Dr Bob Prescribes Georges Bizet, Carmen

As often happens, the topic of a previous day’s Music History Monday post has become, here, the inspiration for today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes.  As a reminder: yesterday’s Music History Monday – entitled “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” – focused on a pair of Taylor Swift concerts in Seattle that shook the ground beneath the stadium with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.

OMG: does that mean that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will feature Taylor Swift?

No, it does not, for which we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Instead, we’re going to run with the music-and-earthquake connection.  It’s a bit tangential, to be sure, but nevertheless, applicable.

Carmen

With music by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, Carmen opened on March 3, 1875, at the Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement.

Neither Carmen’s premiere nor the run that followed went well.  Audiences at the “Opéra-Comique” were accustomed to, well, comic French operas. Instead, in Carmen, they witnessed an opera that the critics slammed as “Wagnerian” because – so they wrongly claimed – the voices were subordinated to the orchestra.  Additionally, the audiences at the Opéra-Comique found both of Carmen’s principal characters to be distasteful, to say the least.  Don José, having sniffed Carmen’s pheromones, goes from being a good, honest soldier to a murderous, testosterone-addled brigand.  As for Carmen herself, well, there’s a piece of work!  She is the female id personified: a glorious, beautiful, highly sexualized and unrepentant hedonist; an amoral conniver; a capricious, fearless, utterly free spirit; a veritable female Don Giovanni, in sexual heat 24/7/365.  She is an opportunist and a feminist in a pre-feminist world, in many ways a shockingly modern woman who, in the words of The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg:

“would rather die than be false to herself.”

The character of Carmen was as far as one could possibly get from the typical “woman-of-virtue” leading lady the audiences at the Opéra-Comique were accustomed to.

Of course, it’s Georges Bizet’s music that makes Carmen the ultra-sexualized woman that she is, and he composed some of the most seductive music in the operatic repertoire for her, as she goes about winning the heart, loins, and unquestioned devotion of a corporal in the Spanish Dragoons named Don José.

Carmen introduces herself to both the audience and Don José with her famous Habanera – a slow, Cuban dance in duple meter – during which her philosophy of life (and love) is made crystal clear!

Sensational, yes?  But not for the opening night critics, who claimed that Carmen’s music was boring!…

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