The Beecham Carmen

I've gone back and forth 100 times on whether the greatest Carmen is Andre Cluytens with Solange Michel and a dozen other forgotten French singers at the Opera Comique, or the extremely well-rated Thomas Beecham in his final phase at Paris Radio with the extremely well-rated Victoria de los Angelos as Carmen and the impossible to overrate Nicolai Gedda.

Beecham was never so 'well-behaved' as he was in his final few years when stereo captured him. A New York Carmen from fifteen years earlier finds him sounding much more in the Opera Comique tradition that makes Carmen sound halfway to a vaudeville show. And that's perfectly appropriate: Carmen is as much vaudeville as Wagner.

I love Carmen. I love the trashy, poppy, elements in it just as much as I love the high sublimity, and the two stand next to each other with shameless pride.

It is one of those delicious little ironies that just as Wagner was putting the finishing touches on his grand metaphysical summation of the (his) world: Gotterdammerung, Bizet was writing a piece that exists as a giant middle finger to everything Wagner stood for. I don't doubt Wagner meant for the Ring Cycle to supercede all other operas, but the Ring is always talked about but rarely played, Carmen is always played but rarely talked about. It was Carmen which superceded all other operas as Wagner meant to.

Within two years, even Wagner would bow down before the power of an opera by a recently deceased unknown from France, better known by those who knew him at all as a pianist and with rumors of murder surrounding his death. Had Bizet lived a year longer, he'd have lived to see himself the toast of Europe. Had he lived ten years longer, we may have had many more works in the mature style he discovered in Carmen and we would be talking of him in the same breath as Mozart and Beethoven.

Bizet is one of the most tragic losses in the history of music: because beginning with Carmen, music breathes a different air, dances to a different time, and sings to a different tune. By 1878, the world had found a new god that would gradually replace Beethoven's self-expression as the goal of music - a god that would eventually lead the world away from classical music into the world of popular culture.

Pleasure was our new god, and Carmen was its prophetess. Don Jose is not simply seduced by Carmen, he is seduced by the entire world she conjures for him: a lurid, underground imagining of gypsy animality which seems to promise the fulfillment of every desire, and when that fulfillment proves impossible, Carmen chooses death rather than compromise on her ideal of what pleasure entails. At the beginning of the opera, we view everything through Don Jose's eyes. But the brilliance of the second half is that we've been so completely seduced by the first that we see the unfolding tragedy through the eyes of Carmen. Like Don Jose, we listeners begin by being seduced by everything we see and hear, so much so that like Carmen we would rather choose death than give up what we've discovered. It is a far more convincing reason for death than anything in Tristan und Isolde.

Carmen is not about sex, it's about longing. To be sure, sex is a hugely important part of that equation, but both Carmen and Eros are far larger than sex. What Carmen awakens in us is something far more disturbing and liberating even than pleasure: it's the realization that there may not be a self to express, nor even any need for a self. We may not be more than electro-chemical-neuro-physiological bundles of nerves only capable of feeling pleasure and pain as any other animal does. As with all other notions, it may or may not be true. But if it is true, then perhaps we needn't aspire to be any more than that. Is that notion destructive, or is it liberating? This is the question at the center of Carmen.

And what is the question at the center of Carmen the character? Do we ever really know? Does she know?

Does Carmen find any true happiness in pleasure? Her love of free love often seems like a cover for existential dread, perhaps even a willful seeking of oblivion. Does she truly love 'loving and leaving' as she claims, or is she simply pathological in her seeking of an erotic ideal? Unlike her male equivalent, Don Giovanni, there is not a perfect narcissism at work behind her machinations. Rather, Carmen seems to suffer from something like borderline personality disorder. Moment to moment, she seems able convince herself tht either side of a bifurcated reality is true. I forget how long she waits for Don Jose, but it's a while, and within five minutes of his return, wearies of him as though she had not spent the last year or so thinking of Don Jose as her masculine ideal.

