13
Opéra comique, the crucible
Opéra comique, comic opera in French, in the nineteenth century: what comes to mind? If talking about the earlier decades, it’s mostly a now-forgotten repertory – light, operetta-style works with lively set pieces, some sentimental moments, lots of spoken dialogue. Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo (1830) might, if time were short, stand in for the entire genre. The laughing bandit, Fra Diavolo (tenor), is a dashing though murderous highwayman who gets to sing a bravura aria about the life enjoyed by robber chiefs; he poses as a marquis but is eventually foiled by a young officer called Lorenzo (tenor), who of course is in love with and loved by the soprano lead Zerline, who is actually the daughter of … And so on. Supporting characters include further brigands, a pair of eccentric English aristocrats and two choruses – soldiers on one side of the law, bandits on the other. Another signature work, Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa (1831), helps show the pattern. The dashing though dissolute pirate Zampa (tenor) is, unbeknownst to all, actually a disgraced nobleman in disguise. He tries to romance the ingénue Camille, and gets to sing a passionate aria about how much he loves her, but is foiled when the statue of a woman he once seduced and abandoned squeezes him to death as Mount Etna erupts in a fiery explosion. There are also some noisy – very noisy, and very wonderful – pirate choruses. The overture to Zampa is one of the nineteenth century’s finest and was thumped out in piano-duet arrangements for more than a century in living rooms around the world. It was also a favourite orchestral showpiece of Arturo Toscanini (who recorded it in 1952) as well as providing the soundtrack for a famous Mickey Mouse cartoon, ‘The Band Concert’ (1935), in which the strains of two overtures being played on a bandstand (Zampa and Guillaume Tell) uncannily manifest themselves in nature as earthquakes, storms and tornados. The Zampa overture fell into almost total obscurity after the 1950s, but made a late twentieth-century reappearance on the soundtrack of the comedy To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995). This is not as random as it might seem. The film is about three drag queens (one named ‘Vida Boheme’) driving cross-country to Hollywood, and chronicles their derring-do along the way. In such a large-hearted rhapsody to disguises, to silliness and courage, the spirit of opéra comique is not so far away.
Lest the impression is forming that opéra comique actually requires the presence of alluring criminals and their associates, we should recall that the most popular example of the genre to emerge from the 1830s – performed thousands of times in Paris and elsewhere up to the early twentieth century – was Auber’s Le Domino noir (The Black Domino, 1837). This is a Spanish-intrigue drama, with a masked ball and at least one tenor of uncertain reputation and dubious morality; but in this case the rowdy males are merely tipsy Iberian aristocrats celebrating at a local inn. Entire books could be written about opéra comique and the inn: about taverns as sites of chance encounter between the disparate classes of humanity; as a kind of stage-within-a-stage where a visitor’s willingness to sing, dance or tell stories is encouraged and imitated. Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon (1866) starts with a virtuosic inn scene, moves in Act 2 to a theatrical dressing room and then to a park where a performance of Shakespeare is happening just offstage, in a nearby conservatory. All Thomas’s scenes are, in other words, almost-theatrical. It’s as if the place of real performance – the professional stage with its footlights, painted backdrops and painted singers – is too central and intimidating to be shown. But on the other hand the professional stage and the liberties allowed there are so attractive that it’s seldom far away from the action – it’s just offstage, or through the nearest door, or replaced by an inn.
This short tour of semi-forgotten works reminds us of the setting of the nineteenth century’s most famous opéra comique: carefree soldiers and alluring smugglers, both groups ready to break into song at a harp’s flourish; a gypsy who seduces through vocal performance and dancing; several other gypsies; roadside inns, dubious innkeepers and the exotic and alien realm of Spain – a place of alluring alternative colours and sounds for the city-bound Parisian public. The genealogy of Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875), one of the nineteenth century’s greatest operas, becomes clear. And Carmen is great not because it also, famously, has a tragic register that engenders passionate music – music that contrasts nobly with the close harmony of those trivial, carolling soldiers and smugglers. Far from it, what makes Carmen exceptional is its never-incongruous mesh between these registers, above all its sense that each register has equal value. The trivial and the decorative can sit there alongside the sentimental and tragic, all of them co-existing, without fuss, making way for each other when required.
Early nineteenth-century opéra comique, so obviously the crucible for Carmen, was a protean force in other ways. Its popularity in German theatres encouraged the delightful spill-over of its libretto conventions and musical styles into German Romantic opera. We have seen this already amid the supernatural aura of Weber’s Der Freischütz. More surprising, and certainly not something the composer would have enjoyed recalling in later life, opéra comique also smiles out from those nautical choruses and happy spinning-maidens in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer. Later still, Verdi mined the genre when he felt that his Italian operas were becoming too gloomy and monochromatic, when they needed an injection of trivial energy. In Un ballo in maschera (1859), a cheeky page called Oscar (soprano) skips on from time to time to rattle out arpeggios and flirt both with the doomed, tragic hero (tenor, and with a hint of the pirate in his carefree personality) and with the muttering villains (basses, of course) who are plotting murder.
There were also spill-overs in the opposite direction, into even-more-comic opera. Opéra comique was the main progenitor of French, German and English traditions of operetta, and hence of what would become the twentieth-century musical. Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), a critical figure in this transition from comic opera to operetta, started as a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique (the Paris theatre that was first home to most of these pieces); his analytical attention to the genre is evident in his 1856 manifesto on the subject, made in connection with a competition he arranged for young opera composers.1 It is tempting to think that what Offenbach encountered, listening as he did from the orchestra pit, mutated into his idiosyncratic brand of ironic compositional wit, with opéra comique becoming not just operette or opéra bouffe but mutating into bizarre genres such as ‘bouffonnerie musicale’ (Les Deux Aveugles – The Two Blind Men, 1855) or even ‘anthropophagie musicale’ (Oyayaye, ou La Reine des îles – Oyayaye, or The Queen of the Islands, 1855). A composer who could come up with genre designations such as these had thoroughly absorbed opéra comique’s genius for the ridiculous.
