Carmen
This was the best Carmen I have ever seen, bar none!!!! Elena Garanca was unbelievable dancing, singing, acting. Alagna cracked a little during the Flower song but he was great. The staging was outstanding and the added ballet in the overture and the act 3 interlude really added to the interpretation of the opera. I loved it. We noticed Robert Weiss in line behind us at the theater.
She’s Got Castanets, So Let Carmen Dance
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
In his overture to “Carmen,” Bizet introduces a recurring motif that listeners have invariably associated with fate and with the fatal liaison of Carmen and Don José. The composer meant it to be played with the curtain lowered. Then, as the stage action proceeds, he develops it powerfully, bringing it back often, in hauntingly different versions: like a flash of lightning, like a slow but tremendous warning, like an irresistible undertow.
During the overture in Richard Eyre’s new production of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, a blood-red diagonal gash in the front curtain opens (this is later echoed by a red diagonal slash on the dress Carmen is wearing when she is killed), so that we can see a danced treatment of this fate motif by Christopher Wheeldon. Man (Martin Harvey, formerly of the Royal Ballet) meets Woman (Maria Kowroski of the New York City Ballet) to make love in a red arena.
The main point of this choreography is its image of sex. She lies on the floor and opens her legs wide for him. At another point (though this was none too clear on opening night), as he lifts her high, she seems to stab his upper back — as if he were a bull, she the toreador. Man, woman, sex, death: get it?
This is scarcely subtle, but it prepares us for the rest of the production (which will be performed on Saturday afternoon and broadcast live in high-definition to movie theaters around the world). Never mind that, when Carmen and José — the singers — finally meet as lovers in Act II, she announces that she will dance for him. Never mind that Carmen’s first three big solos — the Habanera, the Seguidilla and the Danse Bohémienne — are all dance numbers in their rhythm; so, when she tells José that she’s going to dance for him in Act II, we might presume that she means it, especially as Bizet gives her castanets and a rhythm that subtly recalls that of the Habanera.
For Mr. Eyre — and, apparently, Mr. Wheeldon — dance, however, is not what Carmen intends. She (Elina Garanca) takes off her shoes, nuzzles José (Roberto Alagna) from behind, wraps a leg round him, then lies on the floor and opens her legs wide to him — get it? — just as the woman did in the overture. And never mind that Bizet doesn’t give us the fate motif here.
The idea of fate in “Carmen” (as the heroine tells us in the card trio) isn’t difficult. Carmen has had many lovers and would have gone on to have many more. Her final lover, the toreador Escamillo, is among those who know that her affairs are short. But in choosing the hitherto innocent José as her sexual victim, she actually chooses the man who will kill her; and that’s both her fate and his.
What is remarkable is the change in him, from innocent country boy to jealous killer. Not for nothing did the bass Feodor Chaliapin — the most extraordinary singing actor in opera a century ago — say that José was the only role that made him want to be a tenor.
When big-name choreographers are brought into “Carmen,” they are usually given dances (sometimes to non-“Carmen” music) in Act IV. In the 1937 Met revival with Rosa Ponselle as Carmen, the Act IV dances were choreographed by George Balanchine. (Unlike Ms. Garanca, Ponselle was among the many Carmens who have tried some real dancing.)
Here, however, all the dancing is over before the main action of Act III. Mr. Wheeldon starts the first part of the Act II Gypsy dance without musical accompaniment, then runs it into Bizet’s music. Inevitably, this gives us the feeling that Mr. Wheeldon’s intentions are greater than Bizet can satisfy. Mr. Wheeldon gives us percussive Spanish footwork and a phalanx of dancers, but the number is not a big deal: ballet abounds in “Spanish” numbers more exciting than this. This is, nonetheless, the production’s finest dance.
Its worst? Having associated Ms. Kowroski and Mr. Harvey in our minds with the fate/death aspect of “Carmen” in the Act I Prelude, Mr. Eyre and Mr. Wheeldon bring them back to dance another pas de deux in the idyllic Prelude to Act III. Their presence makes little sense of music-drama — this is the part of the opera where the music is freest from fate, death or sex — and their duet is all romantic cliché. Ms. Kowroski repeatedly makes standard gestures (not unlike the Swan Queen in “Swan Lake”) to get away from her partner, then returns to his embrace.
That kind of staginess isn’t found elsewhere in this production. Mr. Eyre generally knows how to make his singers look like characters with their own lives and motivations, even if those don’t always make sense within the framework of “Carmen.” But his characters never once moved as if the music impelled them. This will not be an important staging of “Carmen” unless the onstage action starts to show what is musically dramatic about this music-drama.
The Met, under Peter Gelb, is making an impressive effort to win high-level choreographers for its operas (as I’ve written before in these pages). But too often the house’s current stagings, new or old, lack those qualities of musically attentive action that can make operatic acting akin to great choreography.
In Act III of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” the villain Dapertutto sings the aria “Scintille, diamant,” telling his magic gem to lure Giulietta: “Attire-la!” (Lure her”!). As soon as he ends, a rapid figure in the strings seems to indicate her running on at his behest, whereupon at once he addresses her, “Cher ange.”
That rapid writing for the strings recalls a similar passage in Act II, Scene 2 of “La Traviata,” and I have always hoped to see a Violetta run in on the music, as the critic Michael Scott has described Maria Callas doing in the 1958 Covent Garden revival of “Traviata,” her feet hitting the semiquavers “like a ballerina.”
But there are other possibilities: in the 1951 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film “The Tales of Hoffmann,” Frederick Ashton’s choreography gives Giulietta a glamorously chilling entrance in which black rose petals trail through her fingers.
In Bartlett Sher’s new staging of the opera at the Met, however, Giulietta lazily saunters on during Dapertutto’s aria; he fastens the diamond about her neck while he continues to sing, and so he ends the aria by repeating the words “Attire-la!” (“Lure her!”), which have now become wholly meaningless.
Elsewhere in this Met “Hoffmann,” Dou-Dou Huang provides coarse choreography for both the dolls in the Prologue’s Kleinzack story and for five couples who are clones of the doll Olympia and Hoffmann himself. The dancers tend to face front in German-Expressionist style; Mr. Huang’s rhythmic choices are obvious at every moment. The effect makes Offenbach’s music (which I love) far less fresh and appealing.
Choreography and opera direction are separate arts, and few have excelled at both. But, though they proceed by different methods, they are intimately related. Much of the best choreography helps us to hear the music better. I ask the same of opera direction.