Stephanie G. Mathis Domestic violence is often seen as a problem that occurs behind closed doors. The Metropolitan Opera will present a new production, conducted by Daniele Russitioni, of Bizet’s “Carmen” on New Year’s Eve. In the opening performance, the Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhimetshina will play the title role. Piotr Bczala will be the soldier Jose, whose obsession with Carmen leads to her murder. This scene from Act II was rehearsed recently. It is part of a modern dress production set near a border in America that has not been specified.
Carrie Cracknell said that she questioned the idea that Carmen’s death by Jose was a crime committed out of passion as a result of her destroying and corrupting an innocent soldier. She said that domestic violence is something we consider to be between men and women. She added that in the case of Carmen’s death, “we are trying to frame it as a result that feels just as much about gender than about two individuals.”
The opera’s French colonialist fantasies, played in Andalusia and populated by licentious smugglers and passionate girls, can make a man feel uncomfortable. It could tempt him away from his family, church, and the girl that his mother would like to marry. It feels like Bizet, when he stabs Carmen in the bullfighting ring at the same time as her new lover wins the match, is not just killing a character. He’s also restoring the hierarchy of his era.
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Recently, new productions have given this ending a fresh spin. In Cologne, director Lydia Steier made Carmen take back the agency she lost to commit suicide. Barrie KOSKY’s androgynous Carmen walked up with a shrug after she died at the Royal Opera House in London. Carmen shot Jose in a 2018 production by Leo Muscato. This prompted Giorgia Melon’s disapproving Twitter.
Susan McClary is a musicologist who has published studies on race, class, and sex within classical music dating back to the early 1990s. She said that the tensions of “Carmen” lend themself to a modern interpretation. However, she also stated in a video interview that the music compels the audience into wanting the destruction and destruction of Carmen.
McClary explained that the problem was “that final chord which shouts ‘hurrah’.” She argues that up until then, the chromaticism in Carmen’s music was pitted against the more stable lyricism in Jose and Micaela – the childhood sweetheart his mother sent to bring him back to his senses. McClary stated that at the moment when the bullfighter wins and Jose is about to kill Carmen, “all the dissonances in the confrontation between Jose & Carmen that led up to this chord are suddenly resolved.”
Cracknell is fortunate to have Akhmetshina as an interpreter with a wealth of experience. Akhmetshina, 27, has sung this role so many times — she’s sung it in seven productions and plans to sing in two more at London’s Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne. She can recite a number of different approaches she has taken on the death scene. She described Carmen in an interview between rehearsals as a character that continues to be unsettling.
Akhmetshina, who was still dressed in her black leather pants, black cutout top, and turquoise cowboy boot costume, said: “It is fascinating that both women and men dislike Carmen.” Women because they can’t have the same control, and men because she isn’t under their control. She is absolutely honest and true.”
She said that in one production, her character would have killed her if she had not stopped Jose from killing men who he was jealous about. She committed suicide in another production in search of intense feelings. Earlier in the season, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, in an organ trafficker-themed staging, she joked about spending so much time “cutting other people into pieces” that she was ready to murder Carmen herself. She said: “I was just like, ‘just kill her’.” Get rid of her.”
Akhmetshina identified with Carmen’s love of freedom and her outsider perspective. She was born in the village of Bashkortostan and raised by a single mother with three children. She said, “I never thought we weren’t OK until I moved to the cities.” She said, “We had a small farm, and we were fine. But when I moved to the city, it was a completely different story. We faced high rents, and her mother’s salary barely covered the cost of a trip to Moscow. She said that the whole system is designed to keep people in small towns.
Cracknell’s production does not consider ethnic differences but instead focuses on tensions between genders and classes. Ann Yee saw this as an opportunity to create dances that were free from castanets or flamenco clichés. She said that Carmen’s appeal was more a result of psychological longings rather than Orientalist fantasy. In an interview, she stated that “we’ve been hooked on this idea of wildness and liberation, about what lies beyond the border, the journey.” Carmen has a wild appetite, and it radiates to the people she is part of.
Yee stated that the removal of “Carmen” ‘s Andalusian context helped sharpen its feminist messages. If you try to place it too precisely, it’s harder to see that it could happen anywhere.
Cracknell stated that “women are killed by their partners in large numbers in many places around the world.” We are obsessed with this narrative. In her production, she highlights the number of people who have watched Jose’s jealousy grow more dangerous without intervening.
Not one of Carmen’s fellow smugglers offers to assist her in the Act III confrontation, which results in Carmen being knocked to the ground. Micaela is the character Bizet created to be Carmen’s rival and opposite, as sung by Angel Blue. She offers to lend a hand. Carmen reluctantly accepts the offer but releases it so quickly that she stumbles to her feet.
Cracknell claimed that Blue had conceived the idea during rehearsal. Angel instinctively helped her, she said. It was a simple yet powerful moment of solidarity. These two women stepped outside the stereotype of two women fighting each other to win a man. At that moment, Micaela chose to stand up for another woman by seeing her as a victim.
In an earlier version, this article incorrectly described the performance history of the Russian memezzo-sopranoigul Akhimetshina. She has already performed at the Met; “Carmen” is not her Met début.
