Classical Music

This week's performances

Sally Potter’s move from screen to opera house with her production of ‘Carmen’ for ENO is a reminder that Bizet’s work was the first opera to be filmed (1915) – ironically, for the silent screen. But we do mean the opera rather than Prosper Mérimée’s original story, since Cecil B de Mille cast the New York Met’s diva Geraldine Farrar in the title role. When opera stages groaned under fat ladies singing by the ton, Farrar epitomised glamour. The daughter of an Irish-American baseball player, she made her early career in Berlin where her admirers included the Kaiser’s son, Little Willy. She would acquire a shrieking female fanclub, the Gerry-Flappers, and a Hollywood star husband, Lou Tellegen, of whom she observed, on being told of his particularly bloody suicide, ‘I am not interested in the least.’ Now that’s a real Carmen remark. Feature continues

The story of the self-willed gypsy girl and her murder at the hands of a discarded lover lends itself to occasional friction in the cast. The greatest Carmen of all, the French soprano Emma Calvé, getting bored with the role, once took her swain’s song about cherishing the flower she had thrown him as a cue to pop a bloom into the mouth of her suitor as he opened wide for his aria. The subsequent complaints to the management and threats of reprisals were kept off stage, but things can get tense on the boards. In a Chicago performance in the late 1950s, Giulietta Simionato, evidently peeved by the lack of interest from her leading man, the dreamboat Franco Corelli, managed to scratch his face during a more than usually realistic tussle, at which, as one American critic put it, he summoned up an unexpected amount of Latin passion. Impressed by this, Simionato gave him and his knife a wide berth in the final scene, finally dropping dead without letting him get near her.

Most problems in ‘Carmen’ come from the work itself: from the the Toreador’s Song, the housewives’ choice to end them all, hideously difficult to sing in its uncommitted bass-baritone range and described by its reluctant composer as ‘ordure’; and from the cigarette-girl’s vocal line. Is Carmen a tangy soprano with whip-crack Gallic speed and enunciation? Or a voluptuous mezzo, fruity, mellow and sensuous in the lower register? (There are alternate versions of the score.) And what about her character? Free, refusing to be tied down, a sexually liberated woman before her time? Or a siren, selfish, destructive and heartless? And we’re not even talking Carmen Jones or Rita Hayworth in ‘The Loves of Carmen’. ENO’s ‘Carmen’ track record is good. David Pountney’s Third-World, used-car dump production, with its tarty nymphets, swaggering soldiery and implied political volatility, was the best I’ve ever seen. Jonathan Miller’s pre-Civil War, Cartier-Bresson-inspired look stripped away the touristy Hispanicisms – ignoring the fact that they’re in the music – and ended up dowdy beyond the call of historical accuracy. Alice Coote, whose fanbase is verging on Gerry-Flapper proportions (aided by a Garboesque elusiveness through occasional cancellations), is famously intelligent, intense and charismatic. Young Edward Gardner, ENO’s new MD, raises his baton. Sally Potter has the best ingredients.