CARMEN

"Whatever, the woman is a goddess in the untamed, reckless style of the outcast outsider, and as such, threatening as well as irresistible." (quote by Jay)

Bizet's brilliant and exciting music and CARMEN in a new production had opened at the Met! We could not get tickets and “ended up” seeing it at the tenplex movie house — a life performance in HD. And these tickets also sold out quickly. What a performance — great, overwhelming, sexy and mind blowing! It is like sitting in the first row at the Met, looking directly at the singers, seeing the pit, the conductor, and staring directly into the faces of the performers. The sound was overwhelming. Great interview with the singers at intermission and a good peek at what happens behind the curtain once the singers leave the stage. Oh so great. Carmen (Elīna Garanča) is very beautiful and she put all her artistry into her Carmen. She also dances the Flamenco while she sings (yes!) If you love opera and cannot get tickets at the Met, go to the movies! It's much better than sitting at Family Circle all the way up there where we normally are. No wonder that the movie house was also sold out.

Jay alerted me to the original story of Carmen written by Prosper Merimee in 1870 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_Mérimée. I always found the Carmen character fascinating, and I loved her spontaneity, her selfishness and her lust for life. I think this was the third time that I attended a Carmen performance, and this to me was the best! The original book story is vaguely the same as the opera libretto, but ever so vaguely. The book is much more detailed and focuses on Carmen, the gypsy, exclusively. Don José’s crazed attraction and love to her is described in greatest detail, the different ways of gypsy life and their thinking, their thievery, and their love to move around. But in the end it all comes together, there is of course the Picadore who has a love affair with Carmen and then dies in the bullfight; Don José kills Carmen to free himself from her before he also dies.  Oh boy, oh so great.

I looked up the history of “gypsies” on the internet, read about their flight from from India and their moving all over the continent, their own languages, their holidays, their violence, their habits, and the world's many ways of pursuing, exploiting and killing them. All this made the Carmen opera more alive to me and together with Bizet's music it is hard to dismiss from your mind.