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O P E R A N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O
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February 11 - March 25, 2017
I
n
Carmen
Georges Bizet vividly depicted sun-soaked
Andalusia and its transient, adventurous gypsy inhabitants,
yet the composer created this work without ever setting foot
in Spain. It seems like a paradox that Bizet produced such an
adroit study of a regional culture and how certain personalities
worked within its confines without even coming into contact with
that culture! On another level, though,
Carmen
is just a result of
an artistic fascination with Spain, “exotic” gypsies, and nomadic
adventure that permeated contemporary Western Europe.
Yet what makes Bizet’s opera extraordinary is not that it
was able to put “authentic” Spanish flair onstage at Paris’s Opéra
Comique, but that it took a superficial cultural fascination
embodied in Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella of the same
name, highlighted its best moments, and drew realistic, multi-
dimensional characters out of it. Although audiences didn’t
immediately appreciate how Bizet brought Carmen
herself to
life, the opera’s initial shock value and the well-defined female
protagonists of the operatic stage who would follow Carmen
demonstrate good art’s intrinsic ability to provoke and stimulate
change.
Bizet’s chief source material was the novella of Mérimée,
the celebrated French author and historian. It appeared in the
Revue des Deux Mondes
in October 1845, with a fourth chapter
added in 1846. Mérimée probably first heard the Carmen story
from the Countess of Montijo (mother of Eugénie, the future
empress of France) while on his visit to Spain in 1830, but he
significantly embellished it when he finally put pen to paper. This
1830 visit, Mérimée’s first to the Iberian peninsula, included a
venture into the south where he studied the gypsies of Granada.
Though the culture fascinated him and served him well when he
wrote
Carmen
, Mérimée’s interest in the gypsies lay temporarily
dormant.
What apparently reawakened his interest was the continuing
publication of the writings of George Borrow, an English author
and contemporary of Mérimée who studied the Spanish gypsies
intensely. Mérimée himself was familiar with Borrow’s first
published book,
Le Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain
(1841), a comprehensive guide to the language, culture, and
customs of the gypsies of southern Spain. These peers didn’t share
an especially positive rapport, though. Indeed, Mérimée even
Novel Nomads: How a Fascination with Gypsies
Led to Opera’s Most Provocative Heroine
By Harry Rose
Two celebrated Carmens, a century apart: French soprano Emma Calvé and American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves,
the latter pictured at Lyric in 2005.
DAN REST