Opera
Opera Australia’s new production of Carmen features spectacular design and refreshing physical performance, but some complexity is lost along the way. By Chantal Nguyen.
Opera Australia’s Carmen
Opera Australia’s new production of Georges Bizet’s classic holds itself out as “a Carmen for the 21st century, staying true to the rebellious spirit of Bizet’s masterpiece, while asking important questions about gender, violence and class”. Directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, artistic director of Melbourne Theatre Company, it certainly looks fantastic.
Carmen features eye-popping spangled sets and costumes by Marg Horwell, who just last month won a Tony Award for her costume designs in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the lead role on opening night was the larger-than-life Australian–American soprano Danielle de Niese, who pouted, body-rolled and trilled her way through Bizet’s timeless score.
Almost every new production of Carmen – reportedly the third most-performed opera in the world – makes similar claims of offering a fresh take for the times. It remains appealing not only because of Bizet’s profoundly captivating music but also the depth of his characters. Musicologist Hugh Macdonald describes Carmen as the original femme fatale of French opera and laments that subsequent operatic sirens such as Jules Massenet’s Manon, Richard Strauss’s Salome and Alban Berg’s Lulu are “distant degenerate descendants” of Bizet’s peerless creation.
Carmen’s individual complexity as a character means that productions claiming to offer high-level insights into broad social issues such as gender, violence and class sometimes run into problems. The tension between Carmen as a morality tale – where the characters are used to symbolise larger social issues – and Carmen as an individual psychological portrait requires a look at the production’s history.
In early 1870s Paris, Bizet was barely 35 years of age and struggling to find recognition or commissions, despite winning the prestigious Prix de Rome. He was delighted when Carmen was commissioned for the Opéra-Comique, a venue for family-friendly middle-class entertainment. It was to be based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella of the same name: a work that was part travel story, reputedly based on his tours of Spain. Mérimée’s original lacked much of the individualistic nuance of Bizet’s opera.
It stemmed from Mérimée’s own highly dubious “study” of the Romani people – the entire final quarter of the novella was even presented as an objective scholarly treatise on Romani culture. The preface was telling of Mérimée’s views on women and the Romani. He used a quotation from the Ancient Greek poet Palladas: Every woman is bitter as gall / But she has two good moments / One in bed / The other at her death.
Bizet and his librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy), on the other hand, worked to present both Carmen and Don José much more sympathetically – partly to alleviate concerns from the Opéra-Comique management, who feared that Mérimée’s monstrous characters would scandalise audiences.
While the background characters in Carmen are recognisable stock characters from the opéra comique tradition, the two leads, Carmen and Don José, fall outside the genre. They follow in the footsteps of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, which premiered two decades earlier and shocked audiences with its sympathetic portrayal of the courtesan Violetta Valéry – one of the archetypes of the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope – and pre-empted the verismo style of opera, with its emphasis on naturalism and realism, which dominated the opera scene two decades later through composers such as Giacomo Puccini.
Bizet’s score contains the clues to Carmen’s psychologically complex processes. As composer and baritone Glenn Winters of Virginia Opera observed, every main character in Carmen has their own distinctive and consistent musical style: Micaëla sounds angelic, Don José sounds highly emotional, the toreador Escamillo flamboyant, while the Romani have a quick-witted, pattering musicality. Carmen is the only character with little stable identity: she adopts the melodic styles of whoever she is with, mirroring them until they have done what she wants or until her own suspect motivations pass unnoticed. Winters describes her as a “musical chameleon, never singing twice in the same style”. At the end of her Act 1 aria “Seguidilla”, for example, trying to manipulate Don José into freeing her from prison, she sings a soaring line in his style. He replies with the same melody and cuts her ropes.
Carmen also lacks the expected understandings of cruelty or social order. When accused of slashing another woman across the face, she becomes bored and sings “Tra la la la”. What matters most are her own feelings, regardless of consequence or harm to others. In her world, her unregulated subjective desires are almost akin to natural laws. Her famous Act 1 song “Habanera” (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”), is a series of objectively expressed statements about highly subjective emotions: “Love is a rebellious bird / that no one can tame / and it’s quite useless to call him / if it suits him to refuse.”
