Two veteran opera-goers of my acquaintance reacted identically to the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. One called it “the worst thing I’ve seen at the Met in thirty years.” The other declared it the “nadir” of the company’s 141-year history. I had to go.
A classic description of this opera, by Friedrich Nietzsche, extols it as the apex of “Mediterranean” genius, refuting the dark miasma of Germanic art. Nietzsche called it a “return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, virtue!” Its music “liberates the spirit.” It “gives wings to thought.” Bizet’s exoticized Spain is sublimely lucid, streaming with sunlight, hot with perfumed indolence.
Carrie Cracknell’s Met Carmen inflicts black skies, barbed wire, and machine guns. The act one workplace is a guarded facility all of whose female employees wear pink uniforms. The soldiers outside are joined by vagrants (who however sing as if soldiers). The act two gypsy song is danced (sort of) within the confines of the cargo hold of a moving tractor trailer truck. Later in the same act, Carmen’s solo dance of seduction is positioned atop a gasoline pump, a perch so precarious she needs a helping hand from Jose (whom she is defying). The act three set (Bizet’s “wild spot in the mountains”) is the trailer truck overturned, rotating circularly on its side. Dirt and grime are omnipresent.
According to the program book, Cracknell has transplanted Carmen to “a contemporary American industrial town.” Bizet’s Seville cigarette factory is now an “arms factory.” The outcome is a “contemporary American setting” where “the issues at stake seem powerfully relevant.” Carmen and her co-workers are oppressed in a man’s world.
In short, this is a revisionist reading reconstruing plot and characters. And yet Carmen is an opera, not a play. Whatever one makes of the logic of Cracknell’s strategy, it negates the poetry of the music at every turn.
Regietheater, now ubiquitous on world opera stages, was largely born in Germany after World War II – and no wonder. Heilige Kunst seemed, if not discredited, clouded with questions the loudest of which afflicted the operas of Richard Wagner. My own first exposure came at the Bayreuth festival of 1977 – about which I have written extensively (having been sent by the New York Times). Encountering Gotz Friedrich’s Tannhäuser (new in 1972), Patrice Chereau’s Ring of the Nibelung (new in 1976), and Harry Kupfer’s The Flying Dutchman (of which I reviewed the premiere), I encountered a consistency of highly rehearsed operatic acting, wedded to a thoroughness of directorial engagement, wholly new to me. Friedrich’s Tannhäuser was an anti-fascist polemic. Chereau’s method was to assume nothing. He found himself fascinated by the guile of Mime and Alberich, and disgusted by Wotan’s more complex opportunism; he gave him grasping gestures and a scowling face; he dressed him as Wagner.
Kupfer, too, knew what he was doing. I was stunned by his conceit that the main action of the opera was hallucinated by the deranged Senta. I found her character fortified — and also that of Erik, who understood his beloved all too well. The trade-off was a shallower Dutchman, reduced to an idealized figment of imagination. But what most lingered was Kupfer’s ingenious delineation of twin stage-worlds coincident with twin sound-worlds. As I previously wrote in this space: “Kupfer’s handing of musical content was an astounding coup. The opera’s riper, more chromatic stretches were linked to the vigorously depicted fantasy world of Senta’s mind; the squarer, more diatonic parts were framed by the dull walls of Daland’s house, which collapsed outward whenever Senta lost touch. In the big Senta-Dutchman duet, where Wagner’s stylistic lapses are particularly obvious, Kupfer achieved the same effect by alternating between Senta’s fantasy of the Dutchman and the stolid real-life suitor (not in Wagner’s libretto) that her father provided. Never before had I encountered an operatic staging in which the director’s musical literacy was as apparent or pertinent.”
It was only a matter of time before something similar happened at the Met. The breakthrough moment came in 1979 with a re-imagining of The Flying Dutchman by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. But the breakthrough was careless and superficial. By staging the opera as if dreamt not by the high-strung, headstrong Senta, but by the ancillary Steersman, Ponnelle gained nothing. And the dreamscape itself resembled a high school auditorium at Halloween.
One may ask – one should ask – what purposes may be served transporting historically conditioned Germanic Regietheater to the US. I can think of two. The first, as at Bayreuth, is an exercise in taking a known opera and casting a different light upon it. But nowadays the majority of American operagoers are newcomers, or relatively so: this rationale is cancelled. The second is to discover new “relevance.” But, consulting my long and checkered operatic memory, I cannot think of a single production that by resituating time and place likely enhanced the engagement of audiences new to the work.
