Carmen

Bizet, Georges

album cover

Tobacco Girl Takes On the World

Carmen opens in a Seville public square on a hot day. The local police sing an idle, workaday tune while keeping watch over the bustle; they're really waiting to glimpse the women who work in the tobacco factory as they take lunch. The officials have a few favorites, among them the tempestuous heroine, who displays, from her very first entrance, a talent for drawing male attention Madonna might envy.

An exotic Gypsy beauty who tells fortunes and projects a regal air that's above her station, Carmen turns out to be a magnet for love troubles: In the course of this colorful essay on free-spiritedness and jealousy, she snares a young corporal, Don José, then a dashing toreador, Escamillo; she disrupts work and gets into brawls with women, all the while smoking copiously. Georges Bizet establishes each character with distinct hues he returns to, fleetingly, as the tale unfolds. His bawdy large-ensemble moments are organized around hummable tunes—not least of them the magisterial "Toreador" march and the orphan girl's lament "Je dis, que rien ne m'épouvante."

Although Bizet plotted out other operas and comic operas late in his life, Carmen was his last multi-act work: He died at age thirty-six, just three months after its premiere, not knowing that the piece would become an operatic standard. He conceived Carmen using spoken dialog, but the presenting company requested that the narrative exposition be set to music, in traditional recitative style. That task was unfinished at his death, and was handled by the far less adventurous composer Ernest Guiraud, whose labored connective music moves the story along in fitful lurches.

Carmen is now often presented the way Bizet intended, but one of the most enduring recordings—this 1959 version, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and featuring Victoria de los Angeles as Carmen and a forceful Nicolai Gedda as Don José—utilizes Guiraud's recitatives. That's its only flaw: Beecham keeps the Castilian flourishes restrained and helps everyone involved seize, then celebrate, Bizet's coy lyricism. Those seeking music bubbling with passion but containing little of the pomposity associated with opera will find this delightful.

Genre: Opera
Released: 1960, EMI/Angel
Key Tracks: Act 1: "L'Amour est un oiseau rebelle"; Act 3: "Je dis, que rien ne m'épouvante."
Catalog Choice: L'Arlésiennes Suites Nos. 1 and 2, London Symphony Orchestra (Claudio Abbado, cond.)
Next Stop: Maria Callas: Highlights from Carmen
Book Pages: 89–90

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