Word: bizet
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...Satyagraha. He has been to Boston, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, and the White House twice, once for a memorable concert featuring the American debut of a long-lost Mozart symphony. Last week found Walsh in Paris to review Peter Brook's idiosyncratic new production of Bizet's opera Carmen. "I don't mind the travel at all," says Walsh. "It's part of what makes the job of TIME music critic so rewarding. I can go anywhere in the world where there is a major musical event...
...Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville...
...directorial innovations in opera. Patrice Chéreau's controversial Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring cycle (1976) featured Rhine maidens frolicking near a hydroelectric dam and Siegfried wearing a dinner jacket. But what Brook has done goes beyond accepted notions of radicalism. Essentially, he has recomposed Bizet's masterpiece, discarding whole sequences, changing the order of arias, even putting the overture near the end. The implicit arrogance of all this does not trouble Brook. "Opera is not a musical contract on paper, something between attorneys," he says. "The whole essence of theater work...
...mind. True, opera librettos have occasionally been censored (as was Verdi's Rigoletto), and sometimes the exigencies of performance required certain concessions in the music itself. Carmen, a failure when it was first performed at the Opéra Comique in 1875, was outfitted after Bizet's death with recitatives by Ernest Guiraud to replace its original spoken dialogue. But this did not change the essential character of the composer's conception...
...seat Bouffes du Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) or even by Mérim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela, Don José's girlfriend from back home, are direct rivals and have a real fight when Carmen carves a bloody cross on Micaela's forehead...