of Bizet’s heroine and her attendants is the best thing I have read on the subject since Mina Stein Kirstein Curtiss’s appraisal of the opera in ‘Bizet and His World’. She went so far as to say
the opera was an allegory on ALL heterosexual passion. She was persuasive.
I AM Mina Stein Kirstein Curtiss!!! How did you guess, Jack?
“And this is today’s thought: the difference between a play and and opera is always the music. Music dramatizes (it doesn’t merely accompany or mood set) which is what makes opera, opera. Music articulates and deepens character and can contradict the words and change the intent of what a character is saying when s/he is singing it. To be indifferent to that or unaware of it or dismissive of it is to hate opera. And many people do, finding the music annoying and wishing to make it irrelevant. But here one thinks, the feeling is for the primacy of the music (and the evil nature of those who are not overwhelmed by poor Madame Tebaldi).”
First, this smacks of an “America, love it or leave it” kind of thing, reminiscent of the Bush years. “HERE, one thinks, is for the primacy of the music.” Bullshit! There are many ways to view the arts.
Your definition is incorrect, though buttressed by centuries of cultural and aesthetic politics. Opera is an historical and cultural _style_ of theatre, like Kabuki … it is not it’s own art form. It has no constituent properties that distinguish it from ‘theatre’; it just uses the media of theatre by different means. Certainly it has effects that cannot be achieved without the predominance of music, though “contradicting the words” is not one of them; I can contradict words onstage without the use of scored music through the complexity of paralinguisitic signs or a host of other semiotic devices. Truly, the only thing that opera is especially good at, relative to other theatrical styles (but not excluding their ability) is the mimetic depiction of simultaneity, as in duets, trios, and choruses and the like. On the other hand, the amount of acculturation necessary to appreciate the style (like Kabuki) make it a rather effete and undemocratic activity at present. This, combined with the fact that there are so few new operas, even further suggests that it is a a style of theatre rather than an aesthetic form (such as painting, sculpture, music, theatre, or cuisine).
My assumptions, however, do not make me a “hater” of opera … love or leave it.
Totally off topic–Alessandra Marc will return to New York in recital tomorrow evening. Has she sung anywhere lately, has anyone heard her or know of her current vocal estate?
The outdated website bio is a model of a certain kind:
http://www.alessandramarc.com/Updated/bio.htm
The schedule is less a matter of fantasy:
http://www.alessandramarc.com/Updated/schedule.htm
I love this line:
“Alessandra Marc disposes of a rich opera repertoire.”
By the way: How old Alessandra Marc? I assume early 50s.
she is also not coming on invitation from Carnegie Hall but by some other outfit who hired the hall. I didn’t know she is still singing and thought she had retired. Well then again if you look at her schedule she basically IS retired.
Her Elektra was no match for that of the Great Amy.
Leaving aside the current production of Carmen, I wonder if Tommasini didn’t miss the larger point raised by Alastair Macaulay.
Tommasini quotes Macaulay,
“Much of the best choreography helps us to hear the music better. I ask the same of opera direction.”
and then blithely continues in the next paragraph with:
“The idea of opera singers moving choreographically is tantalizing.”
Unless I misunderstood Mr. Macaulay’s point ( and Mutti’s point in the previously mentioned Opera News interview) I don’t think he meant that dance should inform opera… but rather the MUSIC should inform the stage direction.
Returning to the present production of Carmen. It wasn’t the missing castanets that bothered me, but I didn’t hear “rolling in the hay” music by Bizet in the final scene of this production. The tension in the music would better have been served by the traditional “stand off” – less coreography, true, but more drama true to the music.
The key word is INFORM, not “dictate”. The music must be true to the drama, not vice versa. [I realize that this is heresy here; that's why I persist.] We all need to read Wagner, not just listen to him (or fall for that enigmatic Straussian bullshit). “Drama” is not something painted on by the stage director. It is hard-wired (subtext and all, yes) into the score-libretto (script), which can be interpreted to foreground whatever the producer wishes. There is no correct way to direct (an) opera! If you don’t like the interpretation, do say so, but not with an authoritative gesture to the way it “should” be done, rather to what it does, doesn’t, or should mean.
