In 1979, French philosopher Catherine Clément was one of the first scholars to track troubling tropes in opera, pointing out how many females — the roles, not the singers — end up murdered, stalked or abused in our favorite compositions. Carmen is the most famous. George Bizet’s 1875 musical retelling Prosper Mérimée’s novella is both a continuously compelling story of jealousy, seduction and murder and also packed to the gills with musical bangers. It’s easy, today, with Carmen now entrenched in the established canon, to overlook that it was considered so shocking at the time that one of the directors commissioning the work, Adolphe de Leuven, resigned his post at the Opéra-Comique before its premiere in Paris.
Lotte de Beer’s new retelling at the Volksoper renovates in a pointed way a beloved work that has become conventionalized in performance over time. She breaks the fourth wall, disrupts casting and aesthetic norms, and – least comfortably – holds a mirror up to an audience excited to effectively see a woman murdered on stage. Whether or not art imitates life or life imitates art, she seems to say, what are we all doing here?
From the opening announcement before curtain the game is afoot, a chirpy disembodied voice (de Beer) explaining that because smoking is no longer allowed to be depicted on stage, the staging has been adapted. Fortunately, the announcement continues, depicting femicide is still permitted. And while the bulk of the cast – soldiers, cigarette girls and bullfighters – all play their assigned roles dutifully, from the get-go this Carmen is busy uncompromisingly exposing the tale’s dirty underbelly. She rolls her eyes as Escamillio (Josef Wagner) is covered in fawning, sexy women after his opening aria, spins around backdrops and kicks over props to reveal them as scenery (Christof Hetzer's designs), pulls back curtains to reveal theater audiences behind, and teaches the children’s chorus how to smoke.
There is a certain body and costuming type that is almost immediately recognizable as Carmen, something along the lines of ‘sexy gypsy’ Halloween costume that would have been popular at sorority parties in the 1990s. Carmen is generally cast as vaguely southern: long, dark hair, pouting, corseted, dripping with sex, a holdover by-product of 19th-century exoticism. Vocally, Carmens are ‘supposed’ to flaunt the deep, burnished mezzo-soprano vocal timbre equated with knowing sensuality in Romantic opera. De Beer’s Carmen, stunningly delivered by Katia Ledoux, is different by design. She sheds her work clothes (Jorine van Beek's costumes) after the prelude and spends most of the opera in an unapologetic, baggy black pantsuit, short curls and a no-nonsense attitude. Instead of dripping with sex, she sparkles, wryly emanating winning charisma, uncompromising self-awareness and strength.
Vocally, Ledoux had heft and range, but also a great deal of flexibility and spin in her instrument, but there was also a roomy spaciousness to her sound that seemed more accessible and human than your average Carmen. Her Carmen is not just compelling, but also smart – and she sees her fate set long before Don José (Tomislav Mužek) plunges his knife in, realizing that it is not just him that has condemned her to die, but that her death is exactly what opera audiences are craving. After cheering and applauding Micaëla (the virtuous, white, Catholic girl) the opera-watching ‘audience’ chorus gathers around a stage within a stage to close, singing the toreador reprise not while watching a bullfight, but while actively keeping her from escaping, making her violent murder just that much more nauseating.
While the casting was otherwise respectable, if comparatively underwhelming, Ledoux carried the production and was the only character – vocally or dramatically – drawn in three-dimensions. While Don José’s journey often becomes the focus, here all others feel like stock figures next to the title role. The second hero of the evening was Ben Glassberg who briskly led the Volksoper orchestra through Bizet’s score with crisp elegance and style.
Bizet’s opera is so ubiquitous it no longer has the ability to shock or often even move its audiences or critics. De Beer’s production does both with clarity, style and without resorting to gimmickry. In a country with one of the worst femicide rates in the EU, this may not be the Carmen production Vienna prefers, but it is probably the one it needs.