LAWS AND LOCALITY
The names of French operatic genres always raise questions about geography, since in Paris during much of the nineteenth century the shape of an operatic work was dictated by the venue for which it was written. Offenbach wrote many of his so-called opéras bouffes of the 1850s to 1880s for the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiennes. Opéra comique is, similarly, both the name of a genre and the name of the theatre that housed it. Around 1830, Paris offered its public three distinct, indeed rigidly defined and policed, types of operatic entertainment, enacted in three distinct spaces. These distinctions had been laid down (or rather reinstated) by Napoleon in 1807, and they remained in force until the 1860s: theatres had by law to perform a certain type of opera. At the Opéra (at various venues, but from 1821 to the 1870s at the Salle Le Peletier on the rue Le Peletier), you could attend – if you had the cash and the right cut of trouser – the largest and most prestigious of these types, the grand opéra which was just emerging as a genre and which we discussed two chapters ago: huge works, set on the largest of world-historical stages, costing unprecedented sums. The Théâtre Italien (from 1841 at the Salle Ventadour, on what is now the rue Méhul), catering to a no less elevated clientele, was reserved for Italian-language opera, and delivered it in such style, and with such high-calibre singers, that Italian composers saw premieres there as close to the pinnacle of their careers. Rossini was Director of the Théâtre Italien for a period in the 1820s, and remained its éminence grise for some time after; Bellini and Donizetti enjoyed high-profile premieres there in the mid-1830s. Paris’s third main venue was the Opéra-Comique (mostly at the Salle Favart, on what is now the place Boieldieu), the home of opéra comique and thus the place that presided over a continuation of the eighteenth-century tradition of using spoken dialogue rather than recitative. This genre was no less popular with the public, and certain works dominated the repertoire for decades, as did their serious siblings at the Opéra. The 1830s were also a high-water mark in opéra comique’s international success, with the injection of a new, more Italian-influenced manner making the product more exportable than it had been previously.
Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (1825), with its tale of supernatural derring-do in exotic eighteenth-century Scotland, pushed the genre as close as it could go (at least this early in the century) towards the territory of Romantic drama. But it was Eugène Scribe and Daniel Auber, the pre-eminent grand opéra librettist–composer team in its formative period, who dominated the opéra comique repertory in the 1830s and 1840s. In spite of competition from hits such as Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillon de Lonjumeau (1836), Hérold’s Zampa and Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1840), Scribe and Auber successfully managed to match their style to the changing times, in the process amassing numerous successful opéras comiques to their names. They were responsible for both Le Domino noir and Fra Diavolo.
The sheer longevity of the best of these works was remarkable even by the standards of the most popular grands opéras. Fra Diavolo received nearly a thousand performances at the Opéra-Comique alone in the nineteenth century: by the 1850s it had been seen as far afield as New York, Buenos Aires, Sydney and Calcutta. The plot even proved malleable enough to serve as the basis of one of Laurel and Hardy’s movies of the 1930s: directed by Hal Roach, it is known in the US as The Devil’s Brother (1933) and is worth searching out. Scribe offered his composer a three-act drama, set in southern Italy during Napoleonic times. Added variety and local colour are supplied by the exotic English aristocrats (Lord and Lady ‘Cokbourg’) and by Fra Diavolo’s two bumbling companions in crime (in The Devil’s Brother this pair become, of course, ‘Stanlio’ and ‘Ollio’). Auber’s music is simple and direct: the pace may slacken occasionally, but the dominant tempo is that of the quick march, with dotted rhythms ever prominent. It’s certainly no coincidence that this dotted-rhythm march is also characteristic of the ‘Marseillaise’ – distant, comedy-refracted strains of the French Revolution are never far from the surface. An excellent example comes at the opening of Act 3, in which Fra Diavolo indulges in a (rare) solo aria outlining his philosophy, ‘Je vois marcher sous ma bannière’ (I see marching under my banner), which has brief moments of pathos but is dominated by the inevitable march tunes and (as this is a solo) a distinctly Rossinian vocal style in bravura sections.
It was certainly fun. These are works that were played hundreds, even thousands of times in the nineteenth century, occasionally to high praise. In 1844, Heinrich Heine reported satirically on the situation:
While the Academy of Music [the Opéra] was dragging along so wretchedly, and the Italians limping along as miserably behind it, the third lyric stage, or the Opéra Comique, rose to its joyous height. Here one success followed another, and there was cheerful ringing in the money-chest; in fact, there was a much larger crop of money than laurels, which was, however, no misfortune for the management. … Tremendous approbation has been awarded to Scribe’s new opera, The Siren, for which Auber composed the music. The author and musician are perfectly matched; they have the most admirable perception or sense of the interesting; they know how to entertain us agreeably; they enrapture and dazzle us by the brilliance of their wit; they both have a certain filigrane talent for welding together all kinds of charming trifles, and they make us forget there is such a thing as poetry.2
But they are at present little more than names in the history books. What happened? Why are pieces like Fra Diavolo and La Sirène (1844) now essentially forgotten works? Why did opéra comique’s gaudy troupe of drum majorettes, pleasure-seeking nuns, carefree bandits, singing coachmen, accident-prone foreigners and laughing corsairs become passé? As early as 1839, an English-language guide to Paris was complaining that the ‘light agreeable character of the music, which formerly distinguished the opéra comique in France, has given place of late years to a more elaborate style, more scientific perhaps, but certainly less popular’.3 It seems that a sense of mechanical repetition, of vieux jeu, eventually set in. Just as we saw with grand opéra, classic opéra comique gradually disappeared from the purview of contemporary composers, and by the early twentieth century had mostly fallen away from the international repertory But if one sticks to another, broader definition, then opéra comique can, just like grand opéra, also refer to works that mutated from those limited origins into wilder and more varied forms. And in that sense there was no decline. As with the emblematic case of Carmen, some of these sibling works have never once disappeared into obscurity.
Opéra comique can thus be a serious matter in two senses. First, in the simple sense that, over the course of the nineteenth century, the clichés of the genre gradually became precious sentimental remnants of a lost comic world, remnants that survived within operatic works whose plots were concerned with sadness and mortality, even tragedy. Those carolling sailors in Wagner’s Holländer and that flirtatious page in Verdi’s Ballo are resonant particles from a French tradition of tongue-in-cheek local colour. Or, to choose examples closer to the genre’s origins, both Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon (of which more below) and Bizet’s Carmen are called opéra comique even though they have loftier ambitions. They bear the title literally because they have spoken dialogue and were written for the theatre of that name; but they also bear it spiritually because they have choruses of strolling players, or smugglers, or some other insouciant collective with a predisposition for close harmony.
This transformation was also mapped on to the architecture of its capital city. Paris’s Opéra-Comique – although the oldest and most venerable counterweight to the Opéra – could not indefinitely remain the only French operatic venue whose repertory ran to spoken dialogue and less-elevated plots. If nothing else, Paris continued inexorably to expand in the nineteenth century: more people required more operatic venues. In 1847 the Opéra National opened, a theatre that fostered a French repertory running to sleek, semi-serious libretti, with speaking rather than recitative, and with a brisker musical apparatus than anything found in grand opéra. Renamed the Théâtre Lyrique in 1852 (it changed venue several times), it often became the Parisian theatre of choice for younger composers frustrated with or preparing to conquer the Opéra and its regime of obligatory musical weight and scenic bulk.