“That is a far more interesting, dramatic and significant story than gypsy seductress corrupts school boy.”
Well put!
Amer seems to wish to strip DJ of a problematic character of his own. Murder? Well, maybe not but one certainly does not have to flee the region for a shoving match. Certainly DJ has some issues, even if it is only in response to another’s seeking to quarrel.
Carmen herself is antagonistic, from her first act fight to her teasing of the guard squadron to her assault on DJ’s sensibilities. After she has reduced him to obsession, she is antagonistic in her dismissal of him for the attractive and perhaps, harder target to win over in her domineering and antagonistic way. What a challege for her!
Anyway, despite just a little hard edge to the discussion, this is really a great one, with real philosophic meaning. This is why I come back here time and time again. I hate when people get critical of the singers and slam them. Most are to be supported because everyone blows something now and then. If the voice is unsuited and failing, I think pity, rather than attack is most often the thing needed.
As far as Garanca goes, I have only seen Carmen about six times but she seemed to be just right in her interpretation of the role and I admired her dancing, jumping up on table tops, etc. (Not to mention that I love her voice.) After all, she doesn’t really get paid for that much action but can carry it off. Mattila, whether you liked her dancing or not, is also very athletic (The famous split in the intermission, which stunned Fleming, for example.) Both these singers have spent years studying, practicing and giving us their best, which, to my taste, is DAMN GOOD!
Okay – I know I posted “Groundhog Day” earlier, but this is an intriguing discussion and I have had a look at the libretto (complete with dialogue and amendments).
1. José obviously had something dodgy in his past :
Act I to Micaela (about his Mum) :
“Tu la verras! Eh bien! tu lui diras:
que son fils l’aime et la vénère
et qu’il se repent aujourd’hui.”
Act III :
“Frasquita:
?Et son ancien amoureux José, sait-on ce qu’il est devenu?
Le lieutenant?:
Il a reparu dans le village où sa mère habitait… l’ordre avait même été donné de l’arrêter, mais quand les soldats sont arrivés, José n’était plus là…”
2. Castanets :
Act II :
“Carmen:
?Où sont mes castagnettes… qu’est-ce que j’ai fait de mes castagnettes??(en riant)?C’est toi qui me les a prises, mes castagnettes?
José:
?Mais non!
Carmen (tendrement):
?Mais si, mais si… je suis sûre que c’est toi… ah! bah! en voilà des castagnettes…?(Elle casse une assiette, avec deux morceaux de faïence, se fait des castagnettes et les essaie…).”
[There is an variant where she just uses the damn things].
Having said that, it is really a question of interpretation and choices (those castanets are beginning to morph into the Tosca candles).
José has a murky past and a short temper, and Garanca has poor hand co-ordination.
(As for Matilla’s splits, they were just about OK for clowning about in the intermission, and completely and utterly out of place onstage in her period costume).
Manou,
I apologize if this is a duplicate as something just blitzed on the screen. I wrote that I appreciated your bringing the libretto but that your comparison of the castanets as becoming Tosca candles is just plain wrong.
The castanets are a part of the music and the libretto. While I agree that there are choices to be made by the director, Eyre made so many bad ones and the castanets are one. Knocking on a pisspot in place of playing or even faking the castanet section is lame.
Carmen can cover the castanets with felt fake it that way or she can take a fifty dollar private with a teacher to teach her once how to make a trill and then let the orchestra follow. No, we get the pisspot instead which is distracting.
The castanet bit is part of a singer’s musicianship. I agree that one really give a rat’s ass of a singer can dance in Carmen. What Garanca does is not dancing anyway.
Semidiotic made a few good points but the great logic he brings is undone at times by his own leanings. To refer to naysayers as the “the old guard” is simly so wrong. I am the new generation baby! In my early thirties with a love for opera and the history behind it. This website gets gassy at times but it does have a didactic effect
through the fog. Semidiotic’s defense of Eyre is weird, of Gelb pathetic.
I agree about the spilts that Mattila did were sad but did you check out her more recent foray? She was actually compelling in her movement.
