ARTicles vol.4 i.1: Playing at Love

In 1857 Georges Bizet was a young composer of promise; he was nineteen years old, a star student of Gounod and Halévy, a Prix de Rome winner. By October 1874, however, Bizet was well on his way to becoming a middle-aged composer of promise. His career was floundering: he had written a good deal of stage music, some of which had received high praise in some quarters: when the leader of the art-for-art’s-sake movement, the poet Théophile Gautier, heard Les Pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers), he congratulated Bizet for breaking away from “made-to-order arias, strettos, cabalettas, and all the old formulae. He follows the dramatic action from one end of a situation to the other and doesn’t cut it up into little motifs.” But Bizet had never enjoyed unequivocal success: poor libretti, ill health, and aborted projects had frustrated his ambition. Now he was hoping that his new opera Carmen would be the turning point in his career. The music rehearsals at the Opéra-Comique were starting – and there was no end of trouble.

Bizet faced strong pressure from the theatre management, and even from his own librettists, to provide a less gruesome ending; he managed to avert this threat with the aid of the two lead singers, who liked the ending as it stood. The choristers complained that the cigarette chorus was impossible – they would be unable to sing while walking around. Finally the management was so concerned that this gritty drama would antagonize spectators accustomed to more innocuous fare that it urged certain members of the public not to buy tickets. When opening night came, on 3 March 1875, the opera faced predictable charges of obscenity from conservative reviewers, and predictable applause from those who considered their taste advanced. Carmen was neither a success nor a failure, and three months later Bizet died of a heart attack, convinced that no one had understood what he was up to.

Carmen has turned out to be the most indestructible of operas. It has succeeded in any number of guises, including an Otto Preminger movie, set in the African-American South (Carmen Jones); a remarkable ballet with music arranged by Rodion Shchedrin; an eighty-minute-long reduction by Peter Brook (La Tragédie de Carmen), with only four singers. You can abridge the opera as much as you want, you can transpose it to any medium, you can even silence the singers, it still works.

The stamina of the opera probably lies in its central character: Carmen, like Falstaff and Hamlet, seems larger than the particular circumstances in which she appears. The source of power for such huge personages is hard to fathom completely, but part of it lies in the fact that Carmen, Falstaff, and Hamlet are not so much finite stage roles as pretexts for a quick-change artist to show his or her stuff. We know them as caricatures: Falstaff is fat and cracks wise; Hamlet is thin, intellectual, self-stifled; Carmen is a sex-tiger. But beyond these caricatures each shows extraordinary talent in play-acting: Falstaff and Prince Hal play out two versions of an imaginary dialogue between Prince and King; Hamlet seems qualified to give advice in acting to professional players; and Carmen too is curiously detached from the roles she chooses to play – she plays at playing a sex-tiger.

Some of the many faces of Carmen: The first Carmen, Galli-Marié; Luther Saxon and Muriel Smith in the 1943 world premiere of Carmen Jones on Broadway; poster from Carmen, a Hip Hopera with Mekhi Pfeffer and Beyoncé Knowles.

Before Carmen found an opera to dwell in, she lived in a story and in a poem. The story was published by Prosper Mérimée in 1845: the narrator is a Frenchman riding through the wildernesses of Spain to test his theory that the Battle of Munda didn’t occur where textbooks said it occurred. He joins up with a sinister traveling companion, who turns out to be the notorious outlaw José. Afterwards the narrator goes to Cordova, where he tries to make out the naked bodies of the women who bathe in the river at sunset, but it is too dark. As he smokes and stares he is joined by a woman, another notorious character, the sorceress Carmen. Later the narrator meets again with José, about to be executed for killing Carmen, and José tells his whole story, basically the plot of the opera, except that there is no Micaëla and little Escamillo – Carmen is briefly diverted by a bullfighter, but the man whom José kills in a knife duel is Carmen’s husband, an ugly thug.

Mérimée’s narrative is subtle and crafty, full of telling details. When Carmen reads the narrator’s fortune, he notices a dried chameleon among her witch-stuff, and when Carmen stabs her co-worker at the cigarette factory, José notes that she rolls her eyes like a chameleon. A chameleon she is, capable of playing a fine lady, a factory worker, a fortune-teller, the leader of a band of smugglers. Furthermore, she is an astonishing linguist, fluent in Spanish, Basque, Romany. Carmen is omniform and polyglot, because the sexual instinct is itself omniform and polyglot: sex is a tongue that we all speak. Carmen can assume any role, masculine or feminine, but she dances away from that role as soon as anyone tries to identify her with it. Far from being an odalisque, a woman who conforms to the shape of a man’s desire, Carmen takes exactly the shape you don’t want her to take; as she tells José, “Take care…When someone forbids me from doing something, that thing is as quickly done.”

Carmen’s next incarnation was as the heroine of a poem by Gautier, from a collection published in 1872, the year of the poet’s death:

Carmen is thin, a streak of black
Circles round her gypsy eye.
Her hair is dangerously black,
Her skin, a devil burned it raw.

The women say that she is ugly,
The men are mad about her flesh:
The archbishop of Toledo sings
Upon devoted knees the mass.

Her piquant, stinging ugliness
Has a grain of that sea-salt
From bitter seas where Venus rose
Naked, with a sour smell.

Gautier makes explicit what is only implicit in Mérimée: Carmen is a scruffy, sulky version of Venus herself.

Carmen is also Latin for song, and she needed an opera to find her fullest expression. Recent critics have felt strongly Carmen’s irrepressible, uncircumscribable libido, her urgency of being. In her valuable handbook on Carmen, Susan McClary writes: “Carmen proves to be a difficult force to contain, however. The desire she inspires overwhelms the narrative…. The provocative eroticism of the ‘Habañera’ makes it a kind of Pandora’s box.” But does Bizet’s music for Carmen actually spill out of every structure that might contain it? If we imagined a Carmen in which Don José sings a series of polite, tastefully passionate arias, each terminating in a neat cadence – in which Carmen declaims in a wildly sexy recitative, mocking every convention of melodic structure – then we would have a good musical equivalent of the politics of containment in gender and class. But this is the opposite of what Bizet did. From the point of view of musical formality, Carmen is the instinctive conformist, while Don José – whose music is full of asymmetrical phrases, uncertain harmonies, and crowd-displeasing special effects – is the instinctive rebel.

Why did Bizet confine Carmen to a repetitive, stanzaic discourse, to her parade of hit songs? Carl Dahlhaus thought that Bizet was illustrating the fact that Carmen “is incapable of attaining lyric urgency. Carmen can parody lyricism … but she cannot make it her own.” But Carmen’s songs don’t parody so much as quote lyricism: she isn’t improvising but performing a routine, quoting pre-existing songs. (In the case of the Habañera a literally pre-existing song, since Bizet borrowed the sinuously chromatic tune from an African-Cuban piece by Yradier.) The songs are scripted exercises in sexual compulsion – most sexy when most restrained by the bondage and discipline of stanzaic form. Carmen is Venus; Carmen is Song, and Don José (Speech) flutters half-helplessly in her wake.

Daniel Albright is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard.