"CARMEN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 479, 27 August 1948, Page 5

"CARMEN"

Sir,-Your corréspondent E. F. Kaye dismissed Bizet’s Carmen as unworthy in a general sense and as specially unworthy of the "dignified title of Grand Opera." As for his general criticism of the opera, is he not in the teeth of the wind when he abruptly dismisses a work proclaimed by numerous composers, and most critics, as being one of the real masterpieces of the lyric stage? Tchaikovski, in his lifelong struggle to write a really successful opera, constantly called for, but failed

to get, "a libretto like Carmen." He recognised it as a perfect vehicle for "Bizet’s masterpiece of musico-dramat-ics, melody, colour and style." ’ Again, if we are to reject Carmen because of a moral blot or two, we must reject the greatest operas of them all, those of Mozart. As regards the title Grand Opera, I would point out that this infers the adding of the elements of spectacle and pageantry to the music and drama, and surely Carmen has these in plenty? To be sure, it doesn’t attempt the bombast of a Wagner effort, but is it «any. less aeceptable because it remains firmly among those present and strives: not. for the distant stars? -If the libretto captures nothing of the brooding atmosphere of Mérimée’s novel, I would answer, "Praised be Meilhac and Halévy." Surely we have. had enough of the soul convulsions of the exotically romantic egotists, _ each obsessed with his own particular of morbidity, who coughed and wept their flaming paths through the passionate dawning of Romanticism in the ‘Paris

of 1830-40.

J. L.

KELLY

(Kohu Kohu).