craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

Carmen is my favourite opera. It has pretty much always been my favourite opera (Don Giovanni being the only one to ever seriously threaten it in that position), and I have listened to it easily fifty or sixty times. (Callas' under-appreciated studio version being my favourite.)

Carmen also occupies a preponderant place in the pantheon of French-language opera. There are a lot of great French-language operas, but Carmen towers over them all—and unlike the way in which Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen towers over German-language operas, Carmen, being more accessible, also continues to be hugely popular with the general public, as well. (I think a good analogy would be The Nutcracker's broad popular appeal with audiences in the US, which transcends the usual ballet crowd.)

So, when a French opera company puts on Carmen, it is a big deal. The Opéra de Lille rose to the challenge with an extra-long run of ten shows, a recording, and a live retransmission on one of the public squares in order to bring this production to the largest possible audience. Even so, tickets were considered nearly impossible to get. People began queueing up before dawn on the day they went on sale, and they were sold out that very morning. I had many co-workers who had wanted to get tickets, but came away empty.

Fortunately, I was not one of the ones to go away empty-handed. (I got lucky on the online ticket counter.) So, last Tuesday, Emilie and I got to see the Lille production of Carmen, and wow, was it ever worth it!

In some respects, producing Carmen is like shooting fish in a barrel: there's enough material here to fill a whole "best of the opera" CD just with well-known songs from this one opera. The overture, Habanera, and toréador song are enough to send any crowd away happy. But to the cognoscenti, a real succesful production—one that brings out just how excellent this opera is, has to get a number of other elements right in order for everything to click the way it should:

I. The cuadrilla in Act IV. The whole opera leads up to this climactic moment, and done right, it is one of the most powerful moments in all of the fine arts. However, it is hard to do it right: not only do you need a full children's choir and an adult choir, but the staging must somehow come together in such a way that the size and excitement of the bullfighting festival are brought across. It requires big sound and big staging. Shamefully, some productions cut this scene out entirely. I suppose they reckon that it is better to remove it rather than do a poor job of it, but it really castrates the entire opera. Well, Lille not only did not cut it out, but executed it brilliantly. That alone made this Carmen better than the one I saw the Opéra de Montréal produce many years ago, which given the relative sizes of the two companies is really something.

II. Frasquita and Mercédès. These rôles are pivotal to a succesful Carmen. However, because they are not involved in any of the big, famous songs, they are too easily overlooked. Acts II and III depend on their rôles for characterisation and for the pure fun they bring to the whole opera. When they deliver, the opera becomes one masterful whole, and not a collection of classical "hits". The production we saw was completely sensitive to the importance of the smugglers to the opera, and not only were Frasquita and Mercédès brilliantly cast and performed, by Eduarda Melo and Sarah Jouffroy (more on them later), but Dancaïre and Remendado were too. Raphaël Brémard and Loïc Félix were so spot-on with their interpretation of these rôles that it really cemented Acts II and III.

III. The opening of Act II. The song that opens Act II (Les tringles des sistres tintaient) is probably my favourite of the whole opera, and the most under-appreciated. A production that captures the magic of that piece of music is really a production that "gets it". This production exceeded my expectations by a mile, with the scene and choreography coming together with the music wonderfully. The most wonderful, though, were the bohémiennes: Eduarda Melo and Sarah Jouffroy, as I mentioned above, are beautiful women who really embodied their rôles to perfection. Stéphanie d’Oustrac, however, was born to play the rôle of Carmen. Somehow, this is her first time in the rôle, but I think it is a safe bet that it won't be the last. (And I'm not the only one who thinks so.) For starters, it is uncanny how much she looks the part. Beyond that, her acting on stage was excellent, of a higher level than one usually expects in opera, and her ability to dance and sing make her a natural leading lady.

Anyway, I don't want to get carried away in superlatives, but I am pretty discerning when it comes to this opera, and this production really did surprise me. It delivered on all the key points (such as not skimping on more difficult elements like Act IV or the children's choir—who were also great, by the way), and by showing a real sensitivity to the more subtle factors that make this opera great (namely, the smugglers' importance to the whole). Finally, Stéphanie d’Oustrac was a brilliant, brilliant Carmen, and from now on, when I listen to this opera and visualise it in my mind's eye, it is her face that will be Carmen's for me.