But there is a second sense in which we should value opéra comique, even aside from the descendent works that were performed at these alternative venues. What is the serious worth of the purely trivial? This large question hovers over all forms of comic opera, but is most complicated in the case of the obviously frivolous: not Mozart’s humane comedies but the lowest and most farcical works, the opéras bouffes, the forgotten trifles that Offenbach, Alexandre Charles Lecocq or Edmond Audran were pouring forth with wicked prodigality at a time when latter-day Romantics such as Hector Berlioz were summoning up Shakespeare and the Greeks, and agonizing creatively over such generously inflated magnum opuses as Les Troyens.
AESTHETIC SCORN
Even during its days of greatest popular success, classic opéra comique had a hard time with the critics. Foreigners like Heine tended to be mystified and – especially if they came from parts of Europe lacking a Mediterranean coast – suspected that they were up against yet another manifestation of brazen Parisian immorality. Mendelssohn thought opéra comique ‘as degenerate and bad as only a few of the German theatres are’, and feared that, if he agreed to write something so unworthy, the Paris ‘label’ would – quelle horreur – cause it to be imported into his beloved homeland.4 It should come as no surprise that serious-minded Berlioz, whose Benvenuto Cellini (1838) was turned down at the Opéra-Comique before being accepted and then failing miserably at the Opéra, inclined towards the caustic. In one of his longest essays, he identified a problem which didn’t seem to concern audiences of the day, but which he connected to the genre’s hoped-for future demise: opéra comique had, he said, a fatal oscillation of styles.5 Berlioz, uncompromising purist that he was, could never accept the notion that it was precisely this free juxtaposition that would be the genre’s greatest glory.
According to Berlioz’s analysis, part of this dangerous oscillation was between national modes. By the 1830s, French composers knew plenty of German Romantic operas: Der Freischütz, disguised as Robin des bois, was a great favourite, perhaps not surprisingly given that its polyglot style was so indebted to French models. Opéra comique composers, as Berlioz saw them, had the same greedy ears, borrowing freely from the Germanic specialties of orchestral elaboration and charged harmonic language, and – worse by far – from Rossinian vocal excess. In the 1820s Rossini’s operas were the rage of the Théâtre Italien, and guilty memories of many an elaborately warbled duet travelled thence into opéra comique. But rigid Parisian divisions between the various genres meant that, when such influences reached the Opéra-Comique, they had to be grafted on to the old, spoken dialogue convention. While German Singspiel managed to morph into romantische Oper – shedding spoken dialogue and most of the comedy along the way – the opéra comique tradition was chained more firmly to its designated theatrical space. For Berlioz, though, the genre’s most problematic oscillation was one of artistic ambition. The repertoire of the Opéra-Comique was, as he put it, ‘forever drifting between the high and low regions of thought’,6 catering at one moment for those who wanted no more than simple vaudeville entertainment (comic plays with some tunes thrown in), at the next for those aspiring to the greater musical heights. Eventually, as he saw it, the strain of pleasing both audiences would become too much. Classic opéra comique, he thought, risked obsolescence precisely because it had begun to drift away from pure farce.
In some ways Berlioz had a point. If you approach opera expecting classical balance or purity of genre, you will start to feel critical when that balance is not maintained. A good illustration is the way in which all opéras comiques had to deal with the perpetual problem that Singspiel and other dialogue opera wrestled with in the eighteenth century – the problem of how to negotiate that moment when spoken words turned to song. This issue became particularly fraught in the nineteenth century, as expectations for musical continuity and elaboration grew more demanding. It’s thus no surprise to see in the typical roll-call of opéra comique numbers all those elaborate stratagems that made the leap seem less extreme: arias that aren’t really arias, because the character would sing a song at this point in a spoken drama; choruses that are performed by uncomplicated rustic types who are assumed to sing because they’re simple and pleasure-loving; ensembles that tend towards the action variety, and thus with lots of singing dialogue maintained. In a rapidly changing operatic world, these were hard limits to maintain, but the rule of the Opéra-Comique, the insistence on spoken dialogue, was inexorable.
Berlioz is, however, a notorious fountain of aesthetic hauteur, a rather too dominant source of Romantic Era opinion. Who, sitting there in the Opéra-Comique in the middle of the nineteenth century, saw spoken dialogue or mixing things up as a particular problem? Whose expectations were not being met, where and when? There is a similar danger of seeing the whole issue through equally dominant Wagnerian eyes. By the time Wagner emerged as a popular force, in Dresden with Rienzi in 1842 and Der fliegende Holländer in 1843, it was clear that a new, astonishing kind of German opera was in the wings, elaborate in its instrumentation, tragic in plot and intent, with lots of notes, no speaking whatsoever, and edging towards a continuity of tone that would (ideally at least) exclude mongrel oscillations. This is another symptom of the prejudice about mixing genres. That rich array of musical registers in Holländer, mentioned at the start of this chapter, has often been seen as a flaw that Wagner rightly expunged from his later works. And in Paris, too, there were audiences – an elite of opera-goers nurtured on those elephantine works booming forth from the Opéra, or an elite of refined amateurs who followed the critiques of a Berlioz or a Heine – who were dissatisfied with hybrid forms. For certain composers, for certain audiences, the gap between speech and song – a gap that could stand for all the many forms of operatic incongruity – threatened to turn into an unbridgeable gulf. We are heirs to this way of thinking. Audiences of today, conditioned to continuous music in the opera house, may need new attitudes to performance or staging, new ways of hearing its ‘oscillation of styles’, before classic opéra comique once again becomes something to be savoured.
Even Offenbach responded to the pressure of aesthetic hauteur in his final work, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881), which he called an ‘opéra’ and left unfinished at his death in 1880. It is impossible to establish any kind of definitive text for Hoffmann, which has left it gloriously open to rewritings and musical interventions in ways unprecedented for a major repertory opera. In 1992, the Lyon Opera did it as Des Contes d’Hoffmann (A Few Tales of Hoffmann), mixing and omitting and adding (dialogue, new music, high concepts) in ways that left some customers apoplectic. For others, though, Hoffmann commands special respect as a work because, alone among Offenbach’s operas, it aspired to real seriousness. For the libretto, Offenbach returned to his natal roots, using three German Romantic stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann. For the music, he mined lyric veins remembered from works such as Gounod’s Faust. Yet he also put his deep familiarity with the musical grotesque to serious purpose, in order to give body to the uncanny and disturbing aspects of his source stories, tales about automata that can sing and mirrors that steal your soul. No less a luminary than Gustav Mahler championed the work in Vienna, mounting a new production in 1901, and thereby putting the composer of La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein only a half-degree away from the high-German avant-garde.
