Bizet: Carmen. Adèle Charvet, Julien Behr, Florie Valiquette, Alexandre Duhamel, Gwendoline Blondeel, Ambroisine Bré, Matthieu Walendzik, Attila Varga-Tóth, Nicolas Certenais, Halidou Nombre; Chœur & Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal conducted by Hervé Niquet. Château de Versailles Spectacles. $42.99 (3 CDs + DVD).
Everybody knows Carmen, and everybody loves the opera’s mixture of high drama (or melodrama) and gorgeous music. Or so it seems. But it was not always so. Bizet’s masterwork was something of a dud at its March 1875 première, and something of a shock, too: it is essentially a verismo opera, in effect the first of its kind – or at least a bridge between traditional 19th-century dramatic operas and the verismo stage works that would become popular in the decades after Bizet’s death and remain so into the 20th century.
Carmen was conceived as an opéra comique, which most decidedly does not mean “comic opera” but refers to a style akin to that of Singspiel, meaning that the musical numbers are separated by dialogue. Bizet’s work is thus in the line of succession that leads from works such as Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail to modern Broadway shows. But the moral “lowness” of the characters, which retrospectively seems forward-looking, is something that early audiences found shockingly depraved – as does the killing on stage of the principal character, which looks ahead to much later on-stage deaths in works such as Bernstein’s West Side Story.
Trying to re-create the opening night of Carmen is thus something of a fool’s errand, for the only way to approximate its effect would be to re-establish the entire society within which the première occurred – including the Victorian-era sense of morality and immorality plus the exigencies of unamplified voices in a venue lit by gas lamps. Making matters seemingly even closer to impossible is the lack of definitive information on what the March 1875 staging and costuming looked like – a few sketches survive, but they are scarcely comprehensive. Nevertheless, Hervé Niquet and a solid, often splendid cast undertook the near-impossible in performances of Carmen on January 14 and 22, 2025 – the results of which are now available for listening and viewing pleasure on a CD-plus-DVD release from Château de Versailles Spectacles.
The DVD is the real gem here, since the visual elements of the production have been so carefully and lovingly assembled and the entirety of the opera truly comes alive only when seen and heard as opera, which was once described by Franco Zeffirelli as “a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.” Certainly the working-together elements are abundantly present here, along with a truly impressive level of attention to detail, from the use of period instruments to the well-thought-out attempt to costume the characters appropriately for the time and to provide stage settings that change locales efficiently (not requiring the three half-hour intervals of the original production) while staying as true as possible to the appearances that the original audience would have encountered.
None of this would matter, of course, if the music were not handled with all the élan and panache it requires; but Niquet and the singers – certainly including Adèle Charvet as Carmen, Julien Behr as Don José, Florie Valiquette as Micaëla, and Alexandre Duhamel as Escamillo – treat the entire work as fresh and new, not as a museum piece, resulting in a commanding performance that is immensely enjoyable when heard on this release’s CDs, even without the visuals of the included DVD. This is an absolutely top-notch Carmen by any standards, independent of its attempt at historicity.
That said, the production itself makes one curious choice, and the presentation of the recording makes several. The notable performance oddity is the inclusion of the recitatives composed by Bizet’s friend, Ernest Guiraud, for an October 1875 performance of Carmen in Vienna. They are now standard in the vast majority of Carmen stagings, and there is nothing wrong with the recitatives themselves, which in a sense opened the door to the opera’s worldwide popularity: Bizet had died after the 33rd performance of Carmen, but not before signing a contract for the Vienna production, and the recitatives were intended to position Carmen as a “grand opera” and bring it international prominence. They helped do just that – although, interestingly, the Vienna staging for which they were written actually ended up using a mixture of the original spoken dialogue and the newly composed recitatives. What is arguably a miscalculation in the Niquet-led performances is that the recitatives did not exist on the opera’s opening night, which the creative team behind the staging was otherwise at such pains to reproduce. The “first night” authenticity is thus sacrificed on the altar of giving the opera in a form with which the audience would be familiar.
Even setting that matter aside, there are some peculiar decisions involving the presentation and packaging of this otherwise exemplary recording. The enclosed 72-page booklet includes no libretto – only a bare-bones summary of the action that is less than exemplary. There is also no information on the singers, who are scarcely household names internationally. Instead, there are extensive notes on production elements, with essays both by and about Niquet, director Romain Gilbert, costume designer Christian Lacroix, set designer Antoine Fontaine, and lighting designer Hervé Gary. This material is very worthy indeed, and provides valuable insight into the manifest challenges of mounting the whole production – but omitting anything about the singers is an odd decision. For that matter, it would have been interesting to have something from the sound and camera side of things about the way in which this release overcame the considerable difficulties inherent in recording live opera performances – but there is nothing.
Nor is there anything explaining the musical “bonus” material included here. It consists of four alternative presentations of iconic elements of Carmen: the Séguédille and Chanson bohème, the extended scene between Carmen and Don José at Lillas Pastia’s tavern, and the very last scene of the opera. In these “bonus” elements, Carmen is sung by Éléonore Pancrazi and Don José by Kévin Amiel; the other singers are the same as in the main recording. The circumstances of the role changes are not explained anywhere.
On balance, this Carmen is notable on many levels and excellent on virtually all of them, and its studious re-creation, to the extent possible, of the opera’s opening night, is something of a marvel to behold. Peculiarities of presentation aside – although the inclusion of the Guiraud recitatives in this context is very difficult to ignore – this is a thoroughly satisfying recording that reproduces some of the excitement that Bizet and librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy certainly intended to deliver to the first-night audience, even if most of those initial attendees turned out not to be quite ready to receive it. This is a Carmen that straddles their time and ours – an affirmation of the now-firmly-established prominence of Bizet’s masterpiece within the operatic canon.
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