I am not advocating doing away with the castanets, which are as you say in the score. Surely someone in the pit can supply them (with or without having to wear the regulation spotty dress with the frills) if the Carmen can’t do them. My point was that in the original libretto she breaks a plate and uses that as a substitute, so the pot is not that far fetched (if admittedly a bit irritating).
Not sure what you mean by Mattila’s recent foray – Tosca??
The first opera I ever saw was Marilyn Horne as Carmen. I’ll never forget her attempting to improvise the lost castanets by breaking a dish and clacking the shards together. Hers was a sassy little Carmen, impulsive and capable of really bad ideas.
No E, you SAW Horne do this live? Her Carmen with Bernstein was the first opera I ever heard.
I also SAW the Horne and Bernstein Carmen (it doesn’t make you THAT old), and Horne was fine, but there’s no doubt that the dancing star (as well as the musical star) of the show was Bernstein. . .
Oh, I didn’t intend a comment on anyone’s age. I meant: how I ENVY you as I wish I had seen Horne live in the role (or really, in ANY role).
Taken to the ‘next authenic degree’ : every opera production that allows ‘cuts’ to the musical score, or if any music is found to be transposed, for the singers performing it……
Let’s proclaim new edicts: that the conductor, the offending singers and the stage director be hung, drawn and quartered. Happy???!!
I like the way you think, Harry. While we’re at it, can we take out the General Manager, the casting Department, and that smart-aleck usher who wouldn’t help me find my Juicy Fruit?
Betsy Ann – not only the casting department, but the castanetting department too.
Oh!BESTY-ANN-BOBOLINK You bring back a story a friend who was an usher at a real live performance of Carmen (deja -vu) of all things, told me. He related how an old couple from a rural area hit town and decided to see an opera for the first time in their lives. At the end of it,he noticed them frantically searching nder their seats. It turned out some other patron had taken the woman’s program with them. This old lady (rather unlady-like!) exclaimed “Some fucking bastard has pinched meh program”. Knowing that she had intended showing it to ‘the folks back home’ the ushers tried to get another to replace it- but found they were ‘sold out’.
To make amends they divised a plan. Invited the old couple up to the ‘Green Room where all the artists were’ On hearing the story, the stars had the old folks photograph taken- with them- then developed -then wrote their own personal best wishes on the backs of the photos.. Later, off went the old couple after drinks – with something special to show the folks back home what ‘Opera is all about’.
That is what is called ‘helpful service by house staff’.
Shoutay, Manou.
Sorry; I mean “touche.” DAMN this lysdexia.
I guess this will make me REALLY old: I saw Horne’s Carmen in Boston in the late 60′s before her Met debut. And yes, she was quite sassy. It was a production that had Carmen lying on a bed while singing the Seguidilla. Don’t ask why there was a bed in the middle of Pastia’s place. It was a Sarah Caldwell production.
Dialogue in the Comique version, Act 1:
Le lieutenant: Vous êtes Navarrais?
José: Et vieux chrétien. Don José Lizzarabengoa, ç’est mon nom… On voulait que je fusse d’église, et l’on m’a fait étudier. Mais je ne profitais guère, j’aimais trop jouer à la paume… Un jour que j’avais gagné, un gars de l’Alava me chercha querelle; j’eus encore l’avantage, mais cela m’obligea de quitter le pays. Je me fis soldat! Je n’avais plus mon père; ma mère me suivit et vint s’établir à dix lieues de Séville… avec la petite Micaëla… c’est une orpheline que ma mère a recueillie, et qui n’a pas voulu se séparer d’elle…
Two points here are: a) that “j’eus encore l’avantage” might mean homicide and it might mean something as comparatively venial as bloodying the nose of the son of some local bigwig. Either way, he’d be “obliged to leave the country.”
and b) we don’t know how much of this dialogue even made it to the first performance of the work.
So the question is, do we base a characterization on a passing allusion in dialogue to an event that the audience may or may not have known from reading their Merimee, or do we take the text we are actually given to perform and draw our conclusions from that?