THE TRAUMA OF SADNESS, THE SURVIVAL OF BLISS
In his 1856 manifesto on opéra comique, Offenbach shows a delicious capacity to savour incongruity; his alternative views can thus make a colourful foil to Berlioz’s dismay. The two decades from 1855 to 1875 were, in retrospect, an extraordinary time for opéra comique in the broadest sense. Offenbach’s farces can be seen as mirrors on society, with politics and social undertows satirized and negotiated within their libretti. And Paris was to undergo a great political trauma in 1870–71, at the end of a decade that had seen the decimation of a fabled older generation of operatic composers (Halévy in 1862, Meyerbeer in 1864, Rossini in 1868, Berlioz in 1869). By 1870 hardly any were left of that phalanx who had placed a new kind of French opera on the map in the 1830s. In July 1870 France embarked on a disastrous war with Prussia, one that saw the downfall of Napoleon III, the formation of a French Republic and a five-month period during which Paris was besieged by Prussian troops; for some months in 1871 a workers’ uprising took control of Paris (the period of the so-called Commune), only to be bloodily suppressed by Republican troops.
Auber, who survived until 1871, was one of the last of the old generation to die and, as many pointed out at the time, there was a palpable sense that he had simply overstayed his welcome. Born in 1782, just after the 25-year-old Mozart had moved to Vienna, his first theatrical work was written as early as 1805 and he carved out a sporadic career through to the early 1820s. As we have seen, his collaboration with Scribe, both in making grands opéras and opéras comiques, then put him in the forefront of operatic events in Paris in the late 1820s and 1830s. But he lived on and on: through the 1848 revolutions and the formation of Napoleon III’s Second Empire that came in their wake, he doggedly continued to compose comic operas in the vein of Fra Diavolo, although occasionally dabbling in newer trends such as exoticism. By 1870, in his late eighties, he was a remarkable relic of a past age, perhaps even a last link to the eighteenth century. He still exercised his beloved horses, aptly named Almaviva and Figaro, in the Bois de Boulogne and was a regular at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, insisting that Paris was the only place worth living in. He refused to leave his beloved city during the siege, but suffered cruelly when Almaviva was requisitioned and eaten by the city’s starving inhabitants (Figaro was hidden in a piano-maker’s shop and so escaped the dinner table). The ageing, grieving composer finally gave up the ghost during the desperate days of the Commune. In spite of his advanced age, journalists were quick to load the event with melancholy significance; as one obituarist put it: ‘The Prussians dealt him the first blow but it was the Frenchmen of the Commune who finished him off’.7
The sad tale of Auber’s death cried out – as the journalists understood – for end-of-era platitudes. Yet the antics of Fra Diavolo and his like continued to please the public for several decades more. As with serious opera, opéra comique became a revived repertory as well as a living compositional genre. After the Siege and the Commune, the revivals may have been seen as remnants of a past age; but opéra comique, both in the sense of opera with spoken dialogue and in the sense of farcical opera, continued to flourish in Paris, the former within works such as Gounod’s Faust and Carmen, the latter as the operettas of Offenbach and his peers. The restrictions on what kind of opera could legally be produced in which theatre were officially lifted in 1864, but they had for some time been thought anachronistic and unenforceable: the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre Lyrique had already begun producing a very different kind of drama, one more suited to the changing European times.
Take the case of Thomas’s Mignon, premiered in 1866. Mignon was one of the most popular operas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An immediate hit on opening night, it would be performed a thousand times at the Opéra-Comique alone between 1866 and 1894. Nor was its popularity limited to France. The 1915 edition of The Victrola Book of the Opera (published by the recording company to promote its wares) reports an astonishing statistic: ‘Thomas’s opera is among the most popular of all operas in Germany, and during the decade of 1901–1910 was given nearly three thousand presentations’.8 There was even an American silent movie version in 1915 (directed by William Nigh), joining an elite club of silent-film operas that included Cecil B. DeMille’s Carmen (also 1915). But during the next hundred years Mignon gradually disappeared from the stage. In 2005–10 it was performed only eight times worldwide, half of those at a 2010 production at the Opéra-Comique, putting Mignon one performance behind Fra Diavolo for that five-year period.9
Mignon started with high aspirations. The libretto was by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, a pre-eminent Parisian writing team of the later nineteenth century (other credits include Faust and Les Contes d’Hoffmann). The source was Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795), an intimidating Romantic classic, and the choice reflected elevated literary aspirations that were becoming common in opéra comique. Barbier and Carré transformed the Mignon episode in Goethe’s novel from tragedy into a strange mélange of themes and incidents that included a happy ending. Mignon (mezzo-soprano) is a girl who, kidnapped aged six by gypsies, has grown up cruelly mistreated and forced to perform for crowds. In the courtyard of an inn (Act 1) she is liberated from the gypsy impresario by Wilhelm (tenor), an Austrian student wandering the world in search of life experiences. She falls in love with her rescuer, but as she is a boyish waif – and he is smitten by the glittering actress Philine (soprano) – he cannot return her love. An important supporting role is played by a mysterious, half-crazed harpist (Lothario, bass), who regularly consoles Mignon and who (it turns out) is actually Marquis Cipriani, an Italian aristocrat driven mad long ago when his daughter Sperata (aged six) was believed drowned. By the end of Act 3, everything is sorted out via a recognition scene between Mignon/Sperata and Lothario/Cipriani, and via Wilhelm discovering that it is indeed Mignon he loves.
In Goethe’s novel Mignon is a pathetic figure. She is also a character who sings songs, printed in the novel as inserted poems and soon among Goethe’s most famous lyrics: ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ (Only he who knows what longing is) and ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?’ (Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?). Via Schubert’s and many other settings, Mignon’s songs soon took on a new life in the domestic musical circles of the nineteenth century. But the Mignon of the novel, after being wounded at Wilhelm’s side by highwaymen, fades from the narrative, reappearing only on her deathbed (after which, Wilhelm gets happily married). The Mignon of the libretto is far more modern in the sense that her strange psychological wounds seem not at all softened by her antique setting. In a scene played out as a trio in Act 2, she tries to put her despair over Wilhelm’s and Philine’s love at a safe distance by willing herself to fall asleep. This number uses an old trick: the lovers sing a duet, oblivious to anything else; but underneath this first level, Mignon’s whisperings to herself establish a separate musical strand that calls their bliss into question. Just afterwards, Mignon decides to make herself more feminine, recasting her appearance at Philine’s dressing table and putting on a borrowed dress. It’s an uncomfortable moment, but precisely why is hard to say. Since Mignon is a woman, why shouldn’t she get rid of her trousers? When Wilhelm sees Mignon in the dress, he realizes that he can’t possibly take this girl with him on the road as he had planned. But he knew already that she was a girl; it was never a secret. The scene ends with Philine making fun of Mignon for her incompetence with makeup and petticoats. At the end of the act, Mignon is trapped in a burning building, one that she herself has in effect torched, since when she hopes out loud that Philine’s performance space be struck by lightning and flames, crazy Lothario takes it into his head to grant her wish.
