Carmen, the Lucid Enchantress
In “The Libretto as Literature”, Ulrich Weisstein criticizes the tradition which assigns an inferior role to the libretto in the economy of opera. At its best, the libretto was commended for its capacity to “serve” the music well. At its worst, it was disparaged for its dissonance with music, for “stifling” the melodic form with excessive wordiness. Either way, the libretto’s subservience to music was an indisputable and implicit matter in most of the Romantic approaches to opera. This question becomes all the more important when considering the changes that occur in the transposition from libretto to opera. For instance, one might ask, in Romantic vein, - is there anything the libretto can express other than what music, dance, etc already (and single-handedly) do? Following Weinstein’s advice, I propose to offer an interpretation of opera in order to account for the importance of spoken and sung words. In this paper, I analyze how the interplay of both music and text (and dance, bodily presence, etc.) generates a specific image of Carmen as “femme fatale”, as well as determines her reception by the audience of the nineteenth century opéra-comique.
Susan McClary notes, in “The Musical Languages of Carmen” that “Carmen revolved dramatically around the encounters among these discourses: […] between “Oriental” and European, between French lucidity and Wagnerian excess.” (McClary, 58) This passage, while summarizing the opera’s significant tensions, also accounts for some of the reasons of Carmen’s radical “otherness”: her identification with the Orient and with exoticism, as opposed to the European norm, embodied by Carmen’s foil, Micaela; her association with the irrational, the excessive, the Dionysian, as opposed to the rational, the serene, the Apollonian. Nevertheless, McClary also remarks that “If Carmen were consistently just an “Oriental”, she would not pose nearly so great a threat” and attributes the danger inspired by Carmen to the collapse of the boundaries of “class, race and sexual propriety”, which were deeply embedded in the mentality of the time. I would now like to add and discuss another perspective in the interpretation of Carmen’s “otherness” in light of the horizon of expectations of the 19th century public of the opéra comique.
As an Oriental, exotic personage, we could, at a first glance, associate Carmen with Dionysian excess and irrationality. The songs that Bizet skillfully adapted from the cabaret “numéros” to fabricate a musical equivalent of exoticism for his audience, as well as the provocative dances accompanying the Habanera and the Seguidilla help create this dimension of Carmen’s otherness. It is through her singing and dancing that she becomes a true enchantress, inflicting madness and unreason on the ones she chooses to charm – in act I, Don José says he feels “comme un homme ivre” (Carmen libretto, 9). However, this is not the whole story. In a Dionysian ritual, all the participants have to lose their senses, to be driven mad. Or, Carmen never really becomes irrational. Even when she says, after being asked whether she is in love with Don José, that she is “amoureuse à perdre l’esprit” , she then adds that it is only a cursory moment – “ce soir l’amour passe avant le devoir” (Carmen libretto, 12)– and promises to join her “bande” afterwards.
One of the passages that best capture and concentrate Carmen’s image as a lucid enchantress is the tavern scene. Her song seems to have ‘magic’ powers, causing the bodies to move and dance: “sur cette étrange musique les zingarellas se levaient…” (Carmen libretto, 12). Her detachment and objectivity are signified by the mode of her narration – for once, she is the one telling the story – and also by her bodily presence on the stage – not only does she not dance, but she also seems to be on a somewhat different spatial plane. The vocabulary she uses to describe the zingaras’ ecstatic dance is evocative of the Dionysian trance: “ardentes, folles, enfiévrées, elles se laissaient, enivrées, emporter par le tourbillon” . In this scene we witness Carmen’s dual nature at work: she is the inducer of unreason in others, but she remains in control of her senses. This combination of excess and lucidity seems to confer great, even super-human powers. The 19th century public of the opéra comique must have felt a certain amount of dread and anguish faced with such overwhelming, untamable powers, as the ones displayed by the lucid enchantress, especially since Carmen’s otherness also denied them any form of identification from the start.
If, on the one hand, her Dionysian side is signified through music and dance (ethnicity and appearance too), her detached, Apollonian persona is suggested through the words she utters. We can therefore see how the words contribute to the same extent as music, dance, etc., to the creation of Carmen’s image as the radically dangerous other.