"CARMEN"—OPERA COMIQUE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 480, 3 September 1948, Page 5

"CARMEN"—OPERA COMIQUE

_ Sir,-It may be misleading publicity that calls Carmen grand opera; I do not know. But the French libretto calls it an "opéra comique." The tragic end-ing-which seems to be almost an accepted convention of "grand" operashows that the words do not mean "comic opera" in our sense. The term simply means an "opera" containing the usual arias and choruses, but interspersed with spoken dialogue. This is how the work was given when I last saw it at the Opéra Comique with Conchita Supervia singing and speaking the title role in French. The current performances according to the two broadcasts I have heard contain no spoken dialogue. This

version, I take it, must be a later arrangement, for Bizet died so soon after the first performance that it is difficult to see how he could have written all the recitatives. Gounod’s Faust too was an opéra comique, when it first appeared in 1859. It is now given in Paris without spoken dialogue-but only at the Opéra not at the Opéra Comique. The original version was revived as a historical curiosity in 1932. Curiously enough a criticism I still possess by Gustave Bret mentions. that Carmen has been relieved of its dialogue "for performances in foreign languages" and that the dialogue in Italian versions of Rossini’s Barber of Seville is replaced by recitative. It is probably Italian opera that AngloSaxons have vaguely in mind when they use the senseless term "grand opera"though the Italians themselves do not use it. So strong is the Italian convention that the English firm of Boosey i olaectallanieninenenaineaeeniinaaaliieaienndieeaianiacemtennetaneeetedaentenetdaeeimcnet

used ti to > publish French operas like Faust with text in English and Italian (not French). Further, if I am not mistaken, the first London performances of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman were given under an Italian title. To expect the literary merit of. Mérimée’s story to be reproduced in opera is futile. Just consider the history of the Shakespearian operas, Romeo and Juliet, for example, where Romeo and Juliet must be alive at the same time at the end to sing a final duet. So in Carmen_you must have a soprany, hence the introduction of Micaela. (Carmen herself being-a wicked woman, must be a mezzo or contralto-like Delilah.) Luckily (for the librettists) Mérimée was dead when the opera appeared, or he would probably have had something to say about it, as Victor Hugo did when Verdi’s Ernani appeared in Paris, As for words, when you begin to translate, especially for voices, your troubles really begin. "The French words translated as "Come and buy one" are actually "A deux cuartos, a deux cuartos." A slightly more accurate translation would be "Half a dollar, half a dollar," but this of course would be open to other objections. In fact, the absurdity of operatic conventions to a people with a dramatic tradition are insuperable. But once you have learned to stomach some of the less egregious, Carmen is as good an opera as most and far better than dozens one could name.

A. C.

KEYS

(Auckland).