My answer to the question would be that the existing text supports a wide variety of characterizations of Don José, easily including Alagna’s sympathetic “simple country boy” who falls into a situation way over his head. That Alagna sees the character one way does not mean that another singer or another director might have a much darker interpretation of the facts.
So let me get this “straight” — Here you’re arguing that DJ’s character/objective is open to interpretation by Eyre/Alagna because of the audience’s lack of familiarity with the opera’s sources, and above you are arguing that Eyre/Garanca’s interpretation for Carmen’s character/objective is “lame” or “banal” because of the audience’s familiarity with the opera. Why is there interpretive latitude in the first instance and not in the second? Why on the one hand are you constantly seeking after truth in the score/text (dialogue or stage direction) and on the other in the supposed irony of the situation, which you seem to argue is based on the audience’s supposed familiarity with the work rather than anything contained within the work itself.
At the same time, you have difficulty understanding the shift from a mimetic beating on a pan to an extra-diegetic musical sign that evokes castanets that Carmen isn’t actually playing because she couldn’t find them. You haven’t yet commented on the “fact” that the physical castanets aren’t in the scene … in which case, how can they be mimetic (diegetic, following your terminology)?
There’s quite a slip between “[lack of] familiarity with the opera’s sources” and “familiarity with the opera”, among other things.
Well, no. I am arguing that the source material is not the text. The authors of the text (that is, the librettist and the composer) chose what elements to take from the source material and rejected others. So the material that was not brought over into the text is essentially irrelevant.
The breadth of interpretation has nothing to do with ignorance of the source materials, but rather their lack of relevance. The basis of any kind of interpretation, I continue to believe, is the text. Even when that text is treated freely or openly contradicted, the interpretation should be an informed reaction to the text.
The familiarity I am talking about is not so much of the work itself but rather the repeated experiencing of the work within a narrow range of interpretation, and worse, that these “interpretations” are not direct responses to the text but rather copies of (copies of copies of…) some other director or performer’s response. For example, we have all seen many times over the bit where Carmen, freed from her bondage in Act 1, twirls the rope about in time to the music as she sings the reprise of the Seguidilla. At one time this was a fresh response to the text. Now it’s a cliche practically devoid of meaning.
It’s imaginable that even such a hoary piece of staging could be jolted back to life by a performer with a strong, distinctive personality and a certain physical dexterity. Or a meticulous director might work out some subtly timed variation on the old rope dance, a sort response to the existing “expected” business. But I didn’t find that Garanca and Eyre managed any sort of subtle variation and they did little innovation in the way of new responses to the text: in other words, Garanca’s performance amounted to a collage of bits of other singers’ Carmens rather than (as I would have wanted to see) a fresh response to the text.
The bit about Carmen’s not finding the castanets might be relevant if this production indicated in any way that she looked for them. She didn’t. And I begin to get the feeling you didn’t see the Eyre production of Carmen and so any further back and forth about issues specific to this production doesn’t seem to have much point.
(1) Of course the source material is not the text. That’s hardly to be argued. But subtext can be based on source material and inform interpretation; all characters have an “inner life” developed from their past experience. All the while the audience need know nothing about the source material. But we agree about this. What we don’t agree about is your reliance on the converse argument, that the audience HAS TO KNOW the opera (either in its score or through repeated performances) and a director must direct irony that doesn’t exist. You are suggesting that a new production must take into account the history of its previous productions (though not the source material) in order to generate significant meaning. I find that both elitist and blatantly false.
(2) It is certainly not devoid of meaning for most of the audience who have not seen the opera before … Gelb’s audience, I might add, or the audience that he seeks to develop.
(3) “Garanca’s performance amounted to a collage of bits of other singers’ Carmens rather than (as I would have wanted to see) a fresh response to the text.” I find this assertion unprovable and silly. Using this standard, you can nullify any performance by saying, “Well, you know she was standing at this moment and that’s where XXX stood …” You can’t dissect a performance into as may little pieces that suit your level of vitriol about the things you hate.
No, of course I haven’t seen the production, which is why I rely on your criticism here being better informed and better written. That’s what criticism is for. If I had seen it, I would probably not need to care what you think.