The scenario is by this stage far outside anything traditional: how many other popular operas of the nineteenth century feature the starring diva as an anguished tomboy whose romantic passions are so long unrequited? The music Mignon sings, however – including the impossible-to-avoid ‘Kennst du das Land?’ (here ‘Connais-tu le pays?’) – shows why star mezzo-sopranos coveted the part, starting with Célestine Galli-Marié (1840–1905), who created the role in 1866 and who went on to be the first Carmen in 1875. Geraldine Farrar (1882–1967), a genuine high soprano known for Massenet’s Manon, Marguerite in Faust and Cio-cio-san in Madama Butterfly, lowered herself for Mignon because the part was so good. Little of Mignon’s singing, however, has the exhibitionist verve of Carmen. Her biggest number is a duet with Lothario in Act 1, ‘Légères hirondelles’ (Gentle swallows), an unusual instance of a mezzo–bass duet, owing something, perhaps, to the soprano–baritone duets that Verdi (Rigoletto, La traviata, Simon Boccanegra) had been doing to such great effect. ‘Légères hirondelles’ is a song-within-the-opera (Mignon is accompanying on the harp) sung by two bereft characters. Their topic is an alien and unimaginably beautiful country – Italy certainly, but Italy as a site of memory, a place to which one can never return in reality. Although the text refers to birds, there will be no vocal trilling or hooting. Opéra comique’s great liking for numbers involving the geography of elsewhere, numbers that conjure up distinctive musical colour, leads in this case to a moment in which the voices twining around one another are not the usual two sopranos. The pairing of lower-register voices can’t possibly be heard as acoustic substitutes for the swallows mentioned in the poem. But if the characters describe unattainable things, their melodic lines are so beautiful that singing becomes an object of desire, a place where we want to linger. As if to underscore the point, the duet ends with an extremely intricate double cadenza, one of the few places where Mignon’s singing voice is put on display. The number begins like a journey begins. Harmonic patterning sends the melody onwards rather than keeping it trammelled within little birdsong circles. The first four-bar phrase is in D major but is then elaborated a step higher in the minor, a shift suggesting that, just for a moment, the fantasy could travel anywhere. Yes, the duet is still recognizable as a genre number. But just like the unsettling smugglers’ chorus in Act 3 of Carmen – obligatory bandits whisper admonitions to ‘listen, listen’ and, falling into odd chromatic slips and slides, ‘beware of a false step!’ – this duet from Mignon transcends its origins in opéra comique.
The same could be said for the one number from Mignon that survived the opera’s obsolescence, Philine’s bravura aria in Act 2, ‘Je suis Titania la blonde’ (I am blonde Titania), sung just after she has finished that evening’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To this day, the aria is a regular audition piece for Francophone coloratura sopranos, rivalling Olympia’s song in Les Contes d’Hoffmann. The aria was present at the dawn of opera recording, when Luisa Tetrazzini (1871–1940) did it as ‘Io son Titania’ in 1907 for HMV. In the Hollywood comedy Seven Sweethearts (1942), Kathryn Grayson – who has spent much of the movie dressed as a boy à la Mignon – proves her femininity by performing the aria, à la Philine. Julie Andrews, aged twelve, sang it in her professional debut at the London Hippodrome in 1947. When Beverly Sills was invited on to The Dick Cavett Show on 23 June 1969, ‘Je suis Titania’ was her entrance aria. Closer to our own time, Natalie Dessay has recorded the number and sung it frequently in concert recitals, but – given the virtual absence of contemporary Mignon productions – has never taken the part on stage. ‘Je suis Titania’ is, for all this, actually based not on a vocal genre but on a dance, a polonaise that happens to be sung. When transposed into the Overture, the tune is completely at home among the instruments.
We mentioned earlier that opéra comique of the 1860s and 1870s, in becoming broader in its ambitions, was in step with the changing social and political landscape of those decades. That is, of course, a familiar, almost clichéd assumption. Opera duly reflects the society of its time. But while the idea remains obvious, the mechanism for how such reflection happens is ever elusive. The matter is more complicated in this case because one way in which Parisian opéra comique and operetta responded to the political crises of those years was by providing distraction. This is a familiar role for the arts, and for opera in particular, and would become an important function of film in the twentieth century. Human beings have routinely sought to counteract the miseries of their existence by constructing a parallel life of the imagination, and in the nineteenth century musical theatre served this purpose on an unprecedented level. But there is also a more sinister way of seeing the phenomenon: the musical arts may respond to politics by sleight of hand, by leading the eye away from trouble. What often happens is a middle ground between these two functions. For example, Offenbach’s libretti are well-known for their satires of contemporary political topics and figures, but we can also see ways in which the music that clothed these satires was capable of assuaging any anxieties that arose.
Consider Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in Hell), a farcical version of the myth with a libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Hector-Jonathan Crémieux. The operetta premiered in October 1858 at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiennes, and audiences were duly delighted and outraged. Six weeks later, in an incident now so famous that no Offenbach biographer can omit a reference, it was pilloried by Jules Janin, the all-powerful cultural critic of the Journal des débats. Janin saw a disgusting parody of noble antiquity. Orpheus does indeed go to the underworld to rescue Eurydice. But on Olympus the Gods roll in, yawning from all-night prowls chasing other people’s spouses. Jupiter proposes that everyone head down to hell with Orpheus to check out its goings-on, where Eurydice, guarded by the comedian John Styx, is bored and annoyed. Pluto flatters Jupiter with fulsome courtier praise (for his speech, the librettists parroted an old essay by none other than Janin). It all ends up in Act 4 with a huge party in Hell. Everyone cheers when Jupiter tricks poor Orpheus into looking back at Eurydice on the way out, so that she can rejoin the festivities.
