Carmen Backstage Pass

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activities
q In Act III Carmen, Mercédès and Frasquita describe how they will help the smugglers
get past the customs officers: “It’s simply a question/of letting ourselves be taken
by the waist/and listening to a compliment./If it’s necessary to go as far as a smile,/
what of it?—we’ll smile!” What are the women saying in this passage? How do they
feel about their role in dealing with the customs officials?
q Tennis superstar Venus Williams was asked by a reporter why she wasn’t smiling
during a press conference, and commentators tweeted that Hilary Clinton should
have smiled more during her acceptance speech for the presidential nomination.
Why do you think this is? Can you find other examples?
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and purity. After his encounter with Micaëla, Don José compares Carmen
unfavorably with her. If she was a witch before, now she’s sunk lower still: “I
love Micaëla/and I shall take her for my wife./As for your flowers, filthy witch!”
Micaëla highlights the double standards women were subject to. Not even a
woman as pure as she is immune from the leering soldiers, who try to compel
her to join them in the guard house.
The episode of Carmen that concerned Adolphe de Leuven the most was
her murder at the hands of Don José. “Death at the Opéra-Comique,”
he protested to Halévy. “That’s never happened before, do you hear,
never.” (Halévy ) But die Carmen did. Some critics maintain that Carmen
was such a troubling character for audiences, that her amoral behavior
had to be punished. She could not be allowed to get away with ruining a
good man like Don José. Others see Carmen as an active participant in
her own demise. Left with limited choices, she elects death over a life as a
man’s property. She is defiant to the end, singing, “Carmen will never yield!/
Free she was born and free she will die!” Bizet parallels Don José’s killing of
Carmen with Escamillo’s bullfight. As Jose fatally stabs the woman he claims
to love, the chorus sings, “Look! Look! Look!/The tormented bull/comes
bounding to the attack, look!/Struck true, right to the heart,/look! look! look!/
Victory!” But the scene is ambiguous. Is Don José victorious, having justly
punished an unfaithful lover? Or is Carmen the victor over Don José, having
gone to her death still refusing to be his?
A critic of Bizet’s time found fault with Célestine Galli-Marié, the singer who
first played Carmen, complaining that her “reading of the part allotted to
her possessed fire, life, and exuberant vitality; in fact, she did not escape
censure on the score of excessive realism. [She] seems to take pleasure
in accentuating the unlovely aspect of this dangerous role.” (Parker) If
Galli-Marié did enjoy embodying the fierce character, she wasn’t the last
performer to do so. In 2007, another celebrated Carmen, Denyce Graves,
said of the character, “I’m a great admirer of this woman. I have drawn a
lot of strength from who she is. I wish I could be more like her.” (Huizenga)
Today’s audiences likely see Carmen differently than that first audience
at the Opéra-Comique. For some, she is an empowering character, a
resourceful woman who makes the most of what she has in a society that
severely restricts women’s activities. Manipulative though she may be, she
does it to get by in a culture that demeans and devalues women. Carmen
shines a light on the challenges women faced in Bizet’s era and provokes
modern audiences to reflect on what has changed and what remains the
same.
This Dangerous Role:
Carmen, Women and Society