Don Jose is similarly ambiguous. Why does he relinquish such an ideal domestic life for Carmen? Is it simply sex? Perhaps 19th century Europe was less jaded than I give them credit for, but every town in Europe had dozens of local cowmilkers like Micaela who behind the innocent facade knew everything there was to know about sex. No, it was not sex Jose left Micaela for, but precisely because sex with Micaela would have been something clean and blissful, free from shame. Micaela may know what there is to know about sex, but about shame she is blissfuly naive, whereas Carmen clearly knows what there is to know about shame, and as a soldier, so does Don Jose. Today, we would probably call Carmen and Don Jose trauma victims who can only bond with other victims, and who replay their initial traumas: one of seduction and abandonment, the other of murderous obsession.

And similar to the infinite ways of interpreting Carmen dramaturgically, there are 100 ways of interpreting Carmen musically: as Mahlerian intermingling of sublimity and trash where the tempi are always shifting and every line is interpreted for maximum meaning (Pretre, Fricsay, Maag), as Wagnerian grand opera with huge orchestra and voices (Karajan and Reiner), as as vaudevillian opera comique with small voices and fast tempi (Cluytens and Plasson), as expressionist fraying of the nerves where every moment is played for maximum excitement (Mitropoulos and Kleiber). And then there's Bernstein, which is just... well it's absolutely bonkers.

Obviously, the closest to authentic is the Opera Comique way. Bizet saw his work as an Opera Comique, but there's a fairly obvious problem:

When Bizet first presented it to Paris's Opera Comique, they hated Carmen. They thought it was utterly wrong for them: too dark, too high-fallutin', not enough tunes (can you imagine?). They clearly knew that Opera Comique is not what Carmen is - or rather, Carmen is many things Opera Comique is not.

At its heart, Carmen is no more a mere 'show', it is an artistic work of the highest, profoundest, most all-embracing reach, and reaches to the heavens from a foundation of populist trash. Its only true operatic precedent is Mozart, and like Figaro, Carmen is ultimately perfect: every note and chord, every dynamic indication. It is so sturdily built that you can disobey them all and still make a great performance, but the foundation of Bizet's score is right in front of everybody, and for all the questions of recitatives and transitions, everybody who's ever gone to an opera knows the big moments. Bizet's indications on them are crystal clear, and they cannot be improved upon.

So far as I know, there are three conductors who, by and large, make their singers follow the tempos and dynamics, and scrub it relatively clean of any personalized inflection: Beecham, Abbado, and Solti (better live with the late Grace Bumbry than in the studio with Troyanos). There are plenty of other great recordings (otherwise, Cluytens at the Opera Comique will always be my favorite - along with Fricsay in German), but if you want to hear Carmen at the root level of those pathological questions, metaphysical questions, it's the score that leads you there. The passions are not worn on the sleeve. Neither the fun nor the tragedy is overemphasized, they are, rather, held in complete classical balance so that you never forget either one or the other. The international stars ensure that nothing is too local, and yet the immaculately pungent diction of the supporting cast and chorus is something you can't get in those later recordings, nor can you get an authentic French orchestra elsewhere in recorded sound this vivid.

There are sui generis interpretations, Callas in the title role, Franco Corelli as Don Jose, the direction of Franco Zeffereli or the conducting of Leonard Bernstein (seriously, it's weird...), but all of those interpretations cause us to forget the most obvious fact of all about Carmen. Carmen itself is sui generis, and one of those very few works that needs no help at all from any musician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQSSE6Ob2E4

Well... I look great....

 

I'm not gonna lie, I look amazing right now. I'm still 5'4 1/2 but last week the doctor's office's heavy scale pronounced me a svelte and sexy 178 - the thinnest I've been since freshman year of college. I can stick two fists in my pants and have room for a third. I expect I'll lose at least ten pounds more with little trouble. I've shaved my head, my beard is neatly trimmed and just beginning to grey in a way that doesn't look like rust. All I need is to go legally blind so I can get a thick pair of glasses and I'll look the way I've always wanted to look. I've always looked much older than my age and I now look the youngest I've looked in more than twenty years. No amount of gym workouts or cycling has done for me what's done lately. I currently have the sex appeal of a young Richard Dreyfuss..

