My thanks to Messrs. Crutchfield, Benko, and Cooper for their expert contributions on this topic. I’ve learned from it (including the deathless word “ictus”), and I’m sure readers have as well. The matter is now closed—till the next time it comes up.

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I can think of no operatic character who has reached as far into the culture-at-large as Carmen. Back in the day, the stretch was often for parodic radio/TV skit purposes. Sometimes it’s been for those of more extended commercial exploitation. The former relied on the presumption of broad recognition (everyone targeted knows the girl with the flower between her teeth; everyone recognizes the Habañera and the Toreador Song), while the latter has depended on both that and the nearly infinite adaptability of the character herself—”nearly infinite adaptability” meaning that there is a truth in her that survives nearly infinite cultural re-contextualization. And that in turn often calls forth some portion of honest engagement under what might appear to be basically rip-off conditions. The talented Beyoncé and her colleagues, for instance, were doing what struck me as entirely “sincere” work in their TV Hip-Hop Carmen.

Then there have been the seriously intended attempts at cultural translation. As long ago as 1925, following the Moscow Art Theatre’s revelatory American appearances with plays of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gorky, its Musical Studio, under Stanislavsky’s co-director Vladimir Nemirovitch-Danchenko, followed with samples of its repertory (adaptations of Offenbach, Lecoq, musicalized Pushkin and Aristophanes!). And among these was Carmencita and the Soldier. Nemirovitch, it seems, wished to jettison everything in Bizet’s opera that smacked of the boulevard, of the concessions to popular opéra comique taste, and get back to the vision not only of Mérimée but of Nietzsche—to the opera that, according to the latter, was Bizet’s original tragic vision. Nemirovitch hired the young poet Constantin Lipskeroff to radically redact and re-arrange the materials, and the result was at least something of a success with audiences. From the translated libretto, it is difficult to tell how much of Bizet’s music was used, and where, and impossible at this reach to know how vocally well-equipped the presumably good actors of the MAT Musical Studio were. ^(I)But we can see that Lipskeroff did wrestle interestingly with some of Carmen‘s subtextual themes—Carmen’s atavistic religious belief; the attract/repel quality of certain ethnic differences; the function of Micaëla as emissary of José’s mother (the character, in fact, is gone, but some of her music is allotted to a chorus member representing the mother)—and that his effort was artistically serious.

Some sixty years later, we had Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen. With Brook, there is never any doubt about seriosity. Like Nemirovitch and Lipskeroff, he set out to strip the story down to its tragic essence, which for him meant detaching it from its social setting—those same elements that smacked of the “bourgeois” or the operatic, whether grand or comique: all minor characters and chorus, together with, necessarily, the scenes they play in; a full orchestra; the specified places of action; and lots of terrific music. There was sand, there was engagement with some of the mythic themes of the Gypsy culture. And there were moments of persuasive intensity between the principals, but many more of such serious vocal shortfall as to cut the legs from under the drama, and throughout, the sense of a tale told in a vacuum. La Tragédie had the succès d’estime often accorded such efforts from high-end directors, but my own estime tiptoed out the door as soon as the nature of the goings-on became apparent. ^(II)