Like the personages of Forza, Carmen lives in Catholic Spain, and accommodates herself to its ways as needed. But her Destiny holds out no redemptive hope, and stands in what at first seems a position in contradiction of her claims to “love that’s never known a law,” and to that “chose enivrante, la liberté.” The cards that Carmen reads do not themselves dictate her fate. They only transmit what is written above, and has been her assigned lot all along. That lot is fixed, a tiny part of an impersonal order to which there is no appeal—whichever twists and turns of the path one may choose, all will finally lead to the same place. She and her Destined One will enact what has been foretold, she in full awareness, he in the vain hope of changing the course. This fixed order is beyond human concepts of morality, or of reward or punishment. Like the order of the Ring des Nibelungen, which pre-exists time itself and will extend beyond time, it is neutral with respect to the doings of gods and men. If one is so inclined, one may take this as the ultimate freedom: if no choice can affect the outcome, then make it your choice, and on to the next stop on the road. All this is stated quite exactly, with little room for interpretation, in the words and music of the opera. Meanwhile, the spectacle can be enormously entertaining.

Condemned to the assignment of singing the words and music of this work and of finding behavior to match while playing a scenario set in “a contemporary American industrial town,” the performers appear hapless to us. Yet for all I know they are having a whale of a time. It’s great being out there, and it’s a lot less strain to dress and act like people you know, or at least see on TV, than to imagine yourself in another place and time, among people who have different ideas about how to get on in a different world. So let the director assume the role of Destiny, do what she says, and sell it. I had opted for the second cast of this season’s run, guessing that Michael Fabiano would bring some intensity to José and that Clémentine Margaine, whom I’d never heard, might trail behind her traces of a native French style in the title role. Fabiano, along with Ailyn Perez, did afford what pleasure the first two acts contained. His well-controlled lirico-spinto tenor is on the lighter side of the dramatic demands of Acts 3 and 4, so whether or not he did fulfill those great moments, I cannot say. But in the Act 1 scene with Micaëla and in the Flower Song (granting an amnesty for a falsetto imitation of mezza voce on the ascent to the final B-flat), he did nicely shaded singing along a well-guided line. His bare skull gave him a rather cadaverous presence, and his physicality often seemed tentative, but under the circumstances that’s not to be wondered at. And it’s not his fault that reading a newspaper is a poor substitute for concentrating on his épinglette.^(I) Perez sang prettily and artistically—perhaps a little too artistically. In her appearances in Thaïs and Florencia en el Amazonas she has shown a lyric soprano of fair fullness; here, she didn’t deploy much of that.