In January 1876 Tchaikovsky saw a performance of Bizet’s opera during its first run in Paris, and wrote to Mme von Meck: ‘I am convinced that in ten years’ time Carmen will be the most popular opera in the whole world’. In a letter to her some years later he remembered how he had learned it almost by heart from beginning to end, and his own homage to it in the form of the children’s chorus in the opening scene of The Queen of Spades is one of the most charming compliments ever paid by one great composer to another. Not the least indication of Carmen’s pre-eminence is that it has always been admired by other composers, composers as various as Brahms, Stravinsky, Wolf, even Wagner. It is above all a musicians’ opera.
Tchaikovsky’s prediction was of course right, and the combination of musical mastery with universal popularity is a rare one (Mozart, of course, Handel, Verdi, and then you have to start thinking). And that popularity did not come at once: Tchaikovsky was writing about a failure. Soon after he saw Carmen, it was dropped from the Paris repertory for seven years, and the form in which it won world-wide popularity was very different from the opéra-comique that Tchaikovsky saw. It is indeed extraordinary that the text of Carmen, written little over a century ago and published in vocal score under the supervision of the composer, should still remain a minefield of complexity.
Carmen was commissioned by the Opéra Comique in 1872. Bizet chose the subject – Mérimée’s novella of 1845 – and collaborated closely on the libretto with Meilhac and Halévy. He wrote the words of the Habañera, and possibly those of the Toreador’s Song as well. It was a major project for the Opéra-Comique. Four months had been set aside for rehearsal and a star name – Célestine Galli-Marié – engaged for the title role.
But as rehearsals progressed, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. The Opéra Comique’s finances were more than usually rocky, and a popular success was much needed. Camille du Locle (co-librettist of Don Carlos and Aida and translator of Otello) was co-director of the company with Adolphe de Leuven. He gave in to Bizet’s demands for extra chorus and yet more rehearsals, and then agreed to buy out De Leuven’s share; the latter grew increasingly nervous about Carmen’s subject matter in what was after all a ‘family theatre’, one to which the solid bourgeoisie went for more than just entertainment. ‘We have five or six boxes let every evening for marriage interviews,’ said De Leuven. Marriage is not an institution that gets much of a look-in in Carmen.
But a wholly amoral protagonist, lightly clad female factory workers puffing on cigarettes, smugglers and licentious soldiery get more than a look-in, and there’s a murder on stage. This was far from being standard Opéra Comique fare. The chorus insisted that the music was impossible to sing, and was not pleased at being required to act as well. The ladies complained that smoking made them feel sick. Indeed, smoking in public is perhaps the only thing found shocking in 1875 that is just as shocking today, if not more so.
The premiere on 3 March 1875 was not quite the fiasco of legend. The first act was greeted with enthusiasm, and many people crowded on stage to congratulate the composer. The second act went down less well, and thereafter enthusiasm diminished in direct proportion to the extent to which the score deviated from the norms of opéra-comique. At the end there was but a sprinkling of Bizet’s most loyal friends on stage with him.
The audience was not so much shocked as uncomprehending: the music was, believe it or not, considered ‘difficult’. But, anticipating the future, fellow composers got the point. Gounod applauded enthusiastically, and within hours of curtain-fall Massenet had written a letter of fulsome and possibly even sincere praise. Saint-Saëns went to a performance a week later and wrote to Bizet: ‘At last I have seen Carmen. I found it marvellous, and I am telling you the truth.’ Bizet replied: ‘those three lines … console me immeasurably for the insults of the Comettants and the Lauzières’. They, both rival composers, were authors of just two scathing notices, but critics had insulted masterpieces before and will doubtless do so again.
Carmen played for 48 performances, many of them heavily ‘papered’, before being dropped from the repertory within a year. Popular legend has it that its failure hastened, if not caused, the early death of Bizet, aged only 36, on 3 June, exactly three months after the premiere. (Mozart died at 35, Weber at 39.) In cold fact, he died of an alarming combination of identifiable diseases, but depression and justifiable anger can have done little for his resistance to them.
The day before his death he signed a contract for performances of Carmen at the Vienna Court Opera, and agreed to compose the recitatives needed to replace Meilhac’s and Halévy’s spoken dialogue. In the event they were composed by his friend and colleague Ernest Guiraud, and interestingly enough not all of them were used in Vienna. With remarkable prescience the director, Franz Jauner, retained the dialogue for the comic episodes, and elements of this version survive in the first more-or-less complete recording (1908), in German – a fascinating document.
