Peter Brook’s reworking of Carmen premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Bouffe du Nord in 1981. Brook intended his La Tragédie de Carmen to strip away the layers that had stultified what he takes to have been Bizet’s original vision. He began with the libretto itself:
Mérimée was an extremely economical writer, a minimalist who wasted no words and got right to the point. Bizet’s music is also exquisitely to the point, in human terms. But the librettists brought to the opera’s story a superstructure that was anti- Mérimée, totally decorative. Mérimée wouldn’t use one showy phrase for its own sake, but his story, turned into an opera, has all these extras, these choruses, to make it palatable to audiences of the time. And it became a “Spanish show.”
Brook and his collaborators (composer-conductor Marius Constant and playwright Jean-Claude Carrière) reduced Carmen to what they perceived as its basic elements and reconstituted the opera, so that the story seems at once familiar and alien: “We are doing a new investigation of [Carmen] - hence the new title - and what we have done is to separate its central core from the rest of the material, like boning a fish. Everything is trimmed away to focus on the intense interaction, the tragedy of four people.”
The structural paradigm of the love triangle motivates La Tragédie. Bizet’s opera contains two principal rivalries (José-Carmen-Escamillo; Carmen-José-Micaëla), while Mérimée’s novella includes several other triangulations (Carmen and José as stable factors, with the third position filled variously by her husband Garcia, an English Milord, the Frenchman narrator and so on). Brook seizes this structure and presents the story as a series of permutations that rotate mechanically, each time leaving one “odd man out.”
Thus the opening establishes the duality of José and Micaëla, into which Carmen intrudes, leaving Micaëla alone. Act II takes place in Lillas Pastia’s one-woman brothel, as Pastia and Carmen ply with drink and seduce Zuniga, Don José and Escamillo in turn. The process is virtually identical each time, and Carmen even retreats upstairs with her pimp Pastia, only to return to José at the end of the scene. The third act introduces her husband Garcia, who is killed in short order, and Micaëla, whom José leaves alone with Carmen. And the fourth act revolves around Escamillo and the reentry of José. When Escamillo dies in the bullring, Don José and Carmen depart as if in a trance. Carmen submits to what seems like ritual sacrifice, and José is left alone: after Escamillo’s demise, nothing remains to further the plot, and the other points of the triangle simply disintegrate.
In this structuralist rendition of the opera, Brook puts fate at the center in a way that recalls Nietzsche: “love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel - and precisely in this a piece of nature. That love which is war in its means, and at bottom the deadly hatred of the sexes!” The mathematical configurations sustaining La Tragédie resemble a game of billiards. There is no motivations, no agency here. The social presence so prominent in Bizet’s opera is gone, leaving only this chain of triangles as a universal condition. The actors walk somnambulantly through their paces, cogs in a bloody Darwinian machine.
Unlike some reworking of operas in which the music is sacrificed to theatrical realism, Brook has his characters sing Bizet’s music. But the music has been altered in a variety of ways. First, the orchestra contains only fifteen members. The flair of the original score is subdued to ensure that it does not pull us into the dramatic sweep of the opera, away from our attention to structure. At certain crucial moments (e.g. Carmen’s fatalistic “En vain” air from Act III or the beginning of the final duet), a piano replaces the orchestra altogether. Similarly, ominous solo timpani provide the stark support for the “Habañera.” These choices all have the effect of alienating those passages of the opera for which our reflexes are most automatic.
Brook’s version eliminates the sections extraneous to his vision of the opera, including all the choruses, and most of the remaining sequences are radically reordered. For instance, Bizet’s prelude appears only once - at the beginning of Act IV, as Escamillo prepares for his final bullfight (the “fate” motive is thus attached principally to his destiny). Brook substitutes as opening music Carmen’s “En vain,” played on unaccompanied cello. The work is thus somber from the outset: the irony of Bizet’s festive music in conjunction with the eventual tragedy is lost, but the rigor of Brook’s concept is effectively foreshadowed.
