Carmen, but Not Bizet's

By Michael Walsh

An opera about an opera in 82 minutes

The setting is a decrepit building in a seedy district of Paris, not far from the rumbles and whistles of the Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville.

Like the theater in which it is playing, called the Bouffes du Nord, this is a stripped-down, no-frills Carmen far removed from traditional opera-house conventions. It lasts just 82 minutes, with no interval, and uses only four singers, plus two speaking actors. The full orchestra has been reduced to 15 musicians. Everything unnecessary to the plot has been jettisoned in an effort to return to the sunbaked spirit of the original Prosper Merimee novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary characters. Instead, the focus is on the hotheaded Basque dragoon Don Jose and his fatal passion for the dark-eyed gypsy Carmen. Brook has even given the work a new title: La Tragedie de Carmen.

This is a time of startling directorial innovations in opera. Patrice Chereau's controversial Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring cycle (1976) featured Rhine maidens frolicking near a hydroelectric dam and Siegfried wearing a dinner jacket. But what Brook has done goes beyond accepted notions of radicalism. Essentially, he has recomposed Bizet's masterpiece, discarding whole sequences, changing the order of arias, even putting the overture near the end. The implicit arrogance of all this does not trouble Brook. "Opera is not a musical contract on paper, something between attorneys," he says. "The whole essence of theater work to me is to regard a score as an indication of what the imagination." The composer had director's in his task, adds Brook, is to produce what the composer had in mind when he wrote the piece, not "duplicating what's on paper."

This, of course, is nonsense. Usually what the composer puts down on paper is what he had in mind. True, opera librettos have occasionally been censored (as was Verdi's Rigoletto), and sometimes the exigencies of performance required certain concessions in the music itself. Carmen, a failure when it was first performed at the Opera Comique in 1875, was outfitted after Bizet's death with recitatives by Ernest Guiraud to replace its original spoken dialogue. But this did not change the essential character of the composer's conception.

What Brook has produced is not Carmen, but a critical commentary on Carmen--an opera about an opera. In this he has succeeded. In the 550-seat Bouffes du Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy) or even by Merim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela, Don Jose's girlfriend from back home, are direct rivals and have a real fight when Carmen carves a bloody cross on Micaela's forehead.

In a jealous rage Don Jose kills two men--his lieutenant Zuniga and Carmen's husband Garcia (a character in Merim&233;e's story). By the time Carmen's turn comes, he has nothing left to lose, no emotion to spend, and he plunges a knife into the kneeling woman's back as if he were an executioner doing his job. For her part, Carmen is an even more explicitly sexual creature than she is usually portrayed. She sings the famous Habanera while engaging in some erotic byplay with a cigar, thrusting it into Don Jose's mouth at the words "L'amour, I 'amour. " In its total bleakness this is Carmen seen by a man familiar with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, twin 20th century masterpieces of love, alienation and despair. The production also reflects Brook's distaste for conventional Bizet, which goes back to the time, 30 years ago, when he was production chief at London's Royal Opera House. "I looked with horror at how it was being presented. It had become a mausoleum." Controversy is nothing new for the flamboyant British-born director. In 1949 he produced a scandalous Salome--largely because of bizarre sets by Surrealist Painter Salvador Dali. He has set Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in what resembled an abandoned squash court, with the actors flying about on trapezes. Earlier this year, he staged Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with rugs as virtually the only props.

Brook defends his treatment of Carmen as something historically necessary: "Brick by brick, layer by layer, opera has been encased over the centuries to the point where today it is perhaps the most unnatural object in the whole of our society. To correct this, we must go back to the very roots of what the composer has in mind, to restore opera to its natural life."

But for all the production's dramatic effectiveness, it is to be hoped that Brook's Carmen will not be widely imitated. Would anyone think of touching up the Mono Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's or editing Paradise Lost? Opera is in many eyes a more suspect art form, and thus it is fair game. But composers usually know their own works, and later interpreters should look closely at the foundation before they start removing the bricks. --By Michael Walsh. Reported by William Blaylock/Paris

With reporting by William Blaylock/Paris

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