Earlier this season, the Met revived the most literal, least revised Wagner staging in memory: the Otto Schenk/Gunther Schneider Siemssen Tannhäuser of 1972. I wrote a series of four blogs opened by thousands of readers. The first read in part:
“Many points of conjunction between what the ear hears and the eye sees are unforgettably clinched. The action begins with the erotic Venusberg. Wagner asks for ‘a wide grotto which, as it curves towards the right in the background, seems to be prolonged till the eye loses it in the distance. From an opening in the rocks, through which the daylight filters dimly, a greenish waterfall plunges down the whole height of the grotto, foaming wildly over the rocks; out of the basin that receives the water a brook flows to the further background; it there forms into a lake, in which Naiads are seen bathing, while Sirens recline on its banks.’ Schneider-Siemssen wisely doesn’t attempt all of this – but he poetically renders enough of it to get the job done. At the climax of the Venusberg orgy, Wagner makes everything suddenly and cataclysmically vanish, to be replaced by ‘a green valley. . . blue sky, bright sun. In the foreground is a shrine to the Virgin. A Shepherd Boy is blowing his pipe and singing.’ A credulous rendering of this transformation, abetted by Wagner’s musical imagination, proves as breathtaking today as half a century ago.
“At the opera’s close, Tannhäuser expires alongside Elisabeth’s bier, and young pilgrims arrive with a flowered staff betokening his foregiveness. Nowadays, this ending is variously revised. It is considered toxic or tired. But faithfully conjoined with the reprise of the Pilgrims’ Chorus, it remains overwhelming. . . .
“The arts are today vanishing from the American experience. There is a crisis in cultural memory. How best keep Tannhäuser alive? Flooded with neophytes, the Metropolitan Opera audience is very different from audiences just a few decades ago. What I observed at the end of Tannhäuser was an ambushed audience thrilled and surprised. The Met is cultivating newcomers with new operas that aren’t very good. A more momentous longterm strategy, it seems to me, would be to present great operas staged in a manner that reinforces – rather than challenges or critiques or refreshes – the intended marriage of words and music. For newcomers to Wagner, an updated Tannhäuser would almost certainly possess less ‘relevance’ than Schenk’s 46-year-old staging – if relevance is to be measured in terms of sheer visceral impact.”
In short: there are lessons to be learned from the new Carmen. But it would take a brave artistic initiative, flaunting fashion, to apply them.
All this I pondered while enduring acts one and two last Wednesday night. After that, I discovered that Diego Matheuz’s gestures of hand and baton, in the pit, were more eloquent than anything to be seen onstage. In fact, the musical highlight of the performance was Matheuz’s shaping of Micaela’s aria, and the poetic virtuosity of the accompanying French horns. I am certain I would have enjoyed the Micaela and Don Jose – Ailyn Perez and Michael Fabiano – under other circumstances.
The Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 Carmen deserves to be remembered, and answered, as a seminal lesson in waste – and this at a time when the American arts are starving.
To read a sequel blog (“A Way Forward”), click here.
It is not just the MET’s new Carmen.
The new Lucia, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflote all are travesties. If these productions were the first operas I had ever seen, I would never have come back to the MET.
Absolutely right, I have watched the Met replace some great productions with garbage. “Toscca,of course, comes instantly to mind. Not the most exciting i, but it was still great and a classic. While on about Zefirelli, his “Fslstaff was far superior to the current, Same comments on Ming Cho Lees “Boris”” O’Hearn’s “Rosenkavalier”, Siempssen“
“Hoffman “
AMEN! What a shameful travesty the Met has become. It started its downfall when it lost its respect for the voice. Would a Caballe,, a Sutherland, or a Marilyn Horne been cast in this generation? HELL no. They sacrificed the voices for thinner women who had inferior voices., ripping the soul of the music in doing so.
They added schlocky operas like this and tried to call it ART. Kind of like putting lipstick on a pig., guess what,The Met? It’s still a pig!
So tragic and so sad….and a huge embarrassment for the Met who used to be the gold standard for Voice. Not any more. Oh, and it’s corrupt from the top to the bottom. Why hasn’t Domingo been shaken down from his throne for the many women he’s harassed, chased, or used his power to influence many an outcome Anywhere else but the Met he’d be in jail by now.. But not at THIS Met.
I just hope all the guilty ones who contributed (Jonathan *cough* Friend) will all be front and center when it implodes. So sad.
