ORIGINAL CARMEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 99, 24 October 1938, Page 3

ORIGINAL CARMEN

STORY BY MERIMEE

AND ITS OPERATIC VERSION

CENTENARY OF BIZET

The story of "Carmen" begins thus, writes Richard Capell in the "Daily Telegraph and Morning Post":—"I had always harboured the suspicion that geographers knew not what they were talking about when they placed the battlefield of Munda in the country of the Bastuli Poeni, near the modern Monda, some two leagues north of Marbella.

"Following upon conjectures I had derived from the anonymous 'Bellum hispaniense' and certaian clues collected in the Duke of Ossuna's excellent library, I conceived that somewhere in the neighbourhood of Montilla must be sought the memorable scene where, for the last time, Caesar played double or quit against the champions of the Republic. Happening to be in Andalucia early in the autumn of 1830, I undertook a longish excursion to clear up such doubts as lingered in my mind.

"The dissertation I shall shortly issue will, I trust, settle the question for all fair-minded archaeologists. Pending the publication of the treatise which should resolve a geographical problem that still holds all European scholarship .in suspense, I should like to narrate a trifling tale in no wise affecting the interesting question of the site of Munda."

And then follows the archaeologist's story, told in that pellucid language, that incomparably civilised Merimean French, of his encounter in the Sierra de Cabra with the bandit Don Jose | Lizzarrabengoa,' Carmen's lover and murderer. HOW MUCH THEY MISSED.

Bizet's centenary is about to be celebrated (he was born on October 25, 1838), and that has been an excuse for taking Merimee's little book down from the shelf. But as a way of celebrating the composer of the musical version of the story it must be admitted that there is a risk in reading the original "Carmen"—the risk of realising how much Bizet and his collaborators missed, how much they vulgarised. » ... . There are not too many operas like Bizet's—there is not even one other. We can hardly afford to look too closely into its inequalities. The extravagance of the'praise lavished upon it in the last sixty years is a pointer to the European craving for such music and of its rarity—music of that vivacious temper, spritely and passionate, spontaneous and thoroughbred, music of clear, luminous colour and instinctive poise. The best things in Bizet are of a rarity beyond any jewels. What a vein! But along with the good things there is pinchbeck. His "Carmen is true only in patches. What gaps there are and what superfluities! For instance, Carmen's husband, the oneeyed Garcia, should surely have been included and the Improbable Micaela excluded.

There is in Merimee far too muchj matter to be packed into an opera— but Merimee says nothing about any Micaela. How comes this Micaela to be wandering in Andalucia, she the girl from Jose's far-away Pyrenean home? It is false. And without Micaela room could have been found | for more of the truth about Jose. | INFLUENCE OF WORDS. Seville is worlds away from Pamplona in Navarre, and therein lies the spring of the story. Jose was Basque; *and not Carmen's bright eyes were his downfall, but the few words of Basque she knew. He did not, to begin with, like her looks; he did not care for the women of Seville at all. "I was young then," says Merimee's Don Jose, "I was thinking all the time of home, and no girl could be a pretty girl in my eyes who hadn't a blue petticoat and her hair in plaits down her back."

And what, did Carmen look like on that fatal day (it was a Friday) at the cigar factory? Jose remembered:

I "The red skirt she wore was very | short, and you could see her white silk stockings and more than one hole in them; and she was wearing tiny shoes of red leather tied with ribbons the. colour of fire. She spread her mantilla to show her shoulders and the big bunch of cassia that was stuck in her shift. And she had another cassia flower stuck in the corner of her mouth, and she came swaying on her hips like a filly from the studfarm at Cordoba. In my home a woman looking like that would have made people cross themselves. At Seville every one paid her a saucy compliment on her style, and she had an answer for one and all, making eyes at them her hand on her hip, shameless, like the thorough gipsy she was., The archaeologist himself suspects she was not a pure gipsy. "At least she was far prettier than any other woman of her race I have" met." Her skin was copper-coloured, her black hair had the blue gleam of a ravens feathers. As for her eyes, "A gipsy s eye is a wolf's eye, says the proverb. The performance of Bizet's "Carmen seems more difficult than ever when you- read Merimee. THE FALL OF DON JOSE. Don Jose fell not for her eyes or her copper complexion but for her smattering of Basque. On the way to prison, after the affray at the cigar factory, she wheedled him with "Laguna ene bihotsarena!"—"Friend of my heart!" And recalling it all long afterwards, when he is in the condemned cell, he says, "Our language, sir, is such a beautiful one that when we hear it in a foreign land a shiver comes over US." it is all prettified in the opera, at least until the last act. Take the "Fleur que tv m'avais jetee, that pretty drawing-room ballad—why should Jose be made to sing to Carmen in that way when we have been told at first hand what Jose's singing was really like? At the Venta del Cuervo, says Merimee, "having been handed the mandolin, he sang, accompanying himself. His voice was rough yet pleasing to hear, the tune was melancholy and outlandish; I could understand not one word. 'If I am not mistaken,' I said, 'it was no Spanish song that you have been singing. It seemed like the Zorzicos that I have heard in the Privileged Provinces, and the words must be Basque/ 'Yes,' said Eton Jose, looking gloomy. He put the mandolin down and, crossing his arms, stared at the dying fire with a strangely sorrowful expression. In the light of the lamp that had been put on the little table his face, fierce and yet noble, called to mind Milton's Satan."

It will be gathered that the producers of the opera and the tenors who sing the part of Carmen's lover do not, as a rule, read Merimee. Opera-goers must often have been puzzled by the milieu represented by Bizet's second act. It combines, as a matter of fact, elements from three different scenes in the story. A party at the colonel's, where Carmen performs her gipsy dances, and the scene in the house of the old bawd, Dorotea, where Jose kills the officer (the Zuniga of the opera) whom he has surprised there with Carmen, are somewhat improbably, trans-