After Janin’s article appeared, box office receipts soared. But Siegfried Kracauer, in his marvellous 1937 biography of Offenbach, points out that parodies of Greek antiquity were widespread in France at the time, suggesting that the outrage, whether Janin’s or others’, may well have had some other source:
This is what it was: Offenbach’s operetta, though in play, laid bare the foundations of contemporary society and gave the bourgeoisie an opportunity of seeing themselves as they really were. … No less drastic was the exposure of the shifty expedients by which the apparatus of power was kept intact. In order to escape punishment for the rape of Eurydice, Pluto incited the Gods against Jupiter, and Jupiter himself did not shrink from the meanest and most dishonest devices in order to maintain himself in power or attain some private end. His reign corrupts Olympus, just as that of their dictator [i.e. Napoléon III] did the bourgeoisie [i.e. in Second Empire France]. No sooner did Jupiter propose taking the Gods with him to the underworld than they forget their rancour against him and start singing his praises, forgetting everything except their own amusement and distraction.10
There’s a single couplet in the libretto that asks the audience to squint through its delusions and distractions, ‘Abattons cette tyrannie, / Ce régime est fastidieux’ (Let’s combat this tyranny / This regime is sickening), and it’s set to the ‘Marseillaise’. In Second Empire France, this was music that meant revolution, so if the libretto is a contemporary political allegory, the message is just on the edge of treasonous. But of course it’s all within a joke, which is what took it in beyond the censor’s purview. However, although Offenbach’s Orphée music distracts with giddy delights – the acoustic frenzy of Act 4 includes a danced ‘Galop infernal’ that would for ever after be known as the ‘Can-can’ – there is one extended sober moment, John Styx’s lament ‘Quand j’étais roi de Béotie (When I was king of Boeotia). The lament is an extraordinary mélange, its simplicity of tone unlike anything else in the opera, mixing the trauma of sadness with allusions to a bliss that survives only in memory. John Styx was played not by an opera singer but by an actor from the Comédie Française, Alexandre Debruille-Bache. Thus the lament, in the original performances, was an acoustic island apart. But not a note of the opera’s music is mean-spirited. As Kracauer put it, ‘A kind of inverted magician, [Offenbach] took it as his mission to unmask the hollow phantoms that tyrannize over mankind; but he gave his blessing to every genuine human emotion he met on the way’.11
THE PROMISE OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES
As political allegory goes, Carmen is a similarly complicated case. It could be argued that the opera’s smugglers, and perhaps even Carmen herself, are meant to warn of the dangers of a rebellious underclass, representing them to a public whose first glimpse of such an underclass in power (during the Commune) had proved traumatic in the extreme. But the fact that these smugglers are consistently depicted as easy-going, freedom-loving rogues, and that their gypsy muse’s attractions are so determinedly sexual rather than political, surely blunted the disquiet of the post-Commune bourgeoisie, or at the least pleasingly beguiled them. These matters are made more difficult still by the fact that the Carmen libretto was understood at the time to march under the general banner of realism, a problematic and protean word whose meanings for opera will be explored in more detail in a later chapter. How did Georges Bizet (1838–75) whose earlier operatic libretti were so much more exotic and/or conventional end up with this frank story and its down-to-earth heroine?
To answer that question, some background will be useful. Bizet had lived for three years in Italy from 1857 to 1860 as the Prix de Rome winner (a prize given yearly by the Paris Conservatory to its most promising composition student), and had spent those years casting about for an identity as an opera composer. In both completed and unrealized projects up to the 1870s, one can see him shape-shifting through various nineteenth-century operatic genres. In Italy, he flirted with the local opera, both serious and comic, on the model of Donizetti (he toyed with a new version of Parisina, then completed a comic work called Don Procopio). He took on grand opéra with plans for a Hunchback of Notre-Dame that was never written and an Ivan IV (1865) that was only performed posthumously. His commissions tended towards Orientalist opéras comiques (the lost work La Guzla de l’émir – The Guzla Player and the Emir, 1862; Les Pêcheurs de perles – The Pearl Fishers, 1863; and Djamileh, 1872).
Bizet’s grands opéras were scorned by the Opéra, and his relatively brief career unfolded largely at the Théâtre Lyrique and the Opéra-Comique; it was the directors of the latter who offered him the commission for a new opéra comique in 1872, with a libretto to be a subject of Bizet’s choosing and written by a seasoned team, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Bizet chose Prosper Merimée’s novella Carmen (1845), which made for a libretto distinctly unsuited to a family theatre, with low-class individuals, a promiscuous heroine and women who fight with knives. The plot is simple. Set in Seville, it is the story of a gypsy smuggler, Carmen (mezzo-soprano), who seduces a poor corporal, Don José (tenor), and convinces him to turn to crime. José abandons his army career and his sweet fiancée from back home, Micaëla (soprano), to follow Carmen and her gang of smugglers. But the couple are hopelessly mismatched. In the novel, the inevitability of their estrangement is articulated by Carmen, ‘Chien et loup ne font pas longtemps bon ménage’ (Dog and wolf don’t live together happily for very long). She soon grows tired of José, rejecting him in favour of a flamboyant toreador, Escamillo (bass-baritone). Supporting characters include Carmen’s backing group, Mercédès (mezzo-soprano) and Frasquita (soprano), as well as various army officers and smugglers. In the final act, outside the bullring in which Escamillo is performing, José confronts Carmen and realizes that his case is hopeless. ‘Tu ne m’aimes donc plus?’ (So you don’t love me any more?), he says almost unbelievingly, and then stabs her when she refuses to return to him. This was, notoriously, the onstage murder that changed for ever the shape of what could be called opéra comique. Carmen, whose antecedents were comic, became a tragic heroine, one among a long line of singing women who in the final act are strangled, crushed, shot, stabbed and put in sacks (Gilda’s fate in Rigoletto), drowned, poisoned or cast into a vat of boiling oil (Rachel’s in La Juive, 1835).
Carmen was a troubled project. Bizet fought with one of the directors of the Opéra-Comique, Adolphe de Leuven, who wanted the heroine to survive at the end. After de Leuven resigned and the score was finished, Bizet had to battle with the musicians (particularly the Opéra-Comique chorus, who were not accustomed to screaming and fighting for a living). The remaining director, Camille Du Locle (a great supporter of Verdi and his operas), continued to regard the libretto as vulgar and brutal, its heroine antipathetic and immoral. In the end Bizet fought with more or less everyone except the singer cast as Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié, who showed intense faith in the work and its main character. Galli-Marié’s versatility as a singing actress is demonstrated by the fact that she was brilliant both as Bizet’s promiscuous gypsy and as Thomas’s Mignon, the innocent tomboy of nine years earlier. One of the earliest reviewers summarized the impression she made in Carmen: ‘To see her, rocking her hips like a filly on a stud farm in Cordova: quelle vérité, mais quel scandale (what realism, but what scandal)’.12
Then there is the story, told over and over, concerning an alleged supernatural event at Carmen’s thirty-third performance, on 2 June 1875. Galli-Marié had reached the Act 3 tarot card scene, in which Carmen predicts her own death with fatalistic resignation, ‘Recommence vingt fois, la carte impitoyable répétera: la mort!’ (You can start again twenty times, but the merciless card will be repeated: death!) At this moment, Galli-Marié was apparently overcome with foreboding. Some reports have her experiencing a pain in her side. She fainted and left the stage but managed to return and continue the performance to the end, after which she burst into tears and could not be comforted.13 News arrived later that Bizet had died that night.