Actually I find this very interesting in the general sense. I never said the audience HAS TO KNOW the opera. My point is that a large portion of the audience at a major opera house and for a standard opera is going to be people who do in fact know the opera through repeated exposure to it. As such, it is laid upon the director and performers to make the opera interesting and fresh for this large portion of the audience. This point is just as true for the re-creators of a Broadway musical revival or a production of a familiar classic drama.
This same realization of the work needs to be meaningful and attractive to newcomers to the piece as well. That’s a tall order. But if the direction and the performances are fresh responses to the text, that can go a long way toward satisfying both the veterans and the newbies.
Or, to exemplify. The rose in the teeth is a camp cliche and therefore lacking in meaning to the the audience who have seen Carmen repeatedly. This gesture may or may not have meaning for a naive audience. So I think it’s a director’s job to find something different to express whatever was meant to be expressed by “rose in the teeth” that communicates to both audiences.
What proportion of the actual audience do you think has seen the opera before (and how many with such frequency so as to know the sources, the stage directions, the six previous productions at the MET, and Ruth Berghaus’s middle name)? And where is your evidence for this? I am sorry, really, I just can’t bear the assumptions without evidence.
I understand your position, certainly a valid one (about multiple audiences), but I submit that you need to adjust your criticism for this duality (multiplicity?). And you need to specify the composition of the audience. You can’t just analyze for _your_ audience and not the majoritarian audience. [I note that you carefully use the the phrase 'large portion' rather than majority or even economic majority.]
This is Gelb’s problem: nurturing audiences that are being introduced to the repertory, not we queens seeing our Nth CARMEN. [I'm waiting for Kaufmann.] Sorry, we eventually all need to be replaced by newcomers who might actually enjoy the “rose in the teeth”. From an institutional perspective, the job of the director is to please the audience and have them pay money to see what’s on offer. Are these CARMEN’s not selling? Where’s that HERNANI-like riot?
For so many on here, it frequently sounds like you are so bored to death with opera in performance. In this instance, I detect a reverse nostalgia … you want something different but also something that is just as good as the first time. Sounds like too many of the men I have dated.
If you’re interested in continuing the discussion we can take it off line.
I agree that this kind of discussion is much more rewarding than some of the ‘I hate her/ I love her’ memes that can crop up.
One clarification, though- I don’t have any stake in rewriting Jose’s past, or making him ‘wholesome’ which as you say, is less interesting. What bothered me before and bothers me now is for productions and directors to be criticised for omitting character traits which aren’t actually in the text.
So, presenting a Jose who is more innocent at the start and who has fled from an ill-advised brawl rather than committing a murder is in no way contrary to the composer’s or librettists’ intentions, as illustrated by the libretto. Some seemed to be suggesting that it was.
Well, personally, armer, I think they should get rid of Micaela completely because she’s not in the Merimee book. And they should preface Otello with a scene in Venice, set to the ballet music Verdi composed for (presumably) Paris.
I saw the new Carmen prod in the HD repeat on Wed night and REALLY felt that Micaëla should die. I’ve listened to Carmen many many times, saw it once before in another prod, and know that she doesn’t. But as portrayed by Frittoli, I kept expecting to see her knife herself.
We might still find there are members of the Paris ‘Jockey Club’ around, and they may feel irked, arriving late at the Opera and thinking they missed hearing Carmen play the castenets. After all Carmen is just a ‘froggie’ opera. Since when did genuine Spanish characters start speaking French anyway?
I wish she would have (knifed herself) after Act 1 so that we wouldn’t have had to listen to her yodeling in the mountains. Like I said during the matinee audio broadcast, I could have sworn DJ’s poor sick old dying mother had hauled herself up the mountain instead just to die exposed to the elements.
Friends,
I realize this is entirely off course but I thought that in this age of less than “golden” singing it would be nice to remember the beloved Jussi Bjorling on his 99th birthday.
Tim
Off course, not at all Tim, especially when it is Jussi Bjorling. If only today, we have the same type of singers around, where just listening to the actual sheer beauty of the voice was an experience in itself.
. . . and the way he played castanets ! ! Heaven !
Like the Nutcracker Suite?
Not all taht suite, but I like it if he shaves first.