I look amazing when my stomach doesn't swell to more than twice the size of my torso, which causes my extremities to go numb along with the sides of my face, or when I feel like my lungs are drawing barely 15% of my breathing capacity. There are times I've felt as though my ribs are about to break. And all throughout, the same aerophagic burping I've had for ten years, which, let me tell you, makes dating an absolute wonder. And the same brainfog that makes me forget what I'm saying or typing mid-sentence, which makes it a wonder to me I can do these 'essays.' Obviously, there are days on which I barely eat, and this exhibitionist shall spare you, dear voyeur, the wondrous details of his bathroom excursions.

It all began around late October. Too much sushi became constricted breathing, which became choking and vomiting, which became a heart rate gone haywire, which became five-and-a-half hours waiting in the emergency room at Sinai Hospital while three patients were brought in with bullet wounds. As I was finally brought back into the room to be tested I could hear the crying families. For physical reasons I immediately moved back 'home' so that I would be away from the mammon of city life and the infinite temptations of its gastronomy. I had long since given up garlic and onion, and have put off the inevitable relinquishing of chocolate and coffee for years past the date when I should.

I'd like to think it can all be ascribed to an antipsychotic I've been on since 2007 in which ravenousness is a known side effect. During one period when the dosage increased beyond a minimal amount, I gained thirty pounds in three months. But the truth is that this ravenousness has been with me my entire adult life. After three years at a boarding school that used as many as three hours a day of physical exercise as a deliberate form of torture, my 135 pound frame swore that no one could ever make me exercise again. For many years I hewed all too closely to that fulfilling that promise, and by late 2007 was 100 pounds heavier than I was seven years previous. My whole twenties often felt like a court I held at table. And while friends watched me eat I'd try to make everything into a bullshit session in a manner crossed between Falstaff and Don Rickles as people would listen to (or put up with) me as I extemporized on all manner of subjects on which I set myself up as an expert as only a quarter-read kid in his 20s could, and I would try well into the wee hours to be the ultimate wit at events I tried to make into feasts of wit - freely baiting other people into making fun of me so I could have an excuse to lay into their weaknesses as maliciously as I could to the amusement of everybody else - usually trying to spew my witticisms out as I was chewing the fourth empanada or third falafel. I tried to tell myself I didn't care that I was too prickly to be loved: I had a lot of anger, and I did not eat food, food ate me.

No sickness is more explicable or deserved than this one. I treated my body as a vessel, not for me but what went through me, and even as I look younger than I did fifteen years ago, I'm living a middle age with ailments that are usually incurred by the elderly. And yet few sicknesses have been harder to diagnose, and few sicknesses have been more ignored by doctors - even from within the august apathy of US medicine.

For decades, my uncle was rated the #1 GI in Baltimore; but of course, I had the great luck of developing these symptoms just as he stopped seeing new patients. I have since then been to four GIs, and the only one who took these symptoms at all seriously was, of course, the nurse-practitioner. But my primary care doctor said that he had the perfect GI for me, and sent me to yet another doctor who didn't give the two shits I can't process without a battery of drugs in forms solid, liquid, and gas...

For my sleep, neurological, and pulmonary issues I went to a sleep pulmonologist who will remain nameless, but who prescribed a sleep study for every small change in my regimen. By the time she said I need sleep study #4, I began to realize that this was not about my sleep... I tried to change doctors, but the department told me that once I had a doctor, it was absolutely forbidden to see a different one. Willing myself to get a new sleep pulmonologist took five years. The moment I saw him and told him what I experienced, the nurse said "That was really unnecessary."

My GP was very good for a while, but now he has so many patients that I have to book checkups with him more than a year in advance. When I had my latest emergency, it was to a doctor I'd never met I went who took one look at me and said 'Man, you're goin' through something rough...'

He sent me for a gastric emptying exam. It was a four hour exam I had to get at eight in the morning and drive to White Marsh without any coffee, and it was the only one available at any radiology center before mid to late June. They said it would be one to three days for the results to come back, it's been two weeks and I await their call back when the Memorial Day weekend is finished. I can't deny, I suspect they lost the exam and now I'll have to wait for July to get it again.

