The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Georges Bizet · an opéra comique in four acts, to a libretto in French by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée’s novella of 1845 · the version with spoken dialogue that Bizet left at the Opéra-Comique in 1875; Ernest Guiraud’s sung recitatives, written for Vienna after the composer’s death, are a later substitute and not the work scored
Mode
Opéra comique; sung numbers joined by spoken dialogue, some of it melodrama over the orchestra, in a family theatre’s frame filled with a tragedy of the street
Mythos
Two killings at one gate: the bull inside the ring before the crowd, the woman outside it alone; two men with blades, and fate in a motive, a flower and a pack of cards
Phase
From a guard changing in a Seville square to the gate of the bullring, by way of a tavern and the smugglers’ mountains; a prelude that passes from festival to the fate motive before the curtain rises
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in four acts with a prelude and entr’actes, setting Meilhac and Halévy’s French, in the version with spoken dialogue first performed in 1875
Register
From the street boys’ mock march and the smugglers’ patter to the Habanera’s dotted bass, a solo over the cards that sinks to death and a duet broken by a crowd’s cheering
Scale
Principal roles for mezzo-soprano, tenor, soprano and baritone, with smaller roles, mixed and children’s chorus and one speaking part; one city, its tavern and its mountains
Governing Proposition
A corporal from Navarre, posted to a square in Seville, takes a flower from a woman of the tobacco factory, lets her escape from his custody, deserts for her and follows her into the mountains among smugglers; when she leaves him for a toreador, he kills her at the gate of the bullring while the crowd inside cheers a kill of its own. The wager of the work is that a love which cannot bear the beloved’s freedom becomes a claim of ownership, and that ownership ends in killing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The opera begins with its end, and with the festival that will frame it. The prelude opens in A major with the music of the bullring, bright and quick, and brings in the Toreador refrain before anyone has sung it. Then the light goes. In the low strings the fate motive enters, built on an augmented second, and the prelude stops on a held chord that does not resolve. The day and the death are given together before the curtain rises, and the curtain rises on the day.
The first act is a square in Seville, with a guardhouse on one side and the tobacco factory on the other. The soldiers sing their chorus. A girl from the village, Micaëla, comes looking for a corporal named José and goes away again. The guard changes, and the street boys march beside it in mockery of the soldiers. Then the cigarette girls come out of the factory with a chorus of their own. The genre is at work: chorus pictures, local colour, a public place before a private story.
Carmen enters as a performer. Her first number, the Habanera, is a song she sings to an audience of soldiers, over a dotted bass, its tune adapted from Sebastián Yradier’s song El arreglito. Love, she tells them, is “un oiseau rebelle” (“a rebel bird”). She throws José a flower, the fate motive sounds, and the bond is made in a single gesture. Everything that follows is that flower’s consequence.
Movement II
Micaëla comes back, and she brings word from José’s mother. Their duet, “Parle-moi de ma mère” (“Speak to me of my mother”), is the other world of the opera: the village, piety, a son’s duty, set in the melodic idiom of Gounod, gentle and long-breathed. It is lovely, and it is a different music from the square around it. Micaëla is the work’s invention, not Mérimée’s, and her task is to stand for what José leaves.
Then a fight breaks out inside the factory, and Carmen is arrested for it. Brought before Zuniga, José’s officer, she answers him with a mocking song, and she is left in José’s keeping. To him she sings the Seguidilla, “Près des remparts” (“Near the ramparts”), a dance tune with a lilt. It is a bargain sung as a dance: his duty for her promise. He keeps his side of it, and she escapes.
The bargain has a price: it sends José to prison. The entr’acte that follows gives the tune of the “Dragon d’Alcala” in the bassoons, plain and dry between the acts. The music marks the time that passes, and the second act opens on his release. Each link in the chain so far has been made by Carmen’s performing: a song to the soldiers, a song to the officer, a song to the guard.
