Carmen

“The only person who no longer benefits (nor benefited) from all this,” said Busoni in an irritated comment on the Carmen industry, “is poor old Bizet himself.” He was right of course. When Bizet died on 3 June 1875 - a few hours after the 33rd of the initial run of 45 mainly ill-attended performances at the Opéra-Comique - as far as he knew Carmen was a failure. Had he lived four or five months longer he would have witnessed its first success in Vienna and, given two more years, he could have followed its triumphant progress through five of the major cities of Europe and America.

Whether he would have rushed to cash in on its popularity, as has every succeeding generation of composers and arrangers, we obviously don’t know. It is not unlikely, however, that if he had been unable to persuade the Opéra-Comique to revive the opera - after three further performances early in 1876 Carmen was not seen again in Paris until 1883 - he would at least have fashioned an orchestral suite from it, as he had with the incidental music for L’Arlésienne. Or he might have given the task to Ernest Guiraud, who had been entrusted with writing the recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue for the Vienna production. Whether by Bizet or Guiraud, it would surely have been preferable to either of the two now standard concert suites by Fritz Hoffmann, which are faithful (in so far as they can be without voices) to Bizet’s scoring but which fail to take into account the dramatic significance of the dozen extracted items. Except that the first suite begins with the fate motif from the Prelude to the opera, which gives it some kind of depth, the two Hoffmann compilations present Bizet’s songs, dances, choruses and entractes in an all but haphazard order and trivialise them in the process.

It is surprising, bearing in mind the extent of the Carmen industry in other areas, that no one has succeeded in constructing a more convincing concert suite. The only readily available alternative is Rodion Shchedrin’s extraordinary (and clumsily titled) “Carmen Suite: ballet suite for strings and percussion, based on themes from Carmen by Bizet,” written for the composer’s dancer wife and first performed as a ballet at the Bolshoi in 1967. Roundly condemned by the Soviet authorities for all the wrong reasons - like “making a prostitute out of a heroine of the Spanish people” - it commits a multitude of sins against authenticity. While the thematic material is drawn exclusively from Bizet sources, though not only from Carmen, it is used just as and when Shchedrin wants it - fragmented, jumbled, in some places reharmonised, everywhere rescored for his curiously chosen combination of percussion and strings. Against all the odds, however, it is both wittily and effectively done, from its atmospheric Habanera allusions on bells at the beginning to the quietly eery echo of those introductory sounds at the end.

The Shchedrin score is so effective, in fact, that it has been adopted for several of the modern ballet or dance versions of the Carmen story. Ballet treatment apparently began with a version by Marius Petipa in 1845 - which is rather difficult to believe not only because Prosper Mérimée’s novel, on which every Carmen is necessarily based, wasn’t actually published until that same year but also because of the grotesque stylistic incongruities brought to mind by attempts to visualize Petipa classical choreography in this Spanish context.

The most frequently performed Carmen ballet must be Roland Petit’s which opened scandalously and brilliantly, with the fabulously sexy Zizi Jeanmaire in the title role, in London in 1949. Since then, while retaining Bizet’s music as a basis, dance versions have tended more and more to mix it with whatever alien element fits the concept, most noisily of all perhaps in Didy Veldman’s Northern Ballet Theatre production which, in presenting Carmen as a street kid and Escamillo as a rock star in modern Rio de Janeiro, fuses Bizet with rock. But - presumably because of rather than in spite of its peculiar stylistic neutrality - the Shchedrin score underlies two of the most successful versions of the last few years, Mats Ek’s for the Cullberg Ballet (recently seen at Covent Garden with Sylvie Guillem as Carmen) and Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man: an Auto-Erotic Thriller for Adventures in Motion Pictures.