Don José’s alternative love interest Micaëla, in contrast, speaks in “I” statements that show she knows her feelings – no matter how overwhelming – neither reflect objective reality nor master her decisions and choices. In her Act 4 aria “Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante” (“I say that nothing frightens me”) she sings bravely, “I say that nothing frightens me … I’m dying of terror … I’m afraid … But I’m wrong to be afraid … I’m going to see this woman up close … Protect me! Lord!” She then confronts Don José and Carmen as she promised, despite her terror.
Sarks’s new production, like many stagings of Carmen, is entertaining but not quite up to the task of handling the source material’s complexity. The opera at times felt oddly superficial and the orchestra (Lidiya Yankovskaya conducting in this performance) sometimes lacked the sparkle and depth the score is capable of producing. Even so, the production has its strengths.
De Niese will not disappoint her fans, pulling out all the tricks of the trade as a highly animated Carmen. In an artform infamous for lapsing into “park and bark” singing, her physicality is refreshing. While her Carmen will appeal to some because of its performative energy, it may not satisfy others who look for more dramatic range and narrative development. It is unclear whether this is a reflection of de Niese’s style or a choice intended to highlight Carmen’s superficial grandiosity, but at any rate de Niese’s vocal security and theatrical confidence is a hallmark of the production.
Micaëla (Jennifer Black) is portrayed as a passionless frump, ostensibly to highlight how boring she is compared with Carmen, but this simplification wastes the deeper psychological profile in Bizet’s score. Black’s singing, though, is characterised by a beautiful tone, soaring musical shaping and a wonderfully steady pitch.
Abraham Bretón is a stand-out as José, singing in a heartfelt, vibrant tenor. Bretón’s portrayal is less grandiose than de Niese’s – it’s more three-dimensional and evolves theatrically over the course of the opera. The result is that his Don José comes across as a highly troubled good boy gone wrong, rather than the murderous peril that he can be in other interpretations.
Andrii Kymach was initially muted as the toreador Escamillo, but his voice and persona warmed up in his final scenes. Jane Ede and Helen Sherman are delightful as the Romani duo of Frasquita and Mercedes, matched on the male Romani side by Kanen Breen and Luke Gabbedy as El Remendado and El Dancairo. Finally, Ruth Strutt was a commanding Lillas Pastia.
The absolute highlight of this show is Howell’s designs: a shimmering, candy-coloured haze of pinks, reds, greys, neon and sequins, with a crucifix present in every scene to symbolise impending doom. The final set – Escamillo’s dressing-room – is especially striking, highlighting the tragedy of intimate partner violence with tangible claustrophobia.
For all its claims of fresh insights into gender violence and class dynamics, this production lapses into an interpretation of Carmen that can feel surface-level. In real life, domestic violence and class and gender discrimination may affect people across all spectrums of personality, from women such as the brave and pure-intentioned Micaëlas to the more troubled Carmens of the world. By avoiding the deeper psychological dynamics at play, this production ultimately fails to answer the larger questions it sets itself.
Carmen is playing at Sydney Opera House until September 19, and the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, November 15-25.
ARTS DIARY
CULTURE Clancestry
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Meanjin/Brisbane, July 23–August 10
MUSIC Australian Festival of Chamber Music
Venues throughout Gurambilbarra Country/Townsville, July 25–August 2
LITERATURE Melbourne Rare Book Week
Venues throughout Naarm/Melbourne, July 24–August 2
EXHIBITION Musonga Mbogo: Awake Before the Porsches
Hake House of Art, Guringai/Dee Why, July 26–August 9
BALLET The Sleeping Beauty
Festival Theatre, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, July 22-29
LAST CHANCE
VISUAL ART Elevation
Salamanca Arts Centre, nipaluna/Hobart, until July 21
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Tainted love".
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