Word: brook
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...from the rumbles and whistles of the 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...
...Prosper Mérimée novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary characters. Instead, the focus is on the hotheaded Basque dragoon Don José and his fatal passion for the dark-eyed gypsy Carmen. Brook has even given the work a new title: La Tragédie de Carmen...
This is a time of startling 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...
...What Brook has produced is not Carmen, but a critical commentary on Carmen-an opera about an opera. In this he has succeeded. In the 550-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...
...mouth at the words "L'amour, I 'amour. " In its total bleakness this is Carmen seen by a man familiar with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, twin 20th century masterpieces of love, alienation and despair. The production also reflects Brook's distaste for conventional Bizet, which goes back to the time, 30 years ago, when he was production chief at London's Royal Opera House. "I looked with horror at how it was being presented. It had become a mausoleum." Controversy is nothing new for the flamboyant British-born director...