An opera about an opera in 82 minutes
The setting is a decrepit building in a seedy district of Paris, not far from the rumbles and whistles of the Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville.
Like the theater in which it is playing, called the Bouffes du Nord, this is a stripped-down, no-frills Carmen far removed from traditional opera-house conventions. It lasts just 82 minutes, with no interval, and uses only four singers, plus two speaking actors. The full orchestra has been reduced to 15 musicians. Everything unnecessary to the plot has been jettisoned in an effort to return to the sunbaked spirit of the original Prosper Mérimée novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary characters. Instead, the focus is on the hotheaded Basque dragoon Don José and his fatal passion for the dark-eyed gypsy Carmen. Brook has even given the work a new title: La Tragédie de Carmen.
This is a time of startling directorial innovations in opera. Patrice Chéreau's controversial Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring cycle (1976) featured Rhine maidens frolicking near a hydroelectric dam and Siegfried wearing a dinner jacket. But what Brook has done goes beyond accepted notions of radicalism. Essentially, he has recomposed Bizet's masterpiece, discarding whole sequences, changing the order of arias, even putting the overture near the end. The implicit arrogance of all this does not trouble Brook. "Opera is not a musical contract on paper, something between attorneys," he says. "The whole essence of theater work to me is to regard a score as an indication of what the imagination." The composer had director's in his task, adds Brook, is to produce what the composer had in mind when he wrote the piece, not "duplicating what's on paper."
This, of course, is nonsense. Usually what the composer puts down on paper is what he had in mind. True, opera librettos have occasionally been censored (as was Verdi's Rigoletto), and sometimes the exigencies of performance required certain concessions in the music itself. Carmen, a failure when it was first performed at the Opéra Comique in 1875, was outfitted after Bizet's death with recitatives by Ernest Guiraud to replace its original spoken dialogue. But this did not change the essential character of the composer's conception.