In Search of the Essence

By Christopher Porterfield

LA TRAGEDIE DE CARMEN Directed by Peter Brook

A conversation between Prosper Merimee and Georges Bizet, overheard in the smoking room of the Parnassus Club:

Merimee: And so, my friend, what do you think of the job this fellow Peter Brook has done with your Carmen"!

Bizet: Excuse me, but I do not regard it as my Carmen.

Merimee: Oh, come. I admit there have been a few changes--

Bizet: A four-act work that takes nearly as many hours to perform is chopped to a single act of 82 minutes, the entire cast is reduced to four singers and two speaking parts, the plot and music are twisted around--a few changes indeed!

Merimee: But all done, surely, according to a consistent principle.

Bizet: Yes. Vandalism.

Merimee: Brook prefers to describe it as a search for the essence, a stripping away of conventional trappings. He has turned the apron of the stage at Manhattan's Vivian Beaumont Theater into a patch of dust beneath hot, glaring lights, and on it he has traced the bleak geometry of the characters' fates quite vividly.

Bizet: It is the fate of my other characters and my choral scenes that concerns me. And no offense to the 15-piece ensemble that the music director, Marius Constant, conducts at the rear of the stage and a bit off to the side, but I miss my big orchestra.

Merimee: For me, I must confess, the production has some of the concentrated impact of my original tale of Carmen. You know, the qualities that Nietzsche, just the other day, was saying you had drawn from me--"the logic in passion, the shortest line, the harsh necessity."

Bizet: Nietzsche! I sometimes think I have suffered more from that old bore's praise than from the censure often others.

Merimee: You don't object to my own Carmen being emphasized?

Bizet: On the contrary. Much of what I can find good in this production derives from it. The creature that Carmen has become, for instance--still beguiling, but fiercer and more carnal. The deeper degradation of her simple soldier lover, Don Jose, through his murders of his officer and Carmen's husband, which do not occur in my work. Even the way Don Jose's rival, the bullfighter Escamillo, comes to grief instead of triumph in the end.

Merimee: You see, the immediacy, the reduced scale, the rotation of several young actor-singers in the major roles from night to night--five Carmens, five Don Joses and what have you--are merely Brook's way of reconceiving your work in contemporary theater terms.

Bizet: But he implies that this is the way I would have written it had I been allowed to, or would write it today.

Merimee: Isn't it?

Bizet: If Brook and his screenwriter-playwright collaborator, Jean-Claude Carriere, were to present me with this libretto now, yes, I might be intrigued. But I worked within quite different terms, the opera-comique's of 1875 and my own. Which brings us to the fundamental point that Brook has missed.

Merimee: Namely?

Bizet: In a good opera, the drama, the psychology, the structure all reside in the music far more than in the libretto. If you rearrange the libretto, you cannot simply drape remnants of the score over the new framework. Since we are quoting Nietzsche, remember that he said my score "builds, organizes, finishes," and by heaven it does!

Merimee: What is more, it endures. Your Carmen has survived music-hall travesties, ballets, jazz versions and movies. It will survive the undeniable brilliance of Peter Brook too.

Bizet: Well, then, shall we have a drink on it?

Merimee: By all means, let's join the group in the bar. I believe Nietzsche is buying.

--By Christopher Porterfield This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.