Carmen
Details
In Brief
The productions by the Catalan director Calixto Bieito, the “Quentin Tarantino of the opera stage”, cut incisively into the reality of their stories, making them shockingly provocative. And what work would suit this directing style better – with its similarly crazed passions and emotions – than Georges Bizet’s French opera Carmen? The director has transplanted this opera set in 19th-century Seville to post-Franco Spain, where he depicts a savage and cruel world with a high degree of realism – and not a hint of the clichéd flamenco of folklore. Bieito’s production has been staged all over the world, and in 2021 it finally came to Hungary for everyone to enjoy here.
Parental guidance
Due to sexual content, this performance is not recommended for children younger than 16.
Events
Premiere: July 25, 2021
Synopsis
Act I
In a bustling Seville square, a girl from the countryside addresses Moralès and his fellow soldiers as they observe the crowd. She is searching for a corporal named Don José, who – as it turns out – will be arriving in the square later when the guard changes. Evading the soldiers’ flirting, she decides to come back later. José duly arrives with the new watch and learns from Moralès that a pretty girl has been looking for him. He realizes that this can only be Micaëla, the orphan girl whom his mother has been raising in the countryside. The bell of the nearby tobacco factory rings, and the men gather to admire the working girls going on their break – especially Carmen, the sensual Gypsy girl, who has every eye locked on her, except José’s. Carmen throws a flower to the corporal and hurries back to work. Micaëla returns to deliver the letter and money that José’s mother has sent to him and then departs. A fight has broken out in the factory. Shouting over each other, the cigarette girls explain to Lieutenant Zuniga that Carmen has slashed another girl’s face. José leads the accused into the square, but she refuses to say anything about the matter. Zuniga withdraws to write out the order for Carmen to be locked up. Left alone with José, the girl attempts to use her feminine allure to convince the corporal to set her free. The bewitched soldier goes ahead and releases her bonds. When Zuniga returns, Carmen shoves José and races off.
Act II
Two months later, the Gypsies and soldiers are carousing in Lillas Pastia’s tavern. Lieutenant Zuniga longingly watches Carmen dance. Suddenly the clamour of a celebratory crowd is heard from outside, and the famous toreador Escamillo arrives. His eyes linger on Carmen, who returns his gaze. Escamillo departs with the crowd, leaving Carmen alone in the tavern with her girlfriends Frasquita and Mercédès. Two smugglers – Dancaïre and Remendado – secretly arrive at the tavern in order to ask the girls to help pull off their next caper. Carmen, however, has no desire to go with the smugglers, as José, her new love, is being released that day from the prison where he had been locked up since Carmen’s escape. The corporal’s singing is heard in the distance, and the smugglers stand aside in order to leave Carmen alone with him. The Gypsy girl starts to dance for him, but soon a bugle is heard sounding the call to quarters. José has to head for the barracks if he wishes to avoid further trouble. Carmen grows furious, and José’s protestations of love are not enough for her: she wants him to desert and choose the free life of the smugglers. José rejects this idea, and Carmen tells him everything is over between them. Suddenly, there is hammering at the door: it is Zuniga, who has returned for Carmen. The two men set on each other, and are pulled apart by Dancaïre and Remendado. José now has no choice but to join Carmen and the smugglers.
Act III
The band of smugglers are camped out alongside a mountain road. Carmen and José argue: she finds his constant jealousy aggravating. Frasquita and Mercédès draw cards to read their fortunes: the cards prophesy a handsome lover for one of them and an old but wealthy husband for the other. Carmen also takes a card, but hers foretells death. Dancaïre takes the three girls to help reach an agreement with the customs guards. Micaëla appears in the empty camp fearing that she will be forced to encounter the woman for whose sake her beloved José has become a villain. Hearing voices, she hides. Left behind to guard the camp, José has called out to a stranger. It turns out to be Escamillo, who has come to find the beautiful Gypsy girl with whom he has fallen in love. Upon learning that it is Carmen he is looking for, José draws a knife, but the returning smugglers separate the two men. Escamillo departs. Micaëla emerges and begs José to return home to his dying mother. Before leaving for home, José warns Carmen that they will meet again.
