Carmen: Gender politics in Opera

Carmen is not an ordinary love story between two people that happen their destinies are collide and both end with tragic death.

Screenshot from Ross movie Carmen (1984).
Credit: YouTube

Carmen is one of the most popular and successful operas of all time because it has limitless potential for reinterpretation. It is one of the large numbers of fantasies involving race, class and gender that circulated in nineteenth-century European culture. It is an opera in four acts by the French composer Georges Bizet. the libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovico Halévy. It is based on the novella of the same title by the French writer Prosper Mérimée. Produced and first staged at Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875.

Study of this opera is from the perspective of the production of the classic film of the opera made in 1984 by the Italian film director FRANCESCO ROSI.Rosis’s version of Carmen is the most faithful to and most subversive of the opera as it is usually understood. faithfull because the production presents the musical score more or less without deviation-he does not rewrite or update the action, as do most revisionist adaptations.(MacClary 2002 :141).

playful & rebellious

Carmen is a playful and capricious gypsy girl, rebellious female believes in the freedom and knows no restriction in practicing her life with all her wishes.

Officer Don Jose arrests her after a knife fight with her co-worker in a cigar factory in the city. Carmen entices Don Jose and persuades him to let her escape in exchange for a night love. He falls in love with her and forsakes his military duties.

Carmenrushs into the arms of a young bullfighter

Race Issues

As she is a gipsy girl, thus, she is marked from the beginning with alterity and enmity. The battlefield itself, of course, none other than her body and who shall own it. There is also the issue of the otherness of Micaëla - the blue eye girl from the north - in contrast to the dark-eyed, sexier women of Andalusia. As for the class issue, it exposed the status of the factory girls compared with the soldiers and the bullfighter. Carmina Charecterkindels both fascination and suspicion. MacClary (1992: 57)

His love for her increases, pushing him to abandon his childhood sweetheart, the innocent and beautiful girl Micaëla, but Carmen starts weary with Jose who restricts her freedom and stands a barrier in front of her new adventures that she yearns for, she tries to desert him and rush into the arms of a young bullfighter Escamillo, but this time she pays her life as a price for her freedom, Don Jose kills her in a rage of jealousy, then mourns in front of her lying body on the floor "I killed the girl I love", and he himself condemned to die.

Caught between Two

Does Carmen loves Jose? It is not clear. She does not comment on  herself, she only states repeatedly her unyielding will to remain free.  She does choose him by throwing him a flower in the first act. May be  because he is different, he ignores her, even he doesn’t look at her.  She never attempts to give reasons for her behaviour.She is disappointed several times by don Jose’s indecisiveness, and  mocks him sharply. But Jose is a man for whom love is not a game, and  who is so deadly serious about it. (ENO 2011: P.41 )

Carmen singin Habanira.

Credit: YouTube

Oriental rhythms

Carmen is charactrised regularly through Oriental codes. herl music express itself through dance rhythms which are calculated to involve the body in a specific set of sensation and desire responses. The hips swing, the body twisted, the head shook, the arms are moved, and a successive series of sensual euphoria is what represents the foundations of oriental dance. In Mérimée’s novel, Don Jose describes his first impression of Carmen who contemplated her swaying hips, and these are the main elements of most of Carmen's music during the first two chapters. Thus, Carmen has been identified through her alluring body. (McClary 2002.55)

Carmen’s main roles are not indicated by its texts nor by the traditional operatic conventions, but by the designation of the dance type: “Habanera” and “Seguidilla”, whose rhythms indicate that she is fully aware of the charm and importance of her body. Indeed, before she starts singing, she begins engaging her lower body in movement by swinging her hips in response she arouses desire which necessitates her immediate identification as a potentially dangerous female, giving enough signals to convince us that this music is 'Spanish' (gipsy), and establishing, musically, one of the central events in Carmen's seduction of Don Jose.