Movement III
Lillas Pastia’s tavern. Lillas Pastia himself only speaks; he has no music. Carmen sings the Gypsy song, “Les tringles des sistres” (“The rods of the sistrums”), and it gathers speed verse by verse until the dance runs away with it, a performance for the room. Then the room gets a performer of another trade. Escamillo, the toreador, enters to the Toreador Song, “Votre toast” (“Your toast”), and its refrain is the one the prelude had already played: a man whose life is killing in front of a crowd, and who tells it as a story to a tavern.
Then the smugglers talk business, and the quintet is their trade conducted at speed, five voices in rapid patter, a comic ensemble whose subject is an economy outside the law. José is heard approaching off the stage. When he arrives, Carmen dances for him with castanets, and as she dances the bugles sound the retreat: two musics in one scene, her dance and his duty, and he must choose between them.
His answer is the Flower Song, the one great aria of feeling in the opera, rising to its soft high close. It is the only great solo not sung as a performance to someone within the drama, and it is his. She answers it not with feeling but with a demand, the mountains and the free life there. Then Zuniga comes back for her, José draws on his own officer, and there is no return. The act ends on a call to liberty, a brawl turned into a hymn, and the corporal is now a deserter.
Movement IV
The smugglers’ camp in the mountains, to a march and a sextet. José is an outlaw now, and Carmen has tired of him. Frasquita and Mercédès lay out the cards and read them brightly, chattering. Carmen takes the pack, and the music falls away under her. Her solo begins “En vain pour éviter” (“In vain, to avoid”), and what the cards say to her is death. The voice sinks to the bottom of its range on “Toujours la mort!” (“Always death!”), and the two bright voices come back around it as if nothing had been said.
It is the one time in the opera that she sings for no one. Every other great number of hers has been a song for a listener: soldiers, an officer, a guard, a tavern, a lover. Over the cards, with no one to perform for, she says death. Then the smugglers turn to the customs men in a lively ensemble, and business resumes.
Micaëla has come up into the mountains alone to find José. Her aria, “Je dis que rien” (“I say that nothing”), is a prayer, and like her duet it is in another idiom, that of the village and the church; it stops the act for a portrait. Escamillo arrives looking for Carmen, and he and José fight. Micaëla tells José that his mother is dying, and he goes down with her. As the act ends, Escamillo’s refrain is heard from off the stage. Mérimée had no Micaëla and no such toreador: his picador, Lucas, became Escamillo here, and Carmen’s husband was cut.
Movement V
The last act is outside the bullring in Seville, on the day of a corrida. Vendors sell to the crowd, and the procession of the cuadrilla passes in to music the prelude promised. Escamillo and Carmen have their duet, “Si tu m’aimes” (“If you love me”). Frasquita and Mercédès warn her that José is near. She stays outside. Everyone goes in to the fight.
The final duet opens “C’est toi! C’est moi!” (“It is you! It is I!”). She will not yield what she sang in her first song. Inside the ring the crowd cheers the bull’s death, and its music breaks across the scene of two voices outside the gate, two killings set at once, one before the crowd and one alone. José stabs her. The fate motive returns fortissimo over the body, and his last words are “ma Carmen adorée” (“my adored Carmen”): possession to the end. In Mérimée the killing happens in a lonely place outside the city; the opera moved it to the gate.