But it was with Guiraud’s recitatives, never credited in any published score, that Carmen won the popularity that Tchaikovsky rightly foresaw, and it was in this form that it was played all over the world – literally, in Russia, Scandinavia, Australia and both North and South America – before it was revived in the city of its birth in 1883. The recitative Carmen then survived for over a century in all theatres save the Opéra Comique, and it is a perversion of the masterpiece that Bizet wrote.
First, Guiraud’s recitatives are workmanlike and irredeemably third-rate. Every time they come thudding in, the dramatic temperature drops. Second, recitative takes far longer to tell audiences much less: the dialogue was ruthlessly cut before it was set. Too much goes missing. One example: in their first-act duet Micaëla tells Don José that his mother has forgiven him, and he replies that he has repented. In Guiraud there is no hint of anything to forgive or repent.
But there is in the dialogue: José admits to being the unsatisfactory son of a respectable family, to having dropped out of studying for the priesthood and to having lost his temper in a game of pelota and – we are to presume – killed his opponent, which is why he has fled his homeland of Navarre and is serving as a corporal in a scruffy platoon of guards. We really do need to know that the man is a bit off-centre, if not an odd-ball, before the action starts to unfold.
Contrary to received opinion, the libretto of Carmen is a very carefully written and logically worked-out piece of theatre by two practised masters of their art, and it deserves treating with respect. The dialogue is part of its structure. Just as each act is shorter than the previous one, so there is less spoken dialogue in each succeeding act, with just a single exchange in Act IV. As the drama approaches its climax, there is less for the spoken word to do, more for the music.
The most damaging effect of replacing dialogue with recitative was to remove one of Carmen’s most vital elements – humour. In its original form it is a work of quicksilver changes of mood, light, Gallicly detached, sophisticated and witty. But the recitatives iron out the contrasting shades of light and dark in favour of the latter. One example: after the Card Song, Carmen snaps out of her mood of foreboding and leads the broadly comic dialogue about outwitting the customs officers before leading the company in the dazzling G-flat major ensemble. The much briefer recitative means that the song is established as the dominant mood instead of being what it is, a passing fancy, shaken off with a shrug of the shoulders.
The elimination of humour for nearly a century save in the theatre of its birth – try and find the 1950 Opéra Comique recording of Carmen, reissued by EMI on CD, to hear how briskly and lightly the piece was played there – naturally had an effect on performance style and tradition. In German-speaking countries it became a darker, more sombre work oozing Fate and Significance from every pore. The score was hugely influential on the soon-to-emerge verismo school in Italy, where it was too often turned into a strident melodrama, with Carmen and José first cousins to Santuzza and Turiddu.
Carmen is above all a comedy, and the fact that the action takes a nasty turn is neither here not there. Life is like that. Given its prodigious tunefulness and swift action, you could almost call it the first Broadway musical. Oscar Hammerstein II certainly saw it that way in 1943 and supplied a perfectly brilliant but (these days) less than politically correct translation; the star of Carmen Jones, Muriel Smith, later sang the role at Covent Garden, very well, but with Guiraud’s recitatives.
Return to the dialogue version, starting here in the 1950s and ’60s, was hampered by the lack of a proper edition. The score that Bizet saw through the press was superseded everywhere by the standard Choudens edition with Guiraud’s recitatives. It was tragic that when a new one came in 1964, it should have been by Fritz Oeser, and denounced by the Bizet scholar Winton Dean as ‘perhaps the most corrupt score of any major masterpiece published in modern times’. (Dean’s denunciation, a quite magnificent musicological hatchet job, is reprinted in his Essays on Opera, OUP paperback, 1993.) It is even more tragic that this edition is still being performed in otherwise quite respectable opera houses, and has been much recorded. We still await a proper modern critical edition; two are nosing over the horizon as I write and are, as they say, eagerly awaited.
The late Dr Oeser’s multiple errors stem from his assumption that changes and cuts made during the rehearsal period and the first run were made by Guiraud or forced on the composer by an interfering management. So with great arrogance he opened cuts and substituted early autograph sketches for what appeared in Bizet’s own published score. There is no evidence that Bizet yielded to pressure of any kind, and overwhelming evidence that he took enormous pains over his score: he rewrote the finales to Acts III and IV three times before he was satisfied. Oeser’s conflation of two early drafts of the moment of Carmen’s death is an amazing piece of illiterate musical gobbledegook.
And Bizet tinkered throughout stage rehearsals, polishing and snipping, all in the interests of tightening the action, especially in the first act. Even after publication of his score, he cut (rightly) a number for Moralès. Entrance and exit music was shortened when it became evident that it was longer than necessary in stage time. He was an instinctive man of the theatre, and knew exactly what he was doing. But the disinterring of previously cut music does raise problems, especially for those who want in principle (if not in the theatre) to hear as much music by Bizet as possible.
