We follow the fame of Bizet's Carmen this week, to the wartime and postwar success of Carmen Jones. And this requires assessing the radical relocation and remake of the opera that became a musical by Bizet and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Death as a light motif
Carmen was famously one of those operas whose ending is musically foretold. The theme of fate and doom is there from the first act in his music, much stronger than the theme of freedom. There's a fascinating detailed account of the changing fate motif on the Met Opera site here (audio no longer available, but you'll recognise the moments described as we watch the opera.)
Carmen's fated death is in the cards she draws with her gypsy friends. "La mort. Toujours la mort." (Death, always Death.) Here's Shirley Verret's amazing performance. And here's the ROH poster image for their 2024 production with Aigul Akhmetshina.
José's disintegration, likewise, is in the words and the music. In the Habanera, her entry aria, Carmen sings of his destruction - "If I love you, beware!" How could it end otherwise?
Hammerstein was to translate it for Carmen Jones,
I told you truly, if I love you
Dat's the end of you!
Getting to the top of the pops
Is the power of this fatalism, the pull of the story, one reason why Carmen comes out tops in the opera pops commentaries? It's her battle with Death? Or the battle of (her) freedom with (his) control? Or of course, a battle between the sexes? Look more widely at the music, and consider that argument. "Carmen’s music refuses to be contained. It is used to mercilessly manipulate Don José, who is obsessed with her. By giving Carmen unpredictable, disordered music, she is portrayed as the opposite of Don José."
She's one of the strongest female characters of opera, and also one of the most complex. Most female leads are thoroughly, predictably good. Tosca and both Leonoras are strong, committed and constant. Mimi and Violetta. like Cio-Cio San, are loveable victims - of social norms and poverty as well as disease. Carmen is intensely complicated, her fate is in her character, knotted to her commitment to freedom.
Mezzo Denyce Graves (above) says she's learned much about being a woman in the process of playing Carmen. "I'm a great admirer of this woman," Graves says. "I have drawn a lot of strength from who she is. I wish I could be more like her. She doesn't care. She really lives honestly, and that's attractive, I think." More to think about here.
And then there was Carmen Jones
Carmen Jones the musical arrived in 1943, set in the US South during the war. It was a passion project for Oscar Hammerstein II, early in his long career as a dramatist and lyricist, and was his only solo project after teaming up with composer Richard Rodgers. It's rarely mentioned now in bios and eulogies for Hammerstein that provide long lists of the hugely popular musicals he created with hugely popular current American composers. His family was steeped in opera, and presumably he knew Carmen. His career was faltering, with a long period without significant output - the triumph of “Show Boat” had been in 1925. But I can find no account of how he arrived at the idea of translating Bizet's opera, not only from French (the lyrics follow the themes of the original closely) but also from its historic and geographical locations. And while there are many accounts of his social values, there's none that I can find about his goals in taking the story of Carmen into a depiction of Afro-American life.
Perhaps a hint is in the insistence by those who knew him that unlike in classical opera, the story, and its dramatic whole, always took precedence over show - story-telling was as important as music and acting. Sondheim is quoted as saying "Oscar was trying to do something based on reality, instead of some kind of fairytale." Which takes us to the version of reality he showed in Carmen Jones.
A play about race?
The book and lyrics were completed in 1942, but Carmen Jones would premiere very successfully on Broadway, with an all-black cast, in December 1943, nine months after “Oklahoma!”. The film was a decade later (1954). The screenplay by Harry Kleiner was based on the lyrics and book by Hammerstein and like the Broadway show, set to the music (and much of the libretto) of Bizet's 1875 opera. The saga of the inception and success of this daring adaption is serious social history. It was produced and directed by Otto Preminger, who expected no financial support from the big film industry, but to his surprise found it from 20th Century Fox. It was also cleared by NAACP for the racial representation in the film.
There's history in the casting, too. Dorothy Dandridge (below) was the first African-American film star to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress - but her singing voice is dubbed by a 20 year-old Marilyn Horne. It was her first opera role. (Marilyn Horne became America's leading mezzo, and her roles later did include Carmen. Here's her recording of the Seguidilla.
Harry Belafonte was Joe, a soldier selected for flight school; his singing voice dubbed by LeVern Hutcherson. Here's their version of the Flower Song. Joe Adams as Husky Miller, was dubbed by Marvin Hayes. Here's their version of the toreador song - Stand up and Fight.