Carmen was first performed at the Opéra-Comique, in the Salle Favart, on 3 March 1875, with Célestine Galli-Marié as Carmen, Paul Lhérie as José and Jacques Bouhy as Escamillo. The theatre’s management had resisted the subject, the press found it indecent, and the first run was respectable rather than triumphant. Bizet died on 3 June 1875, ninety-two days after the premiere. For the Vienna Hofoper in October that year Ernest Guiraud set the dialogue as sung recitative, and in that form the opera went round the world for about eighty years; the spoken version returned to general use only in the second half of the twentieth century, and Fritz Oeser’s edition of 1964, which restored material cut in rehearsal, was widely criticised for presenting it as the work. Nietzsche held the opera up against Wagner in 1888; Mascagni and Leoncavallo took its knife into verismo. What it shows has outlasted every staging of it: a woman known only by the songs she sings for others, and the man who cannot bear that she is free.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is short and every link pays. The flower thrown in Act I binds José; the arrest gives Carmen the bargain of the Seguidilla; the bargain sends him to prison; his release brings him to the tavern; the bugles test him and Zuniga’s return forces the desertion; the outlaw is one she tires of; and the bullring is where she has gone to Escamillo. What holds the axis here is the genre. The street boys, the smugglers’ quintet and ensembles, the vendors and the procession could go without loss to the drama, and Micaëla’s aria stops the third act for a portrait. The dialogue carries plot the music need not mark, which is why every theatre cuts it differently.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a love that cannot bear the beloved’s freedom becomes a claim of ownership, and ownership ends in killing. José, a man of rule and of his mother’s world, desires by possessing. Carmen says in her first song that love is “un oiseau rebelle” (“a rebel bird”), and holds to it at the knife: “libre elle mourra” (“free she will die”). The opera gives her the voice that Mérimée’s frame gave only to José’s confession, so the condition is heard from both sides. Held near the bar by two costs: Carmen is drawn through a Parisian fantasy of Spain and the Roma, part mood rather than meaning; and Micaëla is a convention whose work is to price Carmen.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The heights are real and recur. The prelude drops from the bullring’s daylight to the fate motive in the low strings and leaves the chord hanging. The Card solo is the sublime of dread: over a quiet, low accompaniment the voice falls to its lowest register on “Toujours la mort!” (“Always death!”), between two bright trios. The Flower Song rises to its soft high close; Act II ends by turning a brawl into a hymn to liberty; the final duet, the summit, is broken across by the crowd’s cheering, with the fate motive fortissimo over the body. Held below the top by frequency: much of the score’s fame is charm and brilliance, which is pleasure, not elevation.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The archetype is built, and at its strongest it bears the load. The last act stages two killings at once: the bull dies inside the ring to the crowd’s cheering while Carmen dies outside its gate, and the sacrifice inside frames the one outside. Escamillo and José are matched as two men with blades, one who kills before the crowd and one who kills alone. Mérimée’s José kills her in a lonely place outside the city; the move to the gate is the opera’s. Fate is built into the form: the motive, the flower, the cards. The particular stays particular. Held below the top because the fate is partly imported colour, cards and Gypsy fatalism, and Micaëla is type, not person.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the opéra comique of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic: a family theatre, spoken dialogue, light comedy and, by expectation, an ending short of horror. Carmen keeps the frame, with dialogue, couplets, chorus pictures and a comic quintet, and fills it with a working woman who smokes, fights and chooses where she sleeps, a soldier who deserts, and a murder on the stage. The stake was real: the management resisted, the press found the subject indecent, the first run was respectable rather than triumphant, and Bizet died three months after the premiere. Held at the bar because the form is not broken: number opera with dialogue, in the language of Gounod’s generation used with genius.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses one thing it knows exactly: that Carmen is known only through performance. Almost every one of her great solos is a song or a dance given within the drama, to the soldiers, to Zuniga, to José, to the tavern. José sings the opera’s great aria of feeling, the Flower Song, and she answers it not with feeling but with a demand: the mountains. The one time she sings for no one is over the cards, and what she says then is death. In the last act the form doubles the space, the crowd inside cutting across the duet outside. Held down where the form is only the genre’s container: the dialogue’s plot work, and spectacle numbers that travel as suites.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise. Nietzsche set the work against Wagner in The Case of Wagner (1888), and the argument has not closed: whether the opera is the tragedy of a free woman or a fantasy of the exotic woman punished; which version to play, and how much dialogue; how to stage the Roma. Few operas have been made again so often: Carmen Jones (1943, filmed 1954), Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen (1981), the films of Saura (1983) and Rosi (1984), Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite (1967), U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005). Held below the top because the musical argument is thinner than the cultural one: the score is admired more than analysed, unlike Otello (8.9) or Don Giovanni (9.6).