So decisions have to be made by conductor and director before each production. Take the exquisite little mélodrame at the changing of the guard in Act I in which Moralès describes Micaëla; Bizet cut it, but only the most puritanical text-freak could jib at its inclusion tonight. Do you cut (like Bizet) or include (like Oeser) the men’s contribution to the Cigarette Chorus? Wait and see. At Carmen’s and José’s first exchange do you play the short (Bizet) or the long (Oeser) version of the Fate motif? It’s all a matter, again, of stage time. (So whichever decision has been taken, it could well be changed in rehearsal.)
In that same first exchange, do you include José’s answer (in dialogue) when Carmen asks him what he’s doing: ‘I’m making a chain for my priming pin’? Probably not: it might have passed muster in 1875, but not since Freud has taught us all to have dirty minds. It’s one of the great unconscious bull’s-eyes in all opera. At least, I presume it was unconscious. You can never be too sure with Johnny Foreigner. (No, we won’t be getting it.)
In the opening dialogue, how much of José’s pre-history do you leave in? Do you reinstate the little cut that Bizet made in Carmen’s and José’s second-act duet, her ‘Il souffre de partir’, in which with biting sarcasm she repeats his hangdog declaration of love as he prepares to go back to barracks? It suggests a new side to her character. (Yes, we will be hearing it.) Do you perform the shortened (by Bizet) or the full version of José’s and Escamillo’s duel-duet? The cut tightens the action, but the full version shows the Toreador toying with José with the playful cruelty of the bullfighter that he is. Decisions, decisions, so many decisions. No two people will agree on them.
Composers and musicians may always have admired Carmen, but many objections have been raised on literary grounds, founded on very proper worship of Mérimée’s novella. Mérimée’s Carmen is indeed a masterpiece in its own right, an essay in irony and detachment, a narration within a narration. Converting it to dramatic form was a great challenge, and Meilhac’s and Halévy’s adaptation is remarkable for its fidelity to the letter if not always to the spirit of the original; many lines in both dialogue and song – see especially the finale – are direct quotations. The main difference is that in Mérimée Carmen is a ruthless criminal, dour and charmless, whereas in Bizet she is a creature of humour and light. Interestingly, Meilhac and Halévy thought that Galli-Marié was nearer Mérimée’s Carmen than to theirs – could this by why Bizet cut the sarcastic ‘Il souffre de partir’.
But what precisely was ‘the original’? Mérimée (1803-70) was a great admirer of Pushkin, and learned Russian both to read and, later, translate his works. Among those works was the narrative poem Tsygany, ‘The Gypsies’ (1824, also the source of Rakhmaninov’s Aleko). Mérimée’s translation of Tsygany was published in the same volume as his Carmen, as if ‘innocently’ to reveal to the world the debt his story already owed to Pushkin’s poem in general outline. Mérimée, a great tease, carried irony and detachment to great lengths, and needed to in order to fulfil one of his roles, court jester to Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. Close examination of the Pushkin has revealed that Bizet, Meilhac and Halévy must have studied it as closely as they did Mérimée. As a character, the operatic Carmen owes far more to Pushkin than to Mérimée, and there is a prototype for Escamillo as well. All of which tends to confirm Pushkin as more fertile a source for operas than any other great writer apart from Shakespeare.
The librettists’ invention of Micaëla and Escamillo has often been criticized as too cynical a concession to Opéra Comique tastes, but there would be no opera without them. In dramatic terms, a relationship such as Carmen’s with José needs context. Micaëla is the embodiment of what José’s mother would like him to be, of what someone with his background ought to be. She is what José wants Carmen to be. Escamillo, a hunk of glossily packaged supermarket beefcake, is Carmen’s ideal lover, what she would like José to be – six mois and thank you ma’am. These additional characters add theatrical flesh to the central tragic conflict.
Micaëla is often written off as a traditional opéra-comique milksop, but she is much more than that. She has the wit to deal with a platoon of randy soldiers, the warmth of the mother she symbolizes, and the courage to risk her life searching for José in the third act, not out of self-interest – in her aria she refers to José as ‘the man I once loved’ – but because to take him to his mother’s deathbed is the right thing to do. Doing ‘the right thing’ in opera is usually fatal (vide Mozart’s Don Ottavio and practically the whole cast of La forza del destino), but someone has to. And it takes courage.
The wider context is faithful to Mérimée. In both treatments Carmen and her associates – comic in the opera, sinister in the novella – represent forces of anarchy threatening well-ordered society. Perhaps 19th-century audiences, instead of being shocked, should have taken comfort in seeing her destroyed. Today we are more likely to see her destruction as tragic. In 1875 audiences probably saw Carmen as a slut, using her wiles to encompass the degradation of an honourable soldier. Today we see her as a liberated woman, trying to live by her own rules, a woman whose watchword is that great cry in the second-act finale: ‘surtout, la chose enivrante, la liberté’. She just has the misfortune to fancy a joli garçon without recognizing his severe personality defects before it is too late; she is as much trapped by the second-act finale as he is.