Some of the ballets, beginning with Roland Petit’s, have made it into the cinema, which is another rich area of Carmen exploitation. Again there is a long history, in this case going back to DeMille in pre-sound 1915 and including, among eighty or so others, Preminger’s Carmen Jones of 1954, Carlos Saura’s fiery flamenco interpretation of 1983, and Francesco Rosi’s more or less straight filmed-opera version starring Julia Migenes-Johnson and Placido Domingo a year later. I confess to a personal weakness for Carmen Jones since it was my first encounter with Bizet’s tunes. In spite of the adaptations made to fit the words and accommodate the all-black wartime setting of the Oscar Hammerstein musical on which the film is based, it left a deep impression. I confess too to a memory of intense frustration with Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen of 1984, which teased us with a little Bizet while perversely, and not uncharacteristically, giving us a lot of Beethoven.

When Busoni uttered his complaint about Bizet not benefiting from the popularity and commercial exploitability of his last opera he was moved by less than pure compassion. His irritation was provoked in fact by the copyright problems put in the way of his recently completed Carmen Fantasy (or, to give it its full title, Sonatina No.6: Kammer-Fantasie über Carmen) - which is surely the most distinguished product in another extensive area of the Carmen industry. In this case the tradition goes back to Bizet’s funeral service at La Trinité where the organist played fantasies on themes from Les Pêcheurs de Perles and, difficult though it is to reconcile the music with the occasion, Carmen. An improvisation on the fate motif, perhaps, mingled with variations on “Toréador en garde!”?

Presumably the Trinité organist made no more than his usual fee out of that memorial exercise. Pablo Sarasate, on the other hand, must have made a fortune out of his Carmen Fantasy for violin and orchestra (or violin and piano). Not that he didn’t deserve it. Written in about 1883, cheaply put together but irresistibly imaginative in its virtuoso scoring for violin, it was the first Carmen Fantasy to achieve universal popularity and it is still the most frequently performed of them all - although Franz Waxman’s 1946 Carmen Fantasy, also for violin, is rapidly catching up. It has also been the model, or at least the precedent, for countless other examples of its kind for just about every conceivable instrument. Some, like François Borne’s Fantaisie brillante for flute, have secured a firm place in the specialist repertoire. Others, including the surprisingly many featuring the double bass, not least Daryl Runswick’s Carmen Fantasy for eight double basses, seem less likely to find a niche.

What distinguishes Busoni’s Carmen Fantasy from all the others is its sensitivity to the emotional issues and the fatalistic aspect of the opera. It would have been a mistake to make a heavy-handed drama out of such a work, which generically requires a show of technical brilliance and some wit - if not on the frivolous level of Horowitz’s Carmen Variations or, still less, Sorabji’s crudely parodistic Pastiche on the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. Discreetly concealing his thoughtful intentions, Busoni begins with a bright and busy treatment of the opening chorus of the fourth act and then slows down for a con amore memory of “La fleur que tu m’as jetée.” Any of his composer-pianist contemporaries might have done the same, though not with the harmonically complex decorations Busoni adds to Don José’s aria.

The only just perceptible echo of the fate motif introduced in the left hand at the end of flower-song episode is a timely hint, however, that this is going to be no mindless anthology, no Carmen Quadrille in the obsessively inclusive manner of an Eduard Strauss. While an episode devoted to the Habanera was only to be expected and while Busoni was by no means the first composer to indulge himself in the march of the Toreadors, the demonic variation on the one and the impressionistic dissolve applied to the other are entirely out of the ordinary. Most inspired of all is the last page, an Andante visionario that combines sad allusions to the fate theme with subtle reminders of the Habanera and ends with a long-withheld confirmation of the composer’s serious intentions in a sombre A minor. Written too late to be of any interest to Liszt, Carmen had at last, after thirty five years, found a piano interpretation worthy of it.

When Nietzsche declared that “Music must be mediterraneanised,” he was speaking not only for Busoni, who prided himself on being the least Wagnerian composer of his generation, but for a whole army of musicians who, from Chabrier onwards, turned to Spain as a refuge from a Wagnerian influence they were otherwise scarcely able to resist. It is an indication of the greatness of Carmen that it not only symbolised the ideal of that tendency but also actually sustained it, by means of its own often abused but always indestructible material, for so long and in so many manifestations.

Gerald Larner