Originally printed in OPERA NEWS, March 22, 1997, Vol. 61, no. 13. Reprinted with permission.

The Carmen Myth
By James Conlon

Georges Bizet's last opera has earned its place in history because it has struck deeply into the emotions of audiences everywhere it has been heard. What and where it has struck continues to be debated, interpreted and reinterpreted. Carmen is unique: she is the only character to transcend the bounds of her operatic existence and evolve into an archetype, a popular and modern myth.

Many ancient myths have been set to music. Characters from Classical Greek, Roman or Nordic mythology have been the subject of great musical, dramatic, pictorial and literary settings. The story of Don Juan had been around in several forms before Mozart elevated his story to the sublime. Faust existed long before Goethe appropriated him for his magnum opus; many musical settings have tried to capture his spirit, only to fall short. Carmen, on the other hand, had no prehistory: she was perfectly realized the first time she was set to music. It is too facile to say that as temptress she is Eve, or a marionette of fate like countless Greek heroines.

Year after year, in theater after theater, new Carmens are turned out like autos off an assembly line. Ironically, the more this popular archetype gains universality, the more difficult this opera becomes to produce satisfactorily. Carmen's ascendancy to international recognition (at least in the opera world) was rapid and undisputed even though it failed initially at the Opéra Comique. How do we explain its immense popularity?

Jacques Barzun, writing on Romanticism, included 100 examples of the use of the term "Romantic," aiming to show that there is no agreement on its meaning. Yet the word is commonly used and retains its evocative power. Ask twenty-five people who Carmen is and you will have as many answers. Evil temptress, femme fatale, erotic demon for some, a model of emancipation for others.

If there is any doubt about the implicit misogyny of the narrator-author, one has to go no further than the Greek epigraph at the head of Prosper Mérimée's novella. Mérimée quotes the fifth-century B.C. poet Palladas: "Women are as bitter as bile; there are nevertheless two circumstances where they are pleasant: in bed and when they are dead."

Though conceived in a literature that reflects a specific era's racial, class and gender inequality, Carmen has become a symbol of disenfranchised voices everywhere. She is heroine to the poor in class-conscious nineteenth-century Europe, to women in a male-dominated world, to all minorities in racist societies. More than all this, she is the champion of liberated eroticism. Freud postulated that without the sublimation of the erotic, civilization cannot develop. Periodically the "overcivilized" reach back to their erotic roots. Individuals rebel, civilization seeks to regain those roots through whatever means necessary, including artistic. Carmen is a symbol to all civilized people of the triumph of the libertarian spirit and pure eroticism before the fall of mankind and the rise of civilization. She plays Venus to Micaela's Elisabeth, winning Don José's soul, assuring his and her damnation.

Nineteenth-century Europe, having subdued half the globe, proceeded to colonize and missionize, plunder and organize. The dangers of stagnation necessitated that writers and painters seek renewal from what they considered arcane distant cultures. Mérimée's novella is one of many examples of France's turning to exotic locales for artistic inspiration. Fascinated, jealous and fearful of the power of the "Other" they discovered, authors framed their findings like a picture. Spain, France's closest neighbor to the southwest, was seen as exotic. Gypsies and Jews inspired ambivalent emotions and were feared, disparaged and persecuted.

Mérimée discovered these Gypsy characters as if he were on safari, devouring this fascinating tale and trying to digest it by retelling it from the safer distance of his own culture. Bizet, steeped in this exoticism, summoned all his faculties and allowed them to coalesce in Carmen. This phenomenon was not limited to France. Verdi and Puccini also sought inspiration outside their own culture.

Many operatic attempts have been made to enthrone the femme fatale. Manon, Lulu, Thaïs, Salammbô, even Mélisande, are later examples of this genre, but none of these women have ascended to Carmen's Olympian stature of myth.

The obvious male counterpart is Don Giovanni. I once heard a roundtable discussion on the radio about what would happen if Don Giovanni met Carmen. A chatty, urbane repartee ensued, with general agreement that if someone were to "win" in this encounter, it certainly would be she. But a more important theme came out of this discussion: why are these two characters so important to us? One answer struck me as particularly interesting. Would it be fair to say that every man, on some conscious or unconscious level, would like to be Don Juan? Could the same be said for women and Carmen?

The two operas have little in common, except that both take place in Seville and deal with an archetypal main character. They are equally difficult to produce and have sired some disappointing results. But Carmen "wins," to borrow a silly word from that not-so-silly radio discussion. She wins not just the battle of the sexes but also the reality test. As Kierkegaard observed, Don Juan belongs to a universe of zero. He is an impossibility, a very tall tale, who has been said to exist only in his impact on the lives of others. He is many things to many people but nothing to himself. He is empty, and his myth begins to wither with age. But Carmen is real and grows more admirable as time goes on. The shock of her unscrupulous, illegal and immoral behavior has already diminished, seen now in the context of her time and environment. She has become a heroine, not only because of her charismatic sexuality but because she accepts the rules of the game. When the final card is turned up, she bravely plays out her fate.

Don Juan has his conquests and is nothing else. Carmen is complete in herself and needs nothing further. He desires all others because he is nothing. She is desired by others because she is complete, fulfilled and self-defined.

A myth is a bridge to the transcendent. Carmen and her story are now in this realm. Artur Schnabel's maxim "Great music is music that is better than it can possibly be played" is eminently applicable to the question of why Carmen is so difficult to produce successfully: she is too big for any one performance. One interpretation can emphasize only some of her many aspects, to the exclusion of others. There are many fine Carmens in the world, but none who can fulfill all the expectations of every individual in every audience. She is simply about too much. Bizet outlived Carmen's premiere by only three months (to the day). Like his protagonist, he tempted fate and paid the price with an early death. It is tantalizing to reflect on what he might have written had he lived longer. At this young age, Verdi had yet to complete La Traviata or Simon Boccanegra, Wagner Tristan und Isolde or Die Meistersinger. Bizet has the distinction of transforming a character who might not have outlived her author's time into a spirit capable of multiple reincarnations.

Ferruccio Busoni, reflecting on the act of composition, observed that it is not so much creating something out of nothing as discovering something that exists in the universe, and rendering it tangible. One has the feeling that Carmen has existed since time immemorial in the universe, and that Prosper Mérimée and Georges Bizet were the first to discover her. Now, like a mythological goddess, she is revealed and rediscovered over and over again, in every rehearsal, performance and discussion of the opera that bears her name.