Pearl Bailey (left - she was Frankie), was the only lead who sang their own role. Here's her amazing performance of Beat out dat Rythm on a Drum. (Remember? It's the "Chanson Boheme", the Gypsy Song from start of Act 11 in the Bizet opera. Here's Met Opera's version with Elīna Garanča. )
A film about racial stereotypes?
For those who loved the musical, these days, it is a troubled love. There's no indication that Hammerstein saw any issues with a story about seduction and murder presented in this social context. But commentators since have remarked on the ways the behaviours, even the dialect-specified words, stereotype black culture. Certainly, his lyrics for Carmen Jones studiously set out common clichés of African American speech. Arguably, his libretto equates Georges Bizet's sexually liberated gypsy and her sexually liberated entourage with stereotypes of lower-class African American women. There are books on the subject, but not much disagreement. Interestingly, there's much less criticism of Hammerstein for his joyful portrait of these people than for his often saccharine songs about the good life in America.
James Baldwin clearly hated Carmen Jones. In Notes of a Native Son he wrote, “Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat at the same time – and then to peddle the results as ginger ale – has seldom produced anything more arresting than the 1955 production of Carmen Jones… the implicit parallel between an amoral Gypsy and an amoral Negro woman is the entire root idea of the show.” He sees the fantasy of Carmen Jones as a weird image of the black experience and the themes of sexuality and seduction as “sealed off” from reality by the exclusion of any white people. The result he finds “stifling: a wedding of the blank, lofty solemnity with which Hollywood so often approaches “works of art” and the really quite helpless condescension with which Hollywood has always handled Negroes.” Pearl Bailey, he argues, is “the only threat to the film’s lifeless reality”
Fate in the new context
The ending of this version of the Carmen story is just as predictable, the theme of fate as strong, as in the original. And Carmen is just as complex. The Southern US translation leaves nothing to imagination. Dat's love, she sings in the Habanera, finishing...
I told you truly, if I love you
Dat's the end of you!
And the card song? Here's the clip from the film
Plain as can be
Death's got his hand on me.
There ain't no use to run away from that old boy...
Ain't gonna lie, ain't gonna lie,
I look at life straight in the eye
Carmen Jones sings our fascination with the character. It's simply put, at the end of the card song:
While I kin fly aroun'
I'll do my flyin' high!
I'm gonna keep on livin'
Up to de day I die.
Carmen and the Undoing of Women: Remaking Carmen in recent times
Carmen may be not only the most popular but also the most adapted of operas. And it's also been central to the criticism of opera as "the undoing of women", celebrating their seduction and destruction by violence. The charge of course fits Carmen Jones as well as the Bizet original, though neither opera was in its time seen through the lens of women's rights.
Attempts to say something about this via recent productions of Carmen have been pretty unimpressive. A 2018 Florence production revised the final scene to highlight violence against women in modern Italy. Carmen grabs a gun from Don José and shoots him. More here about the production.
In the same year, Barrie Kosky disagreed with the Italian approach. “I don’t think by saying she kills him and survives really investigates in any serious way or complicated way the story of the opera. I don’t think opera is about who kills, who survives. There’s been three hours before that. Let’s be serious. Four hundred years of opera is a history of misogyny. Really! It’s all about hysterical women, sick women.” Instead, he reinstated "the very original idea of Bizet, a strange ending where the Carmen motif comes back. So it doesn’t finish with a dead woman and the weeping tenor, she comes back. Her music comes back. It’s about her.” Kosky's ROH Carmen was stabbed to death but then rose and shrugged at the audience. OperaWire did not approve. "What you are left with is a production in which a director flexes his stylistic muscles to hide the fact that he really has nothing substantial to say about the opera itself."
Or about the character, and her fascination?
In Hawaii, (our new opera company for the week) Carmen’s husband (?) was killed in a fight by José, and Escamillo was killed in the bullring. Carmen refused José’s offer, went with him as far as the place where the cards foretold that she would die.
Opera Australia added to attempts to remake Carmen in 2022, with a "rock'n'roll" themed production on Cockatoo Island that pleased few reviewers. Time Out concluded, "By catering to opera purists, while at the same time trying to invite new audiences and opera progressives with the promise of rock rebellion and motorbikes, this production of Carmen runs the risk of pleasing no one and discredits opera’s ability to be a radical, intensely moving and important artform. It fails to engage with the libretto and the stereotypes the story depends on in any meaningful way, and the “timeless” setting only makes the problems more obvious. It’s a shame that Opera Australia, one of the country's most well-funded arts companies, has wasted this opportunity to create something more radical. There’s just nothing punk about misogynistic and racist stereotypes, no matter how many mohawks you dress them in."
Lyn, updated 26/2/24
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