In Mérimée’s novel, Don Jose describes his first impression of Carmen who contemplated her swaying hips, and these are the main elements of most of Carmen's music during the first two chapter. Thus, Carmen has been identified through her alluring body. (McClary (2002: 55)

**Bizet and Carmen Music**
Carmen music is very close to Spanish
, North African and Arabic music. it is because the opera events were taking place in Seville in Andalusia under the Arabs. These regions were interchangeable in the Orientalism movement that prevailed in Europe during the nineteenth century. But Spanish viewers believe the opera difinetly french.
One of the sources of Carmen music, especially the Habanera (Dance from Havana), was the “El Ariglito” song by the Spanish composer Sebastian Yaradier, who collected Latin music during his many tours there. He picked up this popular folk song, Probably, from a Paris Cabaret at that time.
McLary 1992: 52

Ideological Implications

But describing Carmen's music simply as “oriental” or “Spanish” is not satisfactory enough, because such an interpretation avoids the ideological implications of orientalism, and its misogyny. Carmen's music is immersed in all of these things.(McClary.S. 2002:57) Carmen’s “seguidilla” danceing and singing represent an even more complex fusion of codes and porposes. its surface can be described in such a way as make it seem like stoch Orientalism: compelling dance rhythms, mysterious modal inflections, alteration betwwn stasis and “irrasional” harmonic moves.” (MacClary 1992:56)

When her theme appears for the first time, it accompanies the inflammatory and exciting entrance of Carmen when sings her provocative “Habanera” song on the untameable nature of love ("L'amour est un oiseau rebelle". Even when she reveals herself in response to the pleading male choir, her music classifies her as a slippery and dangerous woman. The song freely celebrates sexual pleasure and promiscuity. As the opera events unfold, even more, the death becomes a sign of her cruel fate.

Sentimental Love

The character of Micaëla, Don Joses's childhood sweetheart, represents Christianity, family bonds, legality and sentimental love. as a passive girl who knows no kiss other than of the mother one, her musical message is simple, lyrical, and sweet. She shares with Don Jose a musical vocabulary of tender and intense lyricism that is utterly antithetical to carmen's songs and dances. When she sings for José on their first meeting, her melody has a rhythm free from body movements, innocent of physicality. Her subsequent duet with Jose has a lyrical line, its notes moving by scale steps rather than leaps. In terms of its key, it moves immediately towards the dominant, and it seems to strive upwards while Carmen's theme has earth pulls its shape is always downward-moving. (Smith , R .2007: 231)

Micaëla character was designed to serve as a foil to carmen herself, and her sexlesness pervades her portrayal.(MacClary 1992:41)

fate in balance

It is Don Jose’s fate that is in balance between good and bad women. As her charms are irresistible, Jose is helpless and cannot be held responsible for his actions. So, killing her becomes his last desperate act, as a necessary measure to reassert order and control. So he is to be pitied and sympathised with; she must be the one to be blamed. (McClary 2002. p. 58)

ectoplasmic character

But equally, one could argue that one of the structural features of the  opera is the defeat of sentimental love by a vital passion. Rather than the weak soldier who renounced his duties to follow a dangerous seducer, Don Jose is a man whose fatal vocation compels him to abandon a pale sentimental love, a banal occupations and to plunge into what he does not know-the outlaw world passion. Don Jose begins to live when he meets Carmen, Love acts here as a second birth, transforming a rather ectoplasmic character into a full-blooded man. One could argue that if he shows weaknes, it is not by following Carme but by being unable to follow her completely. He returns to his dying mother instead of  responding to Carmen’s vital challenge: he is not a free man so he  loses her. Indeed, it is the death she finally challenges by accepting, despite all warnings from her friends, to meet don Jose, She simply has to do it to remain herself.

Carmen (Julia Magnes) and Don Jose (Placido Domingo) in the final scene of Francesco Rosi film (1984) when Carmen refuses to return to him and he kills her in the bullring.

Credit: YouTube