Georges Bizet's opera Carmen premiered in 1875 to popular disapproval. It was a critical failure, and Bizet died thinking so. The plot is fairly simplistic. A soldier (Jose) falls in love with a gypsy girl (Carmen). He deserts his commission and his fiancee Michaela for her and joins her band of smugglers. Carmen tires of him (or doesn't, depending on how you interpret a couple of things) and Jose becomes violently jealous of her relationship with the toreador Escamillo, ultimately killing her.
It is my favourite opera.
The first time I saw Carmen was at college when a touring company of the London City Opera came through. The performance was fantastic. The staging was beautiful. The singing and acting was incredible. Don Jose and Michaela were perfect, literally perfect. Frasquita and Mercedes were excellent. Carmen....was not.
Personally, I picture Carmen the character in her early 20s. She is old enough to know and enjoy her effect on men but still young enough that she hasn't become disillusioned and/or isn't ready to settle down. The Carmen in the LCO production looked to be in her mid-40s. Vocally she was fine, but not great, but the worst part was that she confused "sex" with "sexiness". Sinuously moving your hips while dancing? Sexy. Humping the bench in the prison scene? Not sexy. Trailing a flower along someone's cheek? Sexy. Trying to mount your boyfriend while doing so? Not sexy. In every way that she could, this Carmen came down on the side of not sexy.
This wouldn't have been as much of a problem if Don Jose and Michaela hadn't been perfect and I do mean perfect. In Act One, you couldn't help believing that Jose and Michaela were childhood sweethearts who were deeply, passionately in love with each other. You believed wholeheartedly that when Michaela was delivering messages from his mother, she was really delivering them from herself. You believed wholeheartedly that Jose was just serving out his mandatory military service and when it was over, he would go back to his village, marry Michaela, and never think of the city again. Jose didn't ever so much as look at Carmen until she smacks him with the flower. There was no reason with the performance that night that Jose would be at all attracted to Carmen, or that he would continue to look at her even after she hit him with the flower. However, Jose's performance was so good that once he was "in love" with Carmen, you believed that he was in love with Carmen. Carmen's performance was just so bad that you didn't believe the reason.
The next time I saw Carmen was in Nottingham. Carmen as a character was much better; Jose wasn't but was still quite good. I really don't remember much about that performance, so it must not have been either really terrible or really great.
The third time I saw Carmen was in Banska Bystrica two years ago, and it totally changed the way that I approach this opera. Carmen herself was physically perfect - exactly the way I picture her. Jose wasn't great. Michaela was pretty good, even though no one has ever come close to the Jose and Michaela of LCO.
The thing that made it incredible was just a little thing, but it totally changed the show. During the second half of the overture, when Carmen's theme is playing, Jose was standing at the front of the stage, facing away from the audience. Through the bars of the city gates, Carmen's funeral procession went by.
This is seriously one of the coolest things ever, and I have not stopped telling people about it since then. By having Carmen's funeral procession at the beginning, and especially by having Jose watch it go by, the whole opera becomes Jose's memory of his relationship with Carmen, rather than pretending to be the actual events. By turning it into Jose's personal flashback, any script believability problems are taken care of. Of course Jose is going to idealize his relationship with Michaela and pretend that it's more about his mother. Of course Carmen is going to be an almost caricatured temptress that cast a spell on him with the flower. It's the way Jose remembers it - must remember it - to justify his actions. It is perfect.
I have seen Carmen twice (time numbers four and five) at the State Theatre in Kosice. Both times were fine. The first time I went with Katie, and it was only the second opera she'd seen. The first had been The Magic Flute, and she was amazed at the level of story-telling in this one compared to the Mozart. The second time I went with one of the Slovak teachers. We were sitting in a box on the left side and had a perfect view of the percussion section. There was this one guy playing the triangle that was pretty cute. He had this look on his face of "I am a classically trained percussionist.....playing the triangle." It wasn't an unhappy face - more sort of resigned and wry.
The other thing about the State Theatre is their main dramatic tenor. I like his voice fine, but when he sings, he only sings out of one side of his mouth. It makes it look like he's had a stroke.
The sixth time I saw Carmen, this past week, it was done by Monumental Opera, a touring company out of Germany. It was performed at the hockey arena, so in terms of acoustics it was like when Kirsten and I saw Simon and Garfunkel at the Excel Center. Luckily we were sitting essentially straight in front of the stage, so we could hear fine (except when Michaela's microphone cut out during her first scene. Normally I object to microphones during operas, but at a hockey arena it is inevitable).
The staging was very simplistic. Most of the set pieces were chairs, with a bench in Lilas Pastias's bar and barrels in the mountains. There was a door in the back screen with steps coming down from it for certain entrances and exits, but most of the visual setting cues came from projections on the back screen. It was pretty interesting and they did some creative things with it. For example, during Michaela's song about how much his mother misses him, they showed baby/childhood pictures of Jose and the countryside where he grew up. During the tarot card scene, they showed the full moon going through an eclipse and growing larger and larger until it took up almost the whole screen. In this computer/digital age, it makes sense to do something like that to have fewer large set pieces to create, load, and unload, especially for a touring company.
I thought that the acting during the show was pretty good (Angelica disagrees with me). During the fight scene in Act One, for instance, it seemed that the girls were actually trying to kill each other (as opposed to at the State Theatre when they were more like "Oh, no, keep me back.....eh") Vocally, people were fine, except for Carmen's vowels which got very flat more often than they should have, in my opinion. Escamillo was superb: very metrosexually flamboyant and confident and perfectly on pitch and in character. The one thing that was distracting was Don Jose. He was.....well, there's no better way to say it. He was rectangular. He was a head stuck on a cube (technically, I suppose, a prism), with no neck. His voice was fine, but when he walked out to relieve the guard, the first thought that came into my mind was "No WAY is that Jose." And then he started singing Jose's part and I had to admit it. It was like if Chris Farley had been an opera singer. And half a foot shorter. There is almost no way that he could have been less physically right (in my mind) for the part. I hate to sound that shallow, and his voice was fine, and I got used to it by intermission, but ... he had no neck. And he was a cube. Or technically a prism.
So I suppose my ideal Carmen, based on the six that I've seen so far (oh, I will definitely be seeing more during my lifetime), would have the Jose and Michaela from LCO, the Escamillo from Monumentalna, any Carmen except the LCO one, the interpretation of Banska Bystrica, and the triangle player from the State Opera. And myself as either Frasquita or Mercedes, of course. Priorities must be kept. :-)
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