I disagree. I think the new production brought relevance to a story of emotion. There is a huge hurdle to overcome in attracting the “rap” generation of music to classical music, let alone opera. Period pieces, regardless of genre that are successful seem to rely on updated dialog and music. Opera must rely on staging to attract young audiences. I salute the MET for it’s daring.
You couldn’t possibly be more accurate! I agree wholeheartedly.
The Met (since the 80s) has become an absolute joke. I no longer donate to an organization that has ceased to respect the beauty of the human voice and by doing so, has done a great disservice to opera itself with these laughable (if it weren’t so absolutely tragic) performances.
It’s so shameful-and it will effect generations of voice and opera to come as a result. And along with the tragic loss of standards through these creations of “art” along with the shocking lowering of standards in both vocal development and vocal beauty is a truly tragic loss. That loss has left opera careening into a pile of mediocrity by ignoring its core. The beauty of the voice. Would a Caballe, a Sills, a Sutherland, or a Sills even be considered for today’s stages? Hell no. Shame on any and all who contributed to this piteous downfall. If you want to follow the trail, look to those in power who haven’t any real knowledge of or true respect for the voice.
Those who think these ridiculous puppet shows are necessary to compensate for the vocal standards that they helped create by thinking the voice takes a back seat to the way a singer looks! They don’t.
People still expect true Artistry. People will never become bored by TRUE artistry. The MET no longer respects or promotes true artistry. Instead they resort to these ghastly productions that are huge embarrassments to the box office and to the industry itself.
Boy, do I have stories about people that would curl your hair! Unfortunately there is not room on this or any other forum to explain it accurately. Just think your worst (especially about people whose actions are coming to light in the media (cough) now and then multiply it by about 90%. That’s the cover up number. I’ve witnessed it in person and couldn’t believe it could be true. Enjoy your spiral downward MET, no one deserves it more than you.
The post war era 1945-1990 of the great singing in history is over! What can we expect when today’s world and singers are different. Enjoy the beauty of the music and orchestras and hope for some interesting voices once and a while
It’s not only Carmen it’s Lucia d Lamermoor also. I think if the composer could see thi horrible pantomime they woul drop dead all over again. Works were written by the composers to be respected not to be converted in bad shows
Retire Gelb, and perhaps the MET may return to the institution it once was.
Thank you for finding the middle ground in your assessment of Regietheater. There are always going to be productions of operas updated for relevance. I don’t think this is bad. There’s a tendency to vilify Regietheater wholesale, forgetting that there are many marvelous examples of it. Regarding the stories operas tell, the more universal they are, the more adaptable–without the need to coddle a first-time opera-goer. A story either works or it doesn’t. Regietheater isn’t just about updating; the better ones include powerful Persononregie and intense dramaturgical preparation. I think of Peter Sellars’ Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, or Barrie Kosky’s Bayreuth production of Meistersinger. Or Dimitri Tcherniakov’s brilliant staging of Carmen in Aix-en-Provence and many many others. These productions turn opera into exciting theater. Zurich Opera’s recent Wagner Ring Cycle revival (free until June 15) is another example.
Nietzsche was being childishly contrary in his elevation of Carmen over Wagner. It’s not that Carmen isn’t a great opera, but it loses out in Nietzsche’s apples-vs.-oranges estimation of it over Wagner. At the time, Wagner was becoming a world star. Nietzsche no longer had exclusive access to his mentor. What’s worse, at the first Bayreuth, he saw all the sycophantic young men to whom he could be compared, and was revolted. Der Fall Wagner is a classic case of Freudian rejection of the father, not the best appraisal of Bizet’s Carmen.
Brooks is mostly right about Nietzsche, and partly right about the Regietheater examples cited with approval – but the problem is that they are massively outnumbered, probably by a ratio of something like 50 to 1, by productions that offer little or nothing to admire, little or nothing to illuminate the work, and meanwhile shut out the possibility–previously available in all productions whether brilliant or mediocre–that spectators might develop their own insights and reactions to the drama. Those are strangled in their cradle by the insistence of the director on his or her own insights, which are plastered so gaudily in front of the original content that spontaneous reaction to that content is all but impossible.