Act IV
Before the bullfight in Seville, the crowd is cheering the procession of picadors and toreadors. Arriving on Escamillo's arm is Carmen, whose girlfriends warn her to take care, as they've spotted Don José in the crowd. The girl, however, is not deterred. The crowd makes its way into the arena. José appears and pleads with Carmen to come back to him, since he cannot live without her. The Gypsy girl coldly replies that everything is over between them, and she now loves someone else. Inside, the crowd cheers Escamillo. Beset with jealousy and increasingly passionate, José argues with her. Carmen returns the ring that he had given her earlier. Don José draws a knife and stabs his beloved.
Media
Reviews
“The greatest virtue of the production is the kind of elaboration and professionalism that is unfortunately still not a given in Hungarian opera performances (even though directors coming from spoken theatre have given a new push to such progress recently). In Bieito’s Carmen production everything happens for a reason, every motif, action, visual element serves the artistic message.”
Kondor Katalin, Fidelio
“The Budapest production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen is an unforgettable intellectual and emotional experience, made compelling not only by the music but also by director Calixto Bieito’s bold vision. From the very first act, the audience is drawn into a precisely constructed production.”
Mariusz Grudzień, Maestro
Opera guide
Introduction
Anyone who associates opera with castles, perfume, wigs and fans, or with all-conquering heroism and untamed mythology, should listen to and watch the tobacco-scented, “common” Carmen: a drama of extreme passions that degenerate into murder, brimming with life and overheated eroticism. Carmen is a femme fatale, both the manipulative instrument and the victim of her own scorching sensuality, precisely the rebellious bird she calls love in her Habanera entrance (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”). Yet the miracle of this work, revered as a forerunner of verismo, is not its break with convention, but the musical coherence through which, via the piquant interplay of orchestration and motivic systems, this raw subject matter is used to create character and dramatic events rather than serving as mere decoration.
From the Flower Aria (“La fleur que tu m’avais jetée”), through the Habanera, to the torero’s exhibitionist entrance (“Votre toast”), everything is permeated by an emphasis on the sexual essence of masculinity and femininity. One might call it psychosexual music, veiled by a dramatic revolution disguised as a kind of naturalism. Nietzsche allegedly saw it twenty times and characterized it thus: “This music is wicked, cunning, fatalistic, but always popular.” Don José’s masculine self-esteem falls to pieces, as if he sought to reclaim his former integrity through murder; yet even at the dramatic climax he can muster only a declaration of love to the already dead Carmen. At the same time, the vigorous work sounds authentically Spanish, even though the composer invents this total Spanishness entirely himself. Carmen is the queen of mezzo-soprano roles.
Zoltán Csehy
“Every note and every pause is in the right place”
“Carmen is a masterpiece in every sense of the word… one of those rare creations that express the aspirations of an entire musical era,” Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, having become an admirer of the work shortly after the opera’s Paris premiere. “Every note and every pause is in the right place,” enthused Richard Strauss a few decades later, now well into the twentieth century, about the score of Carmen. And if, alongside the loudly persistent acclaim of fellow musical geniuses and the general public alike, one were to require a philosophical judgment as well, it can be read above how Friedrich Nietzsche,who had turned bitterly against Wagner, praised this final Bizet opera, also held up as a counterexample.
Perhaps it is precisely the unanimity of these enthusiastic endorsements, together with Carmen’s indestructible popularity (not to mention that it is the most frequently performed repertoire piece in the history of opera in Budapest), that sustains the stubborn and pleasantly romanticized common belief that Bizet’s opera failed at its premiere and that this failure more or less led the composer to his grave. Yet this is one of those misleading half-truths for which, characteristically, not even the opposite is true. In reality, even the most ill-disposed premiere audience could not – and did not – misunderstand Carmen in its entirety; what is more, with one or two exceptions, it was already on the very first evening that those numbers met with the greatest success which to this day are regarded as the opera’s “hits.” Among them is the irresistibly boisterous couplet, Escamillo’s Toreador Song, which remains an eternal favourite of ours, just as it does of millions of other opera lovers, even if Bizet may indeed have set about composing this number with the exclamation: “If they want trash, they shall have it!”
Ferenc László