Carmen, Metropolitan Opera 22.05.24
By Susana Puente Matos
For her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, British theater director Carrie Cracknell decided to interpret Bizet’s history-changing, grand opéra comique through what she called a “feminist lens.” In her Carmen, this boils down to an eschewal of blood-soaked reality. It opens with the military being called in to break up not a knife fight between Carmen (mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine) and fellow factory workers, but a hair-tugging cat fight. At the production’s end, Carmen isn’t stabbed to death by her jealous, deadbeat lover, the deserter-turned-smuggler Don Jose (tenor Michael Fabiano). Rather she is bludgeoned with a baseball bat. The single whack swung by Don Jose is even accompanied by a nifty sound effect that goes plock! when the wood hits Carmen’s temple, as if her head were empty.
Is depriving the tragic heroine of blood – either causing bloodshed or shedding it herself – feminist? I pondered this as Don Jose haplessly clung to his clumsy, phallic weapon. I wondered why Cracknell didn’t opt for a gun. If a feminist lens wasn’t going to save Carmen, that majestic wolf, then for Bizet’s sake, I thought, at least let her die in the face of a more formidable force.
At the very least, the decision to kill Carmen with a Three Stooges bat and not a pistol suggests that Cracknell’s “feminist lens” is not a desperate attempt to be relevant. For if it were, she would no doubt have used the opportunity to shed light on the gun violence which wracks the United States. But she didn’t. Guns are tastefully employed in Cracknell’s Carmen for the sole purpose of sounding alarms.
When Carmen died for the first time in Paris in 1875, it sparked a scandal. “Quelle verité,” one critic wrote of Carmen shaking her hips, “mais quelle scandale.” The scandal was not that she was murdered. As the opera goer well knows, opera heroines have been crushed, shot, poisoned, strangled and drowned in sacks; they have wasted away from illnesses both physical and mental. In 2013 Cracknell directed Berg’s Wozzeck at the English National Opera, which ends with Wozzeck stabbing his wife Marie, before killing himself.
The scandal rested in the fact that in being murdered, Carmen became exotic, real and tragic when she wasn’t supposed to be. She was the heroine of an opéra comique, the lighter counterpart to the heftier grand opéra and the ancestor of the modern-day musical. In choosing Prosper Merimée’s novella Carmen (1845) as his libretto, Bizet intended to shock his audiences who expected lighter, more frivolous fare. Just as Gershwin and Bernstein deepened the genre of the musical to include more complex harmonies and gritty, realistic plotlines in the 20th century, so too did Bizet expand the opéra comique in the 19th, transforming it into a genre that could move one to tears and joy, all at once. He did this by democratically bestowing equal attention to all parts, from the close harmonies of the soldiers to the dramatic, tension-ridden motif of his roguish heroine. Carmen became everyone’s favorite opera, from Queen Victoria, to Otto von Bismarck, to Nietzsche, to James Joyce.
Cracknell’s production did not evoke tears. It opens with a flock of pink-frocked women fluttering past men in cargo pants to begin their day in a weapons factory. The pink uniform seems by now to have become an obligatory tribute to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (hadn’t I just seen them at Jay Scheib’s Parsifal at Bayreuth in 2023?). I had to squint through the dark at my program to confirm that the opera was set in today’s mid-western America, and not in Ukraine or Outer Space.
Clémentine Margaine and Michael Fabiano (Photo Nina Wurtzel)
I wondered whether Cracknell had ever been to the mid-west. As if to compensate for this lacuna in her visual portfolio, set designer Michael Levine staged all of Act II in a Star-Wars warp highway (lighting by Guy Hoare). The audience chuckled as more and more cars were packed onto the stage – first a six-wheeler, then a pickup, then a red convertible carrying the rodeo bull rider Escamillo (bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green). Was this Carmen we were watching, or a sad parking-lot tribute to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo?
Taken during a technical rehearsal. (Source: Metropolitan Opera)
The challenge of making an opera relevant for a contemporary audience has less to do with affecting change than it does with acknowledging continuity. For the individual opera goer of 1875, a woman’s murder was as shocking then as it is now. It does not matter whether they filed it under the current label of “femicide.” The Met’s most recent production of Carmen suggests a failure to recognize this. Consequently, Carmen’s murder became a mockery. Through its vague, shapeless suggestion of the mid-west, bloodless conflicts and curve-murdering costumes by Tom Scutt, Cracknell’s production robbed Carmen of the bloody, passionate tragedy which once made it so revolutionary. It pushed it back to the standard of farce Bizet had once so magnanimously surmounted.
A week before seeing Carmen, a friend and I had been exchanging stories about farms, where both of us had witnessed the violence of reproduction. In Ecuador a cousin waxed poetic about the strength of their dairy farm’s bull sperm imported from Spain. I then watched, flinching, as an employee plunged his fist holding a sperm-filled rod upwards, like a lance, into a cow’s vagina, amid a mess of blood and fluids and mooing and muck. My friend, meanwhile, had worked on a farm in Montana with real bulls. She told me how, one day, she saw a bull penetrate a large and stoic cow. He pounded into her so forcefully and for so long that the cow collapsed from exhaustion. Still the bull wouldn’t stop. The farmhands had to intervene. They tore the bull off the cow to prevent him from killing her.
Perhaps such experiences should be prerequisites for understanding gritty, real heroines like Carmen. Her strength lies not in her ability to escape death, but in her tenacity to laugh in the face of it. To turn away from reality is not feminist. It’s delusional, and potentially dangerous. It doesn’t service an opera like Carmen.
“Jamais Carmen ne cédera,” she cries before Don Jose’s knife, chin held high. “Libre elle est née et libre elle mourra!”
References:
Interview with Carrie Cracknell, edited by Matt Dobkin, “Fearless. Unconventional. Daring.” The Metropolitan Opera. Accessed May 30, 2024. < https://www.metopera.org/discover/articles/fearless.-unconventional.-daring/>
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012)