Whether Galli-Marié had a premonition or not, and whether – if she did – it happened so appropriately during the card scene, we can be sure that Bizet, by dying on 2 June 1875, did not survive long enough to learn that Carmen would become one of the most beloved musical works ever written, performed thousands of times by the end of the century. It was Queen Victoria’s, Otto Bismarck’s and James Joyce’s favourite opera; it was worked into novels by Thomas Mann and even by tone-deaf Vladimir Nabokov; its story was retold countless times in films, where arrangements of Bizet’s music lurk like a phantom in the background; Cecil B. DeMille’s in 1915 – being silent – called for gramophones or pianos and singers, armed with vocal scores, on duty during showings. Friedrich Nietzsche, a passionate Wagner acolyte who turned against his idol after the 1870s, ended his life praising Carmen:
Yesterday I heard – would you believe it – Bizet’s masterpiece, for the twentieth time. … This music seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. ‘What is good is light, whatever is divine moves on tender feet’: the first principle of my aesthetics. This music is evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular – its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, the ‘infinite melody’. Have more painful, tragic accents ever been heard on stage? And how are they achieved? Without grimaces. Without counterfeit. Without the lie of the grand style!14
Richard Strauss, modernist opera composer and terrific German chauvinist, held up Bizet’s orchestration in Carmen as a model of ingenuity and timbral imagination. And what’s more, his ire over Nazi-era musical censorship was roused over one particular outrage, as described in 1934 to Julius Kopsch: ‘I hear that the paragraph concerning Aryans is to be tightened up, and Carmen banned! In any event, as a creative artist, I do not wish to take an active part in any further foolishness of this kind.’15
All this love was bestowed on a mere opéra comique, and one much tinkered with by Bizet during rehearsals. There are conflicting editions, no definitive text and even a posthumous 1875 grand opéra version with recitatives by a composer called Ernest Guiraud. But all this, which might in other cases have cemented a distinctly non-canonic status, was unimportant. The music that sounds as the curtain goes up on Act 1 of Carmen, a pyramid that slowly swirls out and gets louder over a quasi-folk drone bass, is the promise of infinite possibilities and one of the best musical daybreaks ever. The opera never goes back on that opening promise.
What makes Carmen so brilliant, adaptable, so protean, so patient of interpretation? It has the advantage of an unmannered story in which the anti-heroine is both unfailingly brave and blithely unconcerned about conventional social roles. In this sense, and in terms of her tremendous musical energy, Carmen is a female version of Don Giovanni. The plot divides the world, as does Carmen herself, into wolves and others. Yet the tame, domestic types – especially Micaëla, who makes two appearances as a messenger from home and is a point of stability in José’s crumbling world – are no less sympathetic than the wolf characters, Carmen and Escamillo. Bizet’s greatest gift was to imagine the music for every element of the plot with equal seriousness: the trivial, ornamental characters, the tragic proletarian soldier, the smugglers singing in close harmony, the swaggering exhibitionist, the generic supporting roles; he pays close attention to each and every one. As was usual by the 1870s, any opera that had recurring motifs – there are a few in Carmen, and also some longer musical stretches that return – was thought Wagnerian. But there is nothing radical about Carmen’s set pieces in terms of form. It is an opera created from the cloth of convention, with well-behaved arias, duets and ensembles, duly separated by stretches of dialogue (or by recitatives in the posthumous grand opéra version, which is often anathematized by the purists but which has its own grandeur and effect, and has now acquired a particular antique charm).
What is unusual is that a very large proportion of the music is realistic in the sense of being real singing within the stage world. The opera is full of songs, dances, military fanfares, outdoor choruses and parades. The preponderance of such occasions allowed Bizet to experiment with exotic sounds, and since the story is set in Spain among gypsies, a lot of these sounds refer to Spanish or Moorish rhythms and modes, or at least to what a French composer in the 1870s understood these to be. The episodes of real performance are particularly centred on Carmen: music making is part of her persona. She likes to sing and dance, and she exploits singing and dancing to convince and to seduce – or simply as a means to express herself. When José first sees her and is instantly smitten, she is performing for the crowd. This is significant: Carmen and José are most profoundly mismatched not because one is a gypsy and the other a petit-bourgeois soldier, but because one is an extravagant, uninhibited performer and the other is an intense, shy spectator.
Carmen is herself susceptible to the lure of bold, exhibitionist singing. Her susceptibility is staged in Act 2, when she becomes part of the audience for Escamillo as he performs for patrons of an inn. The toreador’s two-verse song, ‘Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre’ (I can return your toast), which narrates a typical bout in the bullring, belongs to the then-ancient operatic tradition of presenting a story in the form of a strophic song with choral refrain. The minor-key music of the verses has Spanish cadences and snapped-back Flamenco rhythms; it’s obviously a confection, an elaborate, over-the-top fantasy of Spanish music, but at the same time it’s so gleeful that we struggle not to be carried along. The refrain – ‘Toréador, en garde!’ – is set to a major-key melody that long ago escaped from the stage to become a kind of universal signifier for opera. It’s important, though, not to forget that, banal and over-familiar as it may now sound, this refrain comes back later in much changed circumstances. Carmen hears it in Act 4, sounding offstage as the unseen chorus, who are spectators celebrating Escamillo in the bullring, once more salute his prowess. In this reminiscence, the tune is musically deracinated. It no longer has that thumping orchestral accompaniment, but is underpinned by an alarming cello counterpoint, a sign that the atmosphere has changed and that something tremendous is about to happen. The musical sounds attract Carmen, draw her towards the bullring gate and past José’s waiting arm – a fatal attraction, as it turns out.
Music’s fatal attraction is, in a sense, felt throughout Carmen. In Act 1, Carmen is arrested for brawling and is forbidden to talk by José, her custodian. She declares that she will sing instead, and during the course of the song manages to reel in her catch. By the end of the second verse, José has agreed to free her, be arrested for her sake and join her when he is released. On the other hand, the music that is not presented as part of the stage world, the ‘non-wolf’ music – numbers like Micaëla's duet with José in Act 1 and her aria in Act 3 – seems removed: beautiful, but at a distance, referring to (or coming from) a past that can no longer be regained. This strand of the music is about an ideal world, one that probably never existed and that certainly didn’t exist in 1875.
