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.
I do not like the popcorn and cotton candy
I can’t abide the sort of “updates” that insult me by implying that everything has to be transposed into terms which the adaptor arrogantly presumes will be appropriate to my severely limited range of imagination, empathy, or interest in times, places and cultures other than my own.
(Still bitter over dreadful version of The Magic Flute from the Welsh National Opera which I saw not too long ago. Admittedly there are … problematic … aspects to the original libretto for us sensitive moderns. But quite apart from the lasers, it was not helped by being sung in a truly epically bad, unbelievably tin-eared new English version. Or by a mangling of the plot which managed the quite impressive feat of making substantially less sense than the original. Even.)
I have seen such repackaging described as brain candy.
>prices in Spanish currency (“À deux cuartos!”),
That may only look odd because the base language is French. I can imagine the script for an American movie set in Japan with the line “That’ll be two yen.”
But part of me wonders whether it got scrambled. I might expect a French crowd to understand a vendor calling fully in Spanish. It might actually make more sense to them. Even in an American movie, if the vendors are really just background noise to establish setting and tone, I think that usually the line would be fully in their language.
I’ll just assume that the cuarto was a unit of Spanish currency 150 years ago.
But part of me wonders whether it got scrambled.
Nope.
I’ll just assume that the cuarto was a unit of Spanish currency 150 years ago.
cuarto (historical) A former Spanish coin (until 1866), worth one eighth of a real.
I love Bizet’s opera, but:
he (and his librettists) almost ignored that José is Basque. Yes, he calls him Navarrais, but that’s not quite the same; and no trace of the Basque song José sings when the narrator first meets him; he is fascinated by the strange Basque melody. In Mérimée, both Carmen and José are outsiders in Spanish society; and José isn’t sentimental as in Bizet, but an unrepentant killer.
Well that’s mostly the final chapter, added in 1847. He makes interesting comparisons between the language of Spanish and German Roma.
And then there is the strange similarity between the plot of Carmen and that of Pushkin’s Цыганы (something Nabokov noticed — a section of Lolita is full of references to both works). There was a discussion about this in the readers’ letters section of the TLS a few years ago, with the result that at the time when he wrote Carmen, Mérimée didn’t know Russian — but only a few years later Mérimée started publishing his translations of works by Pushkin. One song from his translation of Цыганы even made it into the libretto of Bizet’s opera (I vaguely remember that Bizet himself insisted on the inclusion of that song).
Very interesting — thanks for that!
I’m happy to see some pushback, for example with the 2023 Palazzetto Bru Zane production.
https://canzonetta.substack.com/p/review-bizet-carmen-palazzetto-bru-zane-dvd-blu-ray
I’m still holding out for someone to use traditional gas lamps for that warm flickering effect.
I feel like I’m part of a fairly narrow but real generational cohort of Americans who will never not associate Bizet’s Carmen score with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_News_Bears
Café-concert? Is it the same as café-chantant, which I’ve seen mentioned here and there in Russian books? Of course it is! Don’t know how to gauge popularity of different forms of this expression in different languages and taking the lazy route to check how the relevant Wikipedia page is titled in 13 available languages:
Café-concert: Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian
Café-chantant: Arabic, Korean(?), Russian, Ukrainian, English, Dutch
Cafè teatre: 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.
“Señor” is an interesting choice by the translator, since in the original novella, Don José always calls the narrator “monsieur”. I assume many of Mérimée’s readers heard the “señor” behind it, as many modern English-speakers would behind “sir”, but the translator could have left it in the background as the author did.
And I’m not sure Carmen is “casually multilingual”. I don’t remember her speaking anything but Spanish and Basque, and she speaks Basque not casually, but for the very specific purpose of getting an illegal favor from José. Also, “Elle estropiait le basque, et je la crus Navarraise; ses yeux seuls et sa bouche et son teint la disaient bohémienne. J’étais fou, je ne faisais plus attention à rien.” (@ulr: Though Basque isn’t the same as Navarrese, José seems to use them as synonyms here