LA TRAGEDIE DE CARMEN
Yet in 1981 theater director Peter Brook—working with conductor Marius Constant and Jean-Claude Carrière, a playwright noted for his collaborations with film director Luis Buñuel—shortened the opera “to focus on the intense interactions, the tragedy of four people.” Presumably the abridgment was allowed because the rights to the opera had expired and permission from the Bizet estate was not needed. In any case, fidelity to the composer’s musical design was never an issue for Brook, who declared he wanted to convey the dramatic core of Prosper Mérimée’s book, on which the libretto is based.
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Brook’s version, La Tragedie de Carmen, was given its local premiere earlier this year by Lyric Opera’s Center for American Artists. The same production, a pet project of the center’s new director, Andrew Foldi, was presented at Grant Park two weekends ago and at the University of Chicago last weekend.
When Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy wrote the opera’s libretto some 30 years after the novella’s publication in 1845, they had to tone down the licentiousness for the bourgeois audience of the Opera-Comique. They also added several characters and scenes for dramatic reasons. The prim and proper Micaela, for example, was created as a contrast to the sultry Carmen. Carmen’s shadowy lover was turned into Escamillo, a bragging bullfighter. A fortune-telling scene heightened the sense of doom and made Carmen more vulnerable.
The single wood-frame set by Scott Marr was simple and functional, as were the costumes collected by Marta Justus. The 15 members of the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Randall Behr, conductor of the original Lincoln Center production, played rather well and enthusiastically. Their sound was particularly convincing when it suggested the tawdriness of a cabaret band. But even the good points of this production weren’t enough. Carmen condensed is Carmen diluted.
