Having exhausted my descriptive powers in attempting to explain the basic unplayability of here-and-now adaptations of 19th-Century masterworks, I haven’t the stomach to write in extenso on the Met’s Carmen. Indeed I cannot, since I fled the auditorium at the single intermission, between Acts 2 and 3. The company has seemed determined for nigh onto sixty years to reduce this opera to rubble, and has finally succeeded. I’ll enter a few notes, mostly about the singing, below. Meanwhile, a sketch of the work’s essential characteristics—a reminder of what a thoughtful interpretation would take into account—might be helpful. We cannot quite say that Carmen and José are a “normal” E-19 protagonist couple. For one thing, the Carmen variation reverses the narrative’s usual male/female social positioning. Here, the woman is the wandering outlaw and the man the partner grounded, though shakily, in the established social order. Their ethnic identities, and their individual adjustments to them in the story’s particular time and place, are literally determinative—this story, this tragedy, would not happen without them.

José is a Basque, that is to say, a native of an ancient, defiantly independent culture in Spain’s northwestern corner that clings to its own language, its own common law, customs, and ways of defining courage and honor. Emblematic of these last is the game of pelota, or jeu de paume, a type of handball played with a very hard sphere. Its most direct domesticated descendant would be Jai-Alai, which even today is played almost exclusively by Basques; it’s a wonderful sport to watch. In a violent quarrel over a match, José has killed his opponent^(I) and on that account has become a fugitive from his home village of Elizondo. He has come south to Seville, where he is not comfortable with that city’s unfamiliar, relatively cosmopolitan mores, especially the ways of Andalusian women. But he has joined the army and, though presently stuck with the modest rank of corporal, plans to follow its rules, work his way up, and thereby pay down his moral and material debt to his widowed mother. (She has left their village and, with the orphaned Micaëla, moved to be within a day’s distance of Seville.) He’s a guilt-racked hothead, trying to go straight.

Carmen is a Gypsy.^(II) Like the Basques, the Gypsies are proud, insular outsiders. But they are also nomads, who over a long history of migration have resisted assimilation with remarkable success. Their travels began in India, somewhere between 900 and 1100, and proceeded westward, with many extended sojourns en route, till their arrival in Europe in the early 1400s. Along the way, they split into two groups, one heading to the North, through Greece and into the Balkans, and the other due west, across Egypt and the rest of North Africa, thence over the Straits of Gibraltar and into Spain from the South. It is this southern migratory group from which Carmen would be logically descended. Their independence notwithstanding, both Gypsy groups were exposed to significant influences of religion and custom by the societies they dwelled amongst, and some of these were absorbed into their own beliefs and observances.