While this melancholy music plays at the beginning, a blanketed figure sits in the center of a dusty courtyard, watching and casting spells. Micaëla enters and sings her lines in which she asks after Don José. The sinister figure cackles and grabs her hand to tell her fortune. When José returns, Micaëla launches into their duet; but as he sings his reminiscence of his mother, the figure throws off the blanket to reveal an amused and unusually malevolent Carmen. She interrupts the duet with her “Habañera,” captivating José by playing suggestively with a cigar. Her number is all the more sinister because of its bare timpani support. When Micaëla returns to try to win José back, the two women lunge at each other in a vicious, hair-pulling fight, accompanied by the music with which the altercation in the factory is depicted in the opera. Manuelita has been replaced here by Carmen’s only true rival, Micaëla, and it is she whom Carmen scars with her knife.
Act II, with its play of triangles in the brothel, rearranges Bizet’s sequence most severely. The seduction of Zuniga takes place against Carmen’s “Gypsy Song” music. As José enters, the orchestra plays his plaintive passage from Act IV, “Je ne mence pas, j’implore, je supplie.” Otherwise most of the music for Bizet’s Act II encounter between Carmen and José occurs in this production as well, except that José is interrupted before his “Flower Song” by the angry return of Zuniga, whom he murders. Only then does Escamillo enter and sing his “Toreador Song.” José challenges him to fight, and the duel/duet between the two men from Act III occurs. As Escamillo leaves, Pastia pulls Carmen upstairs to bed with him, leaving José alone to sing the “Flower Song” to himself. Carmen returns, hears its conclusion and joins with him in a passionate kiss that closes the act. Whereas in the opera, José’s love song falls apparently on deaf ears, Brook’s version yields to sentiment: the “Flower Song” achieves its desired end here, and we witness José and Carmen temporarily in accord.
A couple of other moments of rearrangement will have to suffice for this discussion. As Micaëla sings her Act III air, Carmen joins in with a countermelody based loosely on her own air concerning fate; and when José then leaves the two women together, we see them unified in their apprehension rather than as antagonists. The ending must also be changed, owing to Escamillo’s death. The duet between Carmen and José thus concludes with her “Libre elle est née et libre elle mourra!” They watch Escamillo’s body being carried away, to newly composed music based on the “fate” material from the prelude, and then leave the arena, again to the solo cello playing her fatalistic Act III air, “En vain.” As they kneel for the execution, the ominous timpani reappear, obsessively playing the “Habañera” rhythm. This is all that remains of their history together.
While Brook clearly takes substantial liberties with Bizet’s opera, virtually all of his shifts cast an interesting light back on the original. After seeing his production, those same moments in the context of the opera resonate differently. And for an opera as familiar as Carmen, this is quite an accomplishment. He returns to Carmen the dread, the unsettling feelings experienced by some of the opera’s first audiences.
When Brook’s production was broadcast on television, the enthusiastic commentator proclaimed Carmen “a liberated woman, in charge of her own life and own fate.” But Brook’s vision would seem to suggest quite the opposite: his Carmen is overtly a witch, a prostitute, and evil presence. She has no community (no choruses) to sustain her, and her submission to fate and death scarcely marks her as liberated. The interpretation is formalistic, ahistorical, apparently apolitical, as are most reflections on “fate” and “the human condition.” David Wills writes, “In spite of the success of the production in making opera into convincing theater and not just an outmoded form of melodrama, I would read Brook’s Carmen as something of a retreat from the issue of sexual politics which the text inevitably raises.” But in the 1990s, Brook’s portrait of Carmen and her demise counts not simply as a retreat, but as a reaction against the advances won by women in the last two decades. The rigid law of Brook’s triangulations - the tarot cards he metes out to Carmen will admit no agency, no license.
—From Susan McClary’s Georges Bizet: Carmen