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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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)?

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?

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.

In Carmen, interesting to me was that Alagna’s performance managed to inject some of the subtext of the opera into the production, despite the direction. His DJ clearly had the devil visible under the surface, almost from the beginning. He practically dared Carmen to unleash him as he looked and smiled at her as she sang the Habanera. The killer of Mérimée might have been replaced in the libretto, but there was no question that Alagna’s mamma’s boy enjoyed a part of being so far from home.

As I watched the HD retransmission of Carmen Wed. night (the first time I’d seen the theater packed for such a repeat), I was very impressed with one thing: Garan?a’s physicality. The direction is really designed for someone who can show some leg, dance alone and in an ensemble, get up on a table, and sing while being held aloft by four studly gypsies (this last part made me gasp – how does one continue to pour out the sound while being moved around the stage, on your back, by four men?).

Now, this may not have been a Carmen for the ages, for all the already stated reasons (Garan?a’s fire is too cool; too much distraction with the pas de deux; horribly underlit, blue third act; voice too light), but it did at least attempt to create a Carmen who is realized as a physical – as well as a vocal – being. I do recognize that what was worth seeing for $22 in my local cinema would have left me underwhelmed (and pissed off) at $100 at the Met.

With Borodina assuming the role, I wondered if the direction would be tailored for her more voluptuous sensuality. On the radio, her voice might be more suited than Garan?a’s for Carmen, but I can’t imagine her inhabiting the stage in the same way. If only Garan?a channeled Borodina’s voice for the performance…

No Expert, Bernstein used the Oeser edition for that Carmen with Horne, and that meant restoring some of the dialog (I’m not aware of any recording that has ALL the dialog). The Oeser is really obscene and shoddy, as is his deformation of Hoffmann (Michael Kaye has done a wonderful restoration of that, maybe one day his final thoughts will be recorded).

About Carmen you could look up Winton Dean’s definitive deconstruction of Oeser, his many inaccuracies and his misunderstandings of Bizet’s process that fueled them. It took in some conductors including Maazel (who recorded the most ‘complete’ Oeser butchery with Moffo (!!!) and Corelli (!!!), but also Bernstein and for a moment, Karajan (on the second recording). Solti’s recording uses some Oeser readings but is reasonable on the whole and I love Troyanos’ sound there.)

Ernest Guiraud (a pal of Bizet’s who was born in New Orleans) wrote the once inescapable recitatives and supervised the first widely published score in 1877. However as I posted here the last time there was talk of this revival of Carmen there is a new critical edition, which I’ve read at the library. It returns to the autograph and also uses additional material in Bizet’s hand that made up the first night performance (in so far as that can be established with certainty). This includes cancellations of music by Bizet, which Oeser ignored, as well as simplifications of harmony and orchestrations (also in some cases ignored by Oeser). There are also changes in the various vocal lines, and some uncertain readings for the role of Carmen have been cleared up.

That Horne performance was disliked by a lot of people but I thought taken on its on terms and despite Oeser it was a lot of fun, though it was REALLY old time opera given how Jackie and Big Jim looked and behaved. I think they both did well the first season, though neither quite kept up that ease and distinction later. Some of that was Bernstein who had strange ideas and pulled tempos around but could certainly galvanize performers and the audience. I don’t think the DG recording is as good as some of the live performances were, it is acoustically odd for one thing. But I think there is an in house of the opening night that is exciting.

For now the ‘best’ authentic Carmen is the wonderful Comique version from 1950 conducted by Cluytens with the great Solange Michel, first on EMI now on Naxos (but must be imported to USA). Wonderful cast, thrilling, the (as usual) shortened dialog spoken by the singers, with wit, and Cluytens leading with wonderful brio (he made a slightly later recording of the recitative version that isn’t as good).

Bumbry/Vickers also has dialog and an odd ‘pantomime’ after the Morales scene, which is not in Oeser or the critical edition, except as an appendix — but the dialog is spoken by actors with very different voices and accents than the singers.

Goo-Goo’s recording was to be ALL editions rigged so that one could program one’s CD player to hear one or another but Goo-Goo showed up not knowing the role so they settled for the standard version, though as an appendix she does sing one of Bizet’s drafts of the Habinera (the familiar one is lifted from Yradier).

I never liked Stevens period, sorry to say (she was adored by many) but that Reiner RCA with Peerce et al is wonderfully conducted. I thought the greatest Carmen overall was Crespin though I think her commercial recording is dull and I don’t think the pirates quite capture the magic I thought she had.

Lee never did it live but I have a sneaking fondness for that disgraceful Herbie recording with truly ghastly French and much village band sonority from the conductor (though at a very high level of execution).

But the MUST HAVE is the greatest Mario Del Monaco at the Bolshoi (VAI DVD), extended excerpts with Archipova and Lisitsian (!!!). The audience becomes hysterical over Mario whose carrying on has to be seen to be believed and may not even be believable then but he does pour out sound (in Italian but occasionally forgetting and doing some bad French).

Of course you can explore Italian editions, my fave is with Pertile and Buades that causes people blocks away to call the police. And there is the Zenatello/Gay (his wife in life) final scene, which is certainly the most insane of any.