Poised between these two styles is José’s music, in particular his Flower Song in Act 2, one of the opera’s most celebrated moments, but also one of its most conflicted. It tells a simple story, with Carmen this time as the audience. When he was in prison, José kept the flower that Carmen had dismissively thrown to him in Act 1: its perfume transported him, creating a dream world. Whenever he thought of reproaching her, the dream world would intervene. The aria is introduced by a ghostly orchestral reminiscence of the moment when the flower was thrown, the remembered tune played by the cor anglais, as if to mark that instrument already as a restrained but potent force in the aria, a kind of sonorous worm in the bud. José begins his narrative against a simple but luminous accompaniment (flute, clarinet, cello), but when he mentions the ‘sweet smell’ of his faded, desiccated flower, the cor anglais reappears to mark the word ‘odeur’, underlining the dangerous forces that José has been keeping alive. ‘Then, I accused myself of blasphemy, and felt inside me a single desire, a single hope: to see you again, Carmen. You had but to appear, but to cast a glance at me, to steal my entire being.’ The musical setting of this long line begins conventionally enough, but soon the harmony clouds, exotic cadences intervene and we enter an unreal world in which passion threatens to lose itself. The end of the aria is in one way a settling of this tension, but in another keeps it extraordinarily in play. At the words ‘Et j’étais une chose à toi’ (And I was a thing of yours), marked by Bizet pp rall. e dim. (very quiet, slowing down and getting quieter), José ascends to high Ba, the highest note in the aria, and remains there in eerie quietness on a long held note.
It’s a moment that strongly resembles the end of ‘Celeste Aida’ in Verdi’s opera (to be discussed in the next chapter), and surely has a similar meaning. The tenor may earlier have been forceful and passionate, but here he has become absorbed into another realm. José’s obsession with Carmen is so great that he is drawn into her musical milieu, a place in which he loses all sense of tenor force. And just as at the end of ‘Celeste Aida’, most tenors can’t bear this kind of realism: they ignore the composer’s marking and sing the high note with full force. There’s some sense in this (particularly if you’re a baritonal tenor with a burnished high Ba, one of the most exciting notes in all opera); but it’s not Bizet’s kind of sense, at least not here. As if to underline what has been put in question by that pianissimo Ba, José’s final words in the aria, ‘Carmen, je t’aime’ (Carmen, I love you), involve another wonderfully expressive instrumental effect. José sustains ‘t’aime’, and underneath we hear that woodwind sonority which started his aria (flute, clarinet and now also the cor anglais) playing three strange chromatic chords. These chords pose an unanswerable question. Is there, can there be, a true or right harmony for José’s love or does this tonal wandering call into question the reality of the emotion? And then, as a balance to the orchestral prelude, there’s a gentle orchestral close, reprising José’s opening phrase. But on the very last chord, as tonal stability is finally achieved, the cor anglais sounds again, strangely insistent, the erotic colour that won’t go away and that will eventually destroy both the singer and the woman he addresses.
Carmen reacts to the beautiful, terrible indecision of this aria with brutal realism. ‘Non, tu ne m’aime pas’ (No, you don’t love me), she sings, and on the last word, she spins the music out of José’s anguished tonal orbit and back into her own. It’s as if she hasn’t been listening, hasn’t heard a thing. But that’s the problem with wolves, their deafness to the meek. The same inability to listen plays out in more obvious musical ways in José and Carmen’s final duet. This is their only extended passage of singing together, and its musical trajectory is ever downwards. José keeps proposing a beautifully shaped melody, a tune from another realm; Carmen responds by refusing to echo him, instead supplying musically unrelated ripostes. The single time they sing simultaneously is when he repeats his beautiful, insistent phrase, ‘Carmen, il est temps encore’ (Carmen, there is still time) and she adds an aggressive counterpoint, a completely different melodic line, ‘Pourquoi t’occuper encore d’un cœur qui n’est plus à toi?’ (Why do you still concern yourself with a heart that isn’t yours any more?) Soon after that, with José still determinedly, insanely lyrical, she funnels down to monotones, single notes, rising only to try to make an end – with spectacular high cadences – at her most definitive ‘no’: ‘Jamais Carmen ne cédera! libre elle est née et libre elle mourra’ (Carmen will never yield! she was born free and will die free). Gradually the singing breaks down until the two are essentially half speaking, half shouting in sung form at one another. At the opera’s end, Bizet thus plays out an aesthetic of realism with very high stakes: he lets singing itself, its form and line, degrade under the pressure of impending disaster.
THE VALUE OF FRIVOLITY
Once the age of recording had arrived, Carmen’s death could instantly be turned around, since one had only to go back to Side 1 and start over again. And, of course, Carmen is hardly a tragedy from the point of view of the impresarios who have profited from it, the baritones who have twirled Escamillo’s cape while singing ‘Toréador, en garde’, the tenors and sopranos, the flute soloists who get a star turn playing the customary entre’acte music to Act 3 (music which actually comes from one of Bizet’s L’Arlesienne suites and over many years of performance practice has been pasted into Carmen; but that hardly matters), and the mezzo-sopranos who get to impersonate a force of nature. French mezzo Emma Calvé (1858–1942), a famous Carmen, described her experience of singing the opera at the Metropolitan in New York in 1893–4:
We gave it again and again, to packed houses. The box office receipts were astounding. In the succeeding seasons its popularity never waned. There were no further questions as to how it should be sung. What unforgettable casts, what glorious evenings! Jean de Reszke, Melba, Plançon and myself! The public was wildly enthusiastic. After each performance we would be recalled a thousand times. It was said that Carmen became epidemic, a joyful contagion.16
Underneath Calvé’s clichés is an arresting sense that the experience was glorious, a source of happiness for the audience but also for the singers. This is of course the paradox of operatic performance. The piece itself can be tragic, but the experience of its embodiment, as singing and as spectacle, can be joyful. In opéra comique and opéra bouffe, as we have said, the works themselves can be unstable: what the composer intended is often not clear. Yet since they occupy an aesthetic register that is between serious and farcical, because they allow these antagonists a peaceful coexistence, they are particularly good at producing joy.
This can happen, for instance, in performances of Offenbach. Like many early opéra comique composers, Offenbach was a master of using dance forms as a basis for vocal numbers, a trick that requires almost non-vocal melodic writing, presenting a particular challenge for singers. His soprano roles can be as difficult as Donizetti’s in their way. This trick appears in brilliant form in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, 1867). The eponymous Grand Duchess, coming herself from a military family, is enamoured of soldiers in general, and expresses herself in quasi-marches that quickly veer off into galops, quadrilles and other frivolous dance pieces, as in her Act 1 couplets, ‘Ah, que j’aime les militaires’ (Ah, how I love a uniform). In this aria’s fast, virtuosic refrain, there is an incongruous pairing: the military-march idea with obligatory cymbal clashes joins Parisian ballroom dance, with opportunities for coy slowdowns and hesitations at upbeats. The character being impersonated – the rapacious Grand Duchess – is neither ideal nor idealized. But her number allows a singer to convey unfettered glee: the pure bliss of singing when there is nothing serious at stake, the joy of opéra comique.