In His Native Basque.

I’m not a great fan of the opera Carmen, but Larry Wolff’s NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of a recent Met production has some material of Hattic interest:

In Carmen, first performed in Paris in 1875, Georges Bizet created a Mediterranean musical world in elegant French style. Spanish song and dance fascinated nineteenth-century Paris […]. The Metropolitan Opera’s new production, directed by Carrie Cracknell and premiered on New Year’s Eve, sets the opera in contemporary America, possibly in the vicinity of the Mexican border, where Latin rhythms would not be out of place.

Carmen is an entertainer. This is clear from her very first appearance, singing the erotically descending phrases of the “Habanera” and then the sinuous “Seguidilla” later in the first act. For Bizet, Carmen’s artistry is closely tied to her Andalusian origins and Roma identity. The “Habanera,” named for Havana, borrows its Afro-Cuban inflections from a piece by the Spanish Basque composer Sebastián Yradier, who had visited Cuba. […]

Bizet set the second act in the inn of Lillas Pastia in Seville, where Carmen and her two best friends give a cabaret performance; the lyrics celebrate the “strange music” of the Roma—“ardent, crazy, fevered”—and reference Basque tambours and frenzied guitars. At the Met there is no Andalusian inn; the act takes place inside the trailer of the hijacked truck racing along the highway. It is a spectacular update, a cabaret in motion, and the twenty-seven-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, dancing in denim short-shorts and shiny blue cowboy boots, handled every sensual ornamentation in Carmen’s vocal lines with youthful agility. Akhmetshina played Carmen not as the more usual worldly femme fatale but as a teenage rebel without a cause, which gave a different sense to the character’s recklessness, volatile sexuality, risky romances, and impulsive confrontations. […]

While Haussmann’s Paris sought to define and restrict the spaces where music could be performed, Bizet’s Carmen put the world of the café-concert onto the stage of the Opéra Comique. For Carmen was clearly recognizable as a Roma entertainer who might have been singing or dancing in the café-concerts or in the streets of Paris.

The Second Empire also regulated street music, requiring licenses, restricting performance spaces, and even mandating that performers have a “certificate of good moral standing.” Popular songs, however, could still be subversive, as in the case of one that satirized Haussmann himself as a Turkish despot: his name was pronounced as “Osman,” with his megalomaniacal “Osmanomanie.” In 1864 a nonsensical popular song was sung insolently in the streets of Paris by a group of street urchins on August 15, the birthday of Napoleon I and therefore a ceremonial holiday for Napoleon III. A chorus of street urchins was also present in the first act of Carmen in 1875, and in the last act a chorus of vendors at the bullring rhythmically cried out prices in Spanish currency (“À deux cuartos!”), the sort of public noise that Haussmann’s Paris sought to suppress. In the French libretto they are selling Seville oranges as well as wine and cigarettes, though in the Met’s contemporary American production the translation titles specify popcorn and cotton candy. […] (The Met titles screens offered translations of the libretto in Spanish as well as English and German, but not the original French, which would have been welcome.)

The libretto for Carmen was based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, written in 1845 and almost obsessively interested in ethnography. The narrator, a traveling French scholar, encounters Carmen in a mantilla, offers her a cigarette, and tries to guess her identity. Conscious of the deep history of formerly Muslim Andalusia, he exclaims, “‘Then you must be Moorish, or…’ I stopped, hardly daring to say ‘Jewish.’” Carmen replies, “You can see perfectly well that I’m a Gypsy.” Mérimée was playing to the Romantic fascination with Spain as a place of submerged religions and ethnicities, for the Spanish kingdom had compelled its Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity and banished those who refused. The converted Spaniards, conversos and moriscos, sometimes secretly harbored their old identities and passed them down the generations, so that any Spaniard could be a Muslim or Jew by descent. One of the librettists for Carmen, Ludovic Halévy, was related to a French Jewish family partly of Iberian descent.

Mérimée’s Romantic ethnography becomes even more complicated in the case of Don José, whose full name is José Lizarrabengoa. He is Basque, as Carmen instantly guesses upon meeting him. “It wasn’t difficult for Carmen to guess that I was from the Basque Country,” Don José explains.

As you know, señor, the Gypsies have no country of their own. Being always on the move, they speak every language, and most of them are equally at home in Portuguese, French, Basque, or Catalan.

In Mérimée’s story Carmen is casually multilingual, and her seduction of Don José is all the more complete because she can speak to him in his native Basque.

In removing these ethnographic considerations from the sets and costumes and replacing them with an American world of popcorn and cotton candy, the Met production creates stage images that, while sometimes striking, make Bizet’s Spanish rhythms and Roma flourishes seem almost extraneous. Yet the conductor, Daniele Rustioni, clearly relished those rhythms, and he offered a beautiful rendition of the orchestral entr’acte preceding the final scene, with evocative colorings from the piccolo, harp, triangle, and tambourine. Akhmetshina, though she is usually identified as Russian, comes from the province of Bashkiria, which has a large Muslim population, in the southern Urals. “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir,” she explained in a recent interview, noting that the regional history involved “living in small communities that constantly moved around.” She identifies with Carmen: “It’s kind of in my blood.” In another interview she explained that “my name, Aigul, means ‘Ai’ (moon), ‘Gul’ (flower) in my native language.” The Turkic etymology of that name is just the sort of detail that Mérimée would have appreciated.

I never thought of the Haussmann/Osman pun, and I like “Osmanomanie”; I also like the attention to Turkic etymology (Akhmetshina’s name in Bashkir is Айгөл Әхмәтшина, where ө = [ö] and ә = [æ]). I do not like the popcorn and cotton candy.