Conclusion

Attraction, seduction, frustrated loves, crimes of passion, inform the plots of countless stories, films, and plays. These themes, while time worn, are also alluring challenges for creative artists. It explains the unending popularity of the story of Carmen and its modern remakes. Passion, once considered an illness, has since the eighteenth century gained acceptance and marriages of the heart are now commonplace and these have displaced the social stratification and sexual regulations that once defined marriage. The story of Carmen speaks to these societal changes in intimate human relations. Many of themes found in Bizet’s opera and Mérimée’s novella (seduction, sacrifice, law and lawlessness, racism, misogyny to name but a few) offer sources of inspiration to many artists. But the often-told story of Carmen also raises the question of originality in art.

Fatal Attraction

Simply summarized the plot of Georges Bizet’s Carmen is that of a crime of passion. This banal plot does not by itself account for the extraordinary international success of the story in different media. The themes that explain the tragic end are imbedded in the libretto. Through a textual and structural analysis of the libretto, the themes of love, passion, gender, freedom, possessiveness, and responsibility, as well as the importance of language in human relations are given new emphasis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of personal trauma and political issues that may account for Georges Bizet’s interest in bringing this story to the operatic stage in 1870.

For the Love of Science

In Carmen, the narrator is a French historian who tells us his adventures in Spain and his meeting the famous bandit José and his lover, Carmen. The novella published in 1845 consisted of three chapters. In the last chapter, which is the basis of the opera’s plot, José himself recounts his relationship with Carmen and her death. In 1847, two years after the first publication of Carmen, Mérimée adds a fourth chapter to the original novella. This fourth chapter presents itself as a study of Romany, the language of the Roma, then called Gypsies. This fourth chapter, under the guise of being a scientific study of Romany, underscores the misogyny and racism already apparent in the earlier chapters.

Introduction

Since 1875, Georges Bizet’s Carmen has held the lead as the world’s most performed opera and through its multifaceted cultural renditions, the story of Carmen can be said to have attained the status of a myth. Myths, like legends, are stories that speak to us over time and place about personal, social and cultural issues. In each of its versions, whether in a myriad of lyric productions, numerous ballets, or a multitude of films, the story of Carmen reflects shifting social interests and values. From enacting codes of love and differing expressions of desire to exposing the intersection of law and order, or celebrating ethnicity, Georges Bizet’s Carmen is a story as timely at the dawn of the twenty-first century as it was in the latter part of the nineteenth.

Screen Woman

The international appeal of the story of Carmen on the silver screen has been phenomenal. The story has spawned nearly eighty films by some of the world’s most celebrated directors. In the early days of cinema, we find a first cluster of Carmens among them films directed by Cecil B. Demille, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernest Lubitsch. In 1954, Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones calls attention to African American issues in the United States, as will in 2001, Carmen: A Hip Opera directed by Robert Towsend for MTV. In 1983, we find a second cluster of international film directed by Jean-Luc Godard (France), Francesco Rosi (Italy) and Carlos Saura (Spain). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Bizet’s heroine appears in two major African film production: Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen (Senegal) and U-Carmen by the Dimpho Di Kopan theater (South Africa). All these films testify to the continuous attraction of Bizet’s heroine through time from the lyric stage to the silver screen.