On my birthday weekend, I caved and had a very few drinks, along with a vegetable at my birthday dinner that clearly had garlic even though the waitress and cook swore up and down that it didn't. I was so fed up that I just ate it anyway. Two nights later I was about to go to a friend's house for some garden variety hangoutage, and in the shower I coughed up a slight bit of blood. It happens once every three years or so, then never happens again.

So to their house I went. All it took was two tokes of weed, and I was belching so out of control that I had to go back to the emergency room. My heart-rate was 155, my esophagus felt the size of the Meyerhoff, I almost passed out, and whether it was the weed or a metaphysical experience, I had to fight against my entire line of sight turning white. I was literally burping at the top of my lungs and could hear a male nurse making fun of me to the janitors right outside my room in the ER. I had, what I hope was, a weedy hallucination of a former friend in the doorway, just about the last person I want to see me in this state, to which I shouted "You gotta be shitting me!?" I was told that while I did not have a heart attack, it was roughly 50/50 that I would pass out. I could hear the heart machine beeping the whole time in deafening overdrive. What followed was a surreal 24 hours during which I almost passed out from an anti-gas medicine, I had to keep walking virtually the whole day to stop myself from feeling like I was about to faint, and my diet forbade any food the hospital brought me. I practically fell in love with my gorgeous and very helpful nurse before she pegged me with an enema (that didn't work for two days). When I saw my GI two days later and told him about the weed, I could see in his eyes that the prick was silently laughing behind the mask. Such is American healthcare. I'm a lightweight on weed, but I'm not THAT much of a lightweight. This was no freakout or panic attack, this was the closest I want to come to death for the next fifty years.

I've already tested negative for Celiac's, Collitis, and Hashimoto's, who knows what this is but whatever it is, it's very real, I don't give a shit how little doctors give a shit, I will find answers here even if they couldn't care less to find them.

I see a dietician over Zoom, an extremely smart young lady who knows her subject better than I know music, but who is very traditional in her outlook and hews exactly to the research until the moment the research changes. Every time I wanted to eliminate gluten and dairy, she admonished me against it. I finally took my own initiative against her warnings. It took a full two weeks, but while things are far from perfect, suddenly everything is solid downstairs, I can go a full three days without bloat or dizziness, and the brain fog is significantly decreased.

I also see a 'visceral massage therapist.' A nice sixty-something Jewish lady who moonlights as an actress and speaks Yiddish. I always joke that I have no idea what she does but whatever it is is unspeakably dirty. She is, in some ways, the best part of all this. She is basically is an osteopath who 'moves the organs around' and grants me a few days' relief every week. I do planks and pushups per her instructions, but she is adamant that I should not be running, doing jumping jacks, or lifting weights. She's done a lot of good, but fuck that, I'm doing whatever I can to get relief here.

I'm a bit rusty on these essays There's plenty of detail I know I've forgotten to put in. I'm trying to write a book and it's been a minute since I've done these. The best short story I've ever written was completed in the hospital. Over these months I think I've lost the rhythm of how to organize and remember all the points I want to make. But these essays are personally key for me, whomever reads them. They are not just how I purge myself of the bad thoughts, they are how I retain my nerve as a writer. If you retain the nerve to expose the your experience's dark parts to light's vulnerability, there is no limit to what worthy project you're ready to endure.

Sometimes (Ok, often...) the nerve turns into hubris, and I recently had to abandon a chapter which I planned on writing in the style of a Greek Drama. My nerve is rattled, but somehow I have this faithful public of dozens who have no idea of the latest developments I used to catalogue narcissistically for what I convince myself is your pleasure.

I doubt these essays will ever again be more than an occasional visit from an old friend. Whether I have fifty days left or fifty years, the bulk of the essays I've ever done have probably already been written, while I try other forms of writing so that I don't repeat the same ideaas over and over again and find new avenues so I can evolve into someone different as we all should. My hope is, one day, all these self-revelations are just grist for the mill of life experience that helps us be curious about the heads of people completely different from me. The person I am in real life is both exactly like what I am on the page and completely different, but whereas you all experience work to add to your quality of life, I experience life to add to the quality of the weird work I do, because the 'work' on the page is the place I always know I am in great health, and no stomach distention can destroy what's already on it.

Amen.