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Her underwritten and unexplained, varied character traits seem only to exist to support the much clearer journey of her “lover” Don José. She’s a factory worker, an aggressor, a reluctant smuggler, a gang leader, a seductive manipulator and a vulnerable woman in love. She is clearly an exotic fantasy.īeyond the exoticism, who Carmen is also changes in every scene. The majority of Gypsy women live in a highly patriarchal, rule-bound society where women marry very young.
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Her mixture of rebellious amorality, sporadic codes of honour, and decorative flamenco dancing, all underpinned by the idea of freedom, and particularly sexual freedom, is inconceivable. The mysterious, devious Gypsy identity these men created for Carmen is problematic and inaccurate. Mathilde López, director, centre, with Jeremy Silver, conductor, right, during rehearsals for Carmen. His collaborators, Meilhac and Halévy, were masters of the Parisian farce, with their own agenda of making entertaining scripts that pulled in the crowds, fully embodying and furthering the generic sexism of the era. Bizet’s mesmerising music was inspired by some Spanish composers, whom he fully acknowledged, but he had never set foot in Spain. Mérimée based his 1845 work on a story he had heard of destructive passion in the south of Spain and fused it with a study on Romany language and culture, reinventing the heroine as a Gypsy. This it not surprising given that she embodies the accumulated fantasies of several male authors: Prosper Mérimée, the author of the novella Carmen on which Bizet based his opera three decades later, as well as Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who co-wrote the libretto. She is a sort of mashup of holiday sexual encounters.
#Carmen opera lyrics english series
Beyond Georges Bizet’s incredible music, the character of Carmen is inconsistent and underwritten, a series of different women, or even different skirts – some of these are Gypsy some are not.