The ‘real’ Carmen at the Festival della Valle d’Itria

A Carmen without the habanera had already been heard on concert tours; seen, never. The Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca is now providing the first staged performance of Paul Prévost’s critical edition. Mind you, this is not the ‘ur-Carmen’ – that is, the version staged at the Paris premiere in 1875, before Bizet’s death, when Ernest Guiraud transformed an opéra-comique into an opera tout court for the international market, setting the spoken dialogue to music and making other ‘adjustments’. No: this is the ‘ur-ur-Carmen’, that is, the score that Bizet sent to the copyists at the Opéra-Comique in ’74 but which was heavily modified during rehearsals – a veritable ordeal, with Bizet already unwell and often arriving at the theatre in a wheelchair, the orchestra and chorus complaining that the parts were too difficult, the theatre management, who did not believe in an opera they had themselves commissioned, the performers’ doubts, and so on. The differences from the Carmen we usually hear – though, to be honest, we never hear the same version twice in a row – are quite significant. The spoken passages are longer and often take the form of mélodrame; the first finale is different and, I would say, more beautiful; Alcalà’s song is much longer (the first Don José, Paul Lhérie, was notoriously prone to intonation problems and, in fact, later switched from tenor to baritone), as is the duet-duel between José and Escamillo, and so on. And then, as has been mentioned, there is no habanera, but rather the ironic and flighty aria that Bizet wrote but which failed to convince the first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié – a modest vocalist but a great actress. With her theatrical instinct, she had realised that something else was needed: Bizet borrowed the famous melody from Sebastián Iradier, and it became the hit we all know.

Creating a ‘true’ Carmen – or at least a plausible one – is an excellent idea, not out of philological scruples, but because Carmen’s case is a classic example where a stylistic misunderstanding gives rise to a misunderstanding of content, transforming ‘the’ Don Giovanni of the most anti-bourgeois nineteenth century (and in the moralistic France of the ‘Republic of the Dukes’, which was erecting the hideous Sacré-Cœur as a stone preservative over Paris) into a banal, verismo-style slut. The problem, however, is that the opéra-comique is difficult to revive because its style has been completely lost; it was designed for actors who sang, not for singers who acted. They can’t manage it in France, where the final blow to the tradition was dealt – as early as the Third Republic – by the ill-fated merger of the two companies, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique; let alone us, in the land of melodrama; and if, on top of that, there isn’t a single French-speaking member in the company, it’s even worse. In any case, the best performer is Matteo Lippi as José, a bit clumsy (or rather, quite a bit) on stage but who sings very well; Deniz Uzun as Carmen is firmly rooted in tradition; the same goes for Alessandro Luongo as Escamillo (at least he isn’t the usual booming baritone grappling with couplets that are, in fact, a cabaret number, not a political rally, and meant to be sung word for word); Natalia Tanasii’s Micaëla is very modest indeed. The finesse that is lacking on stage is reborn in the orchestra pit, where Fabio Luisi, at last, conducts Carmen as if it were Mozart, redeemed from grand effects that are almost always over-the-top, all softness and lightness, irony and little gems: and superbly played by the Petruzzelli Orchestra of Bari. An intelligent and minimalist production, conspicuously low-budget, by Denis Krief, in keeping with the general ‘streamlining’ of the opera, symbolised by a ‘fleur’ that is not the usual rose or poppy or any other red flower, but a yellow mimosa (quite symbolic, come to think of it).