Word: carmens
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...automobile accident barely two weeks after taking over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera last July, he had already established himself as an affable, informal man with thoroughgoing administrative expertise. But last week, as the Met opened its 88th season with a new production of Bizet's Carmen that Gentele had conceived and intended to stage, the question was: Could he also produce opera...
Answer: Yes. The Gentele-inspired Carmen is a masterpiece of taste, wit, theatrical imagination and, most delightful of all, good music. It is a gift of fresh spring rain after the long winter of interpretative obfuscation that, in one opera house after another (including the Met), has virtually turned the work into a gypsy folk opera. This Carmen does not carry a rose in her teeth; she would bite it off. Don Jose is no innocent victim of Carmen's wiles; to her obvious fascination, he is a brute with enough temper to kill. With the hauntingly Iberian sets...
...does a dead stage director leave an operatic production behind him? In Gentele's case, in scrawled notes on a mere five pages of his Carmen score, as well as in the sketches for the sets and lighting that Svoboda had worked up for him last winter. The rest lay mostly in the minds of the people he had talked to about the production. His widow Marit also contributed valuable detail (since Gentele had not wanted Jose or Carmen to be pitied, she suggested that Jose should not kneel or sob over Carmen's body). It then fell...
That they did, under the deft direction of Acting General Manager Schuyler Chapin, and with considerable help from Leading Lady Marilyn Horne. "Gentele felt that I had the ingredients within me instinctively to make the kind of Carmen he wanted," Horne recalls. They just may have included the fact that she owns one of the great soprano voices of the century, and controls its reach and richness with a mind and manner unsurpassed by any soprano singing opera today. Horne also proves, to the surprise of many, that she can act -not as well as she can sing, but well...
...understand the success of the new Carmen, one has to realize that the opera is one of the three most frequently performed works in the Met's history (along with Aida and La Bohème). Everything and anything have been tried with it over the years. For all her moods and allure, Carmen is hardly a character susceptible, like Don Giovanni and Boris Godunov, to continuous re-exploration. English Cinema Director John Schlesinger (Sunday Bloody Sunday) once declined an offer to stage Carmen at Covent Garden because he felt that he could not improve on what the world...