And this was inevitable when the achievement of Chéreau was interpreted not as an individual phenomenon to be admired or debated, but as a new Standard Operating Procedure, available to the talented and the untalented alike. Personally I do admire that Ring cycle, and found the Girard “Parsifal” at the Met riveting, and have seen a few strong examples in between — about one in fifty. The rest range from undermining the opera to ruining it entirely, and the trade-off has not been worth it. Opera administrators need eventually to acknowledge that they made a catastrophic wrong turn starting back in the 70s and 80s. What’s going on now is manifestly failing to create a new generation of opera-lovers large enough, or devoted enough to the artform, to sustain its institutions. Leaders who think the solution is an increased dose of the same medicine need to be replaced.
The other loss, barely even mentioned: the complete absence of opera staged by theatrically capable directors *without* rewrites and conceptualizations – because under the new normal, any director skillful enough to put a strong imprint on a show *expects* carte blanche to rewrite it or to subsume it in his/her commentary. The emergence of some directors who have that skill, and are passionate about using it within the confines of animating and embodying the text before them, is the best hope for a much-needed course correction.
I fell in love with opera in my 40s when I had more time and financial means to go. I was fortunate to see regular productions of what was then called the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I’’m grateful that these were classic traditional productions.. I’ve never “bought in” to the notion of updating. A beautiful production is a beautiful production no matter what decade you’re performing it in. That’s what new opera is for— like the brilliant ones by Missy Mazzoli’ and Rene Orth. Leave the classic, older operas alone, please.. Fortunately, the Met’s orchestra is outstanding, no matter what..
I saw it and enjoyed it. As did a friend. I see maybe 2-3 operas a year, not much I guess, but I’d seen traditional stagings of Carmen before. I hope they hold on to it for years to come.
The transfer from Spain to present-day Texas–with its Carmen in cowboy boots, selfie-taking rodeo boys, an 18-wheeler, red convertible, and pickup trucks onstage–was thrilling. The shift from cigarette to gun factory made sense and was appropriate to the work. And the LED lights as scenery were spare, but convincing and dynamic–shifting from highway lights to stadium seating.
Spanish culture is all over the globe, and the opera’s new setting was one of those brilliant, it’s-about-time gestures.
Yeah, I love the Zefferelli Boheme and the Bartlett Sher Barber of Seville, but I also love the Met’s Akhenaten and its Porgy and Bess, its Julie Taymor Magic Flute and their Hansel and Gretel and this Carmen.
And what about the total and insistent perversion of La Forza del Destino, which corrupts the succor and refuge of the monastery and tra storms it into a hell of sadistic monks who beat Leonora, after which a vision of the Virgin (to whom she sings La Virgine degli Angeli) appears as a harlot. This, I suppose is the “logical” progression from her being slapped so hard by Padre Guardiano, when “welcoming” her that he makes her face bleed and having her grovel on the floor after her habit is thrown on the floor.by the usually comic figure of Fra Melitone. It is easy to avoid some of the modern new “operas” at the Met because one knows the libretti. It is quite another to expect to see on stage what the composer and librettist (in this case Verdi and Piave) wrote being rewritten and intentionally perverted in order to offend audiences. R.I.P. grand opera at the Met.
So true and so sad.
Regietheater. is not all it’s cracked up to be vis a vis “growing” new audience. If the staging effects and visual stimuli take me , the listener, away from the music, I’m not buying into it. Also once supertitles became a standard part of live performance the problem with the libretto and onstage action being exclusive make operagoing more of a “challenge” than I like when spending money and time at the theatre.
I’ve always felt that the impulse to modernize operas is more an expression of distaste and distrust of the past.. In my schools (long ago) we were taught to look at the past as different in order to learn from it, to become more tolerant and understanding of human nature, and at the same time to recognize a commonality of feeling. But today, it seems, people would rather hate the past than learn from it. The closed mind is the fashion today.
Sadistic young stage directors are to blame for ruining opera every where. In Berlin last month Nixon in China was grossly obscene. People booed at the curtain calls.
Opera used to represent beauty.
Who is going to donate the Met anymore?
Carmen was absolutely hideous.
What has been happening throughout the major opera houses worldwide is not a new breed of innovative staging. It is a resurgence of Dadaism which is trying to inject deliberate irrationality and destroy traditional artistic values for the ego of young staging directors. It is outrageous infringement of intellectual ideals and artistic values put forwarded by great composers. The worst examples are the opera houses in German speaking countries (such as Munich, Wien, ….) and now other opera houses incl. Met are catching up. I stopped going to Opera House these days and no longer subscribe financial support. At the same time, I started to collect all DVD’s and BluRay’s for opera performances done with traditional staging before they disappear.