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Elena Maximova  in Carmen in Francesca Zambello’s staging for the Royal Opera House.
‘She embodies the accumulated fantasies of several male authors.’ Francesca Zambello’s staging of Carmen for the Royal Opera House (with Elena Maximova as Carmen) Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
‘She embodies the accumulated fantasies of several male authors.’ Francesca Zambello’s staging of Carmen for the Royal Opera House (with Elena Maximova as Carmen) Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Bizet’s Carmen is a mashup of male-fantasy sexual encounters. She needs reinventing

This article is more than 1 year old

The Gypsy heroine is an impossible, exotic male fantasy who is not one woman, but many. Her murder matters less than it should, argues opera director Mathilde López

Directing Carmen is terrifying. First, you must overcome the opera’s huge fame and the expectations of audiences in order to carve yourself some space to think. Then you have to work out who she is – while unpacking the misogyny and sporadic dashes of exotic Gypsy colour that pervade the story.

I am a French woman from a mainly Spanish family with some Gypsy origins. My great-grandmother was a Gypsy woman from AAndalucía who was taken away from her family by a Frenchman - to Morocco. She danced flamenco and never stopped making music on the kitchen pots. Theoretically, this should give me an “in” on who Carmen is. But my first attempts at thinking about the piece needed no French, Spanish or Gypsy DNA.

Beyond Georges Bizet’s incredible music, the character of Carmen is inconsistent and underwritten, a series of different women, or even different skirts – some of these are Gypsy; some are not. She is a sort of mashup of holiday sexual encounters. This it not surprising given that she embodies the accumulated fantasies of several male authors: Prosper Mérimée, the author of the novella Carmen on which Bizet based his opera three decades later, as well as Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who co-wrote the libretto.

Mérimée based his 1845 work on a story he had heard of destructive passion in the south of Spain and fused it with a study on Romany language and culture, reinventing the heroine as a Gypsy. Bizet’s mesmerising music was inspired by some Spanish composers, whom he fully acknowledged, but he had never set foot in Spain. His collaborators, Meilhac and Halévy, were masters of the Parisian farce, with their own agenda of making entertaining scripts that pulled in the crowds, fully embodying and furthering the generic sexism of the era.

Mathilde López, director, centre, with Jeremy Silver, conductor, right, during rehearsals for Carmen. Photograph: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The mysterious, devious Gypsy identity these men created for Carmen is problematic and inaccurate. Her mixture of rebellious amorality, sporadic codes of honour, and decorative flamenco dancing, all underpinned by the idea of freedom, and particularly sexual freedom, is inconceivable. The majority of Gypsy women live in a highly patriarchal, rule-bound society where women marry very young. She is clearly an exotic fantasy.

Beyond the exoticism, who Carmen is also changes in every scene. She’s a factory worker, an aggressor, a reluctant smuggler, a gang leader, a seductive manipulator and a vulnerable woman in love. Her underwritten and unexplained, varied character traits seem only to exist to support the much clearer journey of her “lover” Don José . This contrast between her lack of defined throughline and the specificity of her very recognisable music makes her more symbol than real – she is not one woman, but many. She is the idea of a woman, and thus her murder matters less, certainly less than the turmoil and suffering of Don José when he kills her.

Carmen’s murder is presented as a crime of passion, which, until 1975 in France, was a legal term which meant that homicide could be legally excusable if it was proved that it took place in a fit of passion and was not premeditated. Don José would have been pardoned for Carmen’s murder at the time of the story and of the opera’s composition.

Crime of passion… Calixto Bieto’s 2012 staging for English National Opera Photograph: Alastair Muir

And, of course, the music is so beautifully crafted that the argument can be persuasive: the whole opera encourages us to see Carmen through Don José’s eyes and it is hard to resist feeling compassion for his torturing jealousy, the pain of his guilt and sense of inadequacy. She makes him suffer so deeply that one can easily reach the awful and long unquestioned conclusion that he murders her because “he loves her too much”.

But she is not his first victim. We learn at the beginning of the opera that he has already killed a man in a fit of rage over a ball game. Our romantic lead, Don José, is actually a multiple homicide perpetrator who we learn throughout the opera is obsessed with his mother. I think he’s like Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. But whereas in Psycho the audience switches between protagonists – we are Janet Leigh until she gets killed, and then we are left with her murderer as our antihero – in Bizet’s opera we don’t switch. We view the story only from Don José’s perspective. Carmen only takes over our senses when she invades his.

In the end, Carmen, in the final version of her that we meet, decides to “embrace her destiny” – that of being killed by an officer from the north of Spain who is obsessed with his honour, his pride and his mum.

So, what is to be done with this beloved mess?

At Longborough Festival Opera, we decided to perform it in English to be free to play with the dialogue and the lyrics. It is set in contemporary Spain, our women work in a meat-packing plant, and they don’t dance. Our smugglers are gentle souls, who are poor and trying to get by; our police are desperate for attention and corrupt; and our Carmen is joyfully scandalous, provocative and has nothing to lose. Don José is psychotic and dangerous and his mother is a character in our telling, played by an actor, witnessing, enduring and somehow presenting to us her catastrophic son.

In 2022, we have a responsibility to create and stage three-dimensional female protagonists. Working with our Carmen, Margaret Plummer, and conductor Jeremy Silver we have found a version of the role that is resonant for us today. In our production, Carmen is not a sexy seductress defined by the men around her, she is outrageously fun. She’s also poor: it’s her poverty that gives her the outsider status that Mérimée fantasised as Romany. Her freedom and impulsiveness come from the fact that she has no investment in society because she already exists on the edge of it. The conflict with Don José then becomes one of class and capital: between a petit bourgeois officer and an outsider, a poor woman with nothing to lose.

More on this story

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