When key roles are sung by Russian opera stars in the Met’s “Carmen,” there must be something in the vodka.
Mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko and bass-baritone Ildar Abdrazakov are all scheduled for this year’s first iteration of Bizet’s masterpiece. Later in the season, you can see other singers such as Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca and French tenor Roberto Alagna. Come March 2015, Garanca will be paired with the German heartthrob Jonas Kaufmann.
But on Saturday, the Russians will time-travel in a production imagined by Richard Eyre. The brilliant British director, who reconceived and clarified the Met’s recent “Marriage of Figaro,” has set the Spanish tragedy in the 1930s just outside Seville. The soldiers look remarkably like General Franco’s fascist forces with black boots, belted uniforms and leather tricorn hats.
In 1875, composer Bizet and his literary collaborators, Henri Meihac and Ludovic Halévy, set the work in 1830. Inspired by a fictional potboiler, the opera grew out of ongoing fascination over gypsies and a popular serialized novella of the time.
Written by Prosper Mérimée, “Carmen,” the novel, employs a frame within a frame. A Basque hidalgo named Don José tells the traveling author his tale of woe. It’s a downward spiral, and it’s all a woman’s fault. The story is told in first person, but for the opera, Bizet shifted the focus to Carmen, a beautiful, free-spirited gypsy, a woman desired by every man and loyal to none.
For dramatic purposes, Bizet and his librettists also cleaned up Mérimée’s Don José. Literature’s anti-hero has a darker history than the troubled but good son of the opera. For example, the novel’s Don José was a ruffian and committed murders before he fell under Carmen’s spell.
Musically, Don José got a makeover to career army man – a confused innocent engaged to another innocent, Micaëla, a young woman conveniently close to Don José’s ailing mother. By the way, Micaëla is barely mentioned in the novel, but in the opera she has one of the most beautiful arias in a work full of memorable arias.
When published in serial form in 1845, the novel achieved intense popularity. It’s no wonder that Bizet chose the story for his 10th and final opera.
Only 36 when he composed “Carmen,” Bizet died of a heart attack a few weeks after the Paris premiere. Unfortunately, it was poorly received – mostly due to the expectations of the sponsoring organization, the Opera Comique, a family-oriented light-musical entertainment venue.
An opera about a seductive gypsy who tempts an upright soldier then deserts him for a glamorous bullfighter was not exactly family fare.
A few months later when “Carmen” opened in musically sophisticated Vienna, the audience loved it. And so has the rest of the world ever after. “Carmen” is the most performed opera today.
In an era of many Carmens, the Russian mezzo Rachvelishvili has made the lead her own. You can witness her spectacular first entrance when Carmen sings the famous “Habanera.” She will emerge from the cigar factory to wash off the grime of the workplace. By the time she sponges her bare feet and legs, you get the point.
jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.
If you go
The MET: Live in HD screening of “Carmen” will take place at 10:55 a.m. Saturday in the Vallecito Room of the Fort Lewis College Student Union, 1000 Rim Drive. Tickets are available at www.durangoconcerts.com, by phone at 247-7657 or at the Welcome Center at Eighth Street and Main Avenue, or at the door.