The long reign of the dark Guiraud Carmen emphasized the sluttish, or femme fatale element, whereas the libretto-with-dialogue stipulates that her appearance should be ‘absolutely as in Mérimée’, that is to say rather smart, with shoes, stockings and a mantilla. Contemporary illustrations show that this is how she was costumed. Today we admire her realism, her honesty (the only lie she tells, about being from Navarre, is a joke) and her great good humour. Her telling Escamillo to wait his turn is a beautifully human and open touch: she has unfinished business with the joli garçon who went to prison for her. ‘Je paie mes dettes’. Yes, a creature of light.
Whereas poor José, the spoiled priest, is all darkness, so repressed that he can only express himself through violence when crossed, whether at pelota or in love. Reason as Carmen knows it has no part in his make-up, which is what makes the finale so horrifying, so dramatically truthful. Quite apart from his problem with his priming pin, his subconscious is in turmoil: his line to Micaëla in the middle of their duet, ‘Tu vas retourner au pays?’, is a classic pre-Freudian slip. He can’t wait for her to go. His taking needless risks in his life as a smuggler, revealed only in the dialogue version, suggests a death-wish that could have saved Carmen. The characterization of the man is taken faithfully from Mérimée, and the novella is essentially about him. The brightening of Carmen via Pushkin, Meilhac and Halévy means that the opera is about both of them.
Of all the elements in Carmen, the music is the one whose impact is most blunted by over-familiarity. We know the music so well, or think we do, that we tend not to listen to it properly and to overlook its originality, its wit, its colour and its passion. Maybe we should not censure audiences of 1875 for finding it ‘difficult’: the modulation under the last words of the Flower Song must have sounded pretty startling.
In truth, Carmen faces two ways. There are numbers whose perfection of form recalls a great opéra-comique tradition reaching back to Philidor, Monsigny and Grétry; the palindromic opening ensemble, for instance, the similarly laid-out Micaëla-José duet, or the Séguedille. Micaëla’s is a textbook da capo aria with coda. Other numbers take no heed of established form, and look forward not just to verismo but beyond. The Flower Song is a formless yet self-generating rhapsodic outburst, a perfect musical representation of the man singing it, unsettling modulation and all.
The extended passages of arioso in the later acts, in which conversation is set to music with consummate ease, are more obvious seams for the verismo composers to mine – the climax to the third-act finale, for instance, and the whole fourth act. Above all it is humour that informs so much of the score, whether it is Micaëla escaping the attentions of the soldiers, or Carmen outlining her modus vivendi in the Habañera (words by Bizet, music brilliantly adapted by him from Yradier’s popular salon piece). There is great good humour in the calculated mixture of allure and detached self-mockery with which Carmen ensnares José in the Séguedille. A perceptible element of self-awareness, if not actual self-mockery, also saves Escamillo from mere fatuité.
Over-familiarity also blunts our perception of the orchestration, or does so in the big opera houses with big orchestras that muffle its detail. Here at Glyndebourne, roughly the same size as the Opéra Comique, the piquancy and originality of the instrumental colouring should speak clearly. In 1876 Tchaikovsky perhaps noted the quasi-pizzicato brass in the prelude: it turns up in his fourth symphony of two years later. This, plus such passing effects as the sustained bassoon under Micaëla’s tripping entry, or bassoon and pizzicato strings in unison in the Séguedille are occasions of sheer joy; in the orchestral entr’actes, especially the third, joy is tinged with side-hugging pleasure of an earthier kind. Why should music depicting the clean open air of the mountains sound so incredibly sensuous? Perhaps it’s depicting something quite different.
Instrumental colour is also used to heighten the drama with a near stomach-turning air of foreboding: the bassoons falling in semitones at the end of the Card Song, later echoed by trombones doing the same thing under the wrenching modulation in the finale that marks the moment when José finally accepts that Carmen no longer has any feeling for him. In what opera is more fear engendered by such economic means than when the chattering woodwind march that accompanies the crowd into the bullring is seemingly dragged towards the abyss by strings descending chromatically?
What I love more than almost anything else is the postlude to the G-flat major smugglers’ ensemble in the third act. It’s only music to get the chorus off stage, but Bizet composes it with such care, with such detached, flickering wit, as if it were something really vital to the drama. Now that is genius.
Rodney Milnes is Chief Opera Critic of The Times and
former editor of Opera magazine