Score: 8.8 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is in subject, not form: the work put the urban poor, desire without sentiment and a killing in the street onto the lyric stage in music of full art, and showed that tragedy could be made from the low as well as the high. It did not reorganise musical form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the nearest operatic ancestor of verismo, taken up by Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892); Nietzsche made it a polemical standard; after Glinka and Lalo, it fixed the French musical image of Spain, from Chabrier’s España (1883) to Debussy and Ravel; and its heroine passed into film, dance and theatre.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across 151 years, and presence is of the widest: continuous performance since 1875 in the houses of the world, and tunes that are common property far beyond the opera house. The charge is the text. For about eighty years the work survived chiefly in a form it was not written in, Guiraud’s recitatives in place of the dialogue and of the balance of speech and song that Bizet left. The spoken version returned to general use only in the second half of the twentieth century, and the editing since Oeser’s edition of 1964 has been disputed. Every number survived, so the charge is small. A smaller one: each production must now answer how to stage the Roma.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, exact within a conventional frame. The orchestration is clear and economical, from the flute and harp of the Act III entr’acte to the bugles under the Act II duet. Rhythm is a resource of character: the Habanera’s dotted bass, the Seguidilla’s lilt, the Gypsy song accelerating to its end. The ensembles are made with comic precision: the quintet’s patter for five voices, the Card Trio’s bright frame around a solo. The melodic invention does not flag, and Meilhac and Halévy’s verse is supple and singable. Held off the top by two things: Micaëla’s music is fine Gounod, in another opera’s idiom, and the genre choruses work at a lower charge than the drama round them.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the street boys’ mock-military march and the killing at the bullring gate. One law governs them, and the prelude announces it, passing from the bullring’s daylight to the fate motive, so that festival and death are one physics before the curtain rises. Every bright scene is the festival half of that law, and the motive returns inside them, at the flower, the cards and the end. The comic quintet is business done by people whose trade lies outside the law, and fits. The strain is Micaëla: her scenes obey another physics, the piety of the village and the mother, in another idiom. The contrast measures José’s fall, but sets a second law beside the first.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, in José’s obsession; desire and sexual freedom; labour, rare in opera, in the tobacco factory and its women; the state and its army; an economy outside the law, in the smugglers; the family, in José’s mother, brought by Micaëla; the crowd and its spectacle, at the bullfight; the natural order, in the mountains; fate, in the cards. They are integrated: the brawl produces the arrest, the army the desertion, the smugglers the outlaw’s life, the corrida the frame of the murder. What holds the axis here is what is thin or missing: the sacred appears only as fortune-telling, history is absent, and the Roma and the smugglers are colour more than structure. A four-act opera with a domestic centre.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9. A century and a half of continuous performance, charged only for the eighty years it spent in another hand’s recitatives; an orchestra, a rhythm and a set of ensembles made with exact economy; two killings staged at one gate; and a reach that runs through verismo, the French image of Spain and far beyond music.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2: labour, the army, the outlaw economy, the family, the crowd and the mountains are held and integrated, but the sacred appears only as fortune-telling, history is absent, and the Roma and the smugglers are colour more than structure. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.3: a number opera with spoken dialogue, whose spectacle choruses and plot-carrying speech give way to the subtractive test.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the score and libretto of Carmen and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The work is scored as Bizet left it at the Opéra-Comique in 1875: an opéra comique in four acts, its sung numbers joined by spoken French dialogue, some of it melodrama over the orchestra. Ernest Guiraud’s sung recitatives, composed after Bizet’s death for the Vienna Hofoper production of 23 October 1875, replaced the dialogue for about eighty years; they were a substitute for part of the work made by another hand, not a further stage of it, and are weighed only as a fact about how the work survived. No single production, edition or recording is the unit, and the disputes over rehearsal cuts and the extent of the dialogue are noted only where they bear on a score. Words and music are scored together, on Meilhac and Halévy’s French as Bizet set it. Mérimée’s Carmen is the source, not the work: what the librettists and Bizet kept is credited as their making, and what is Mérimée’s discovery is weighed as inheritance. French is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, in fragments of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, is not charged to the work, and no published translation is quoted. The count of Carmen’s solos sung as performances within the drama is the desk’s own. The dates and intervals were computed by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the conductor of the first night, the running time, the detail of the orchestra, the contents of the rehearsal cuts and the current critical edition, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.