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 It was Carmen which superceded all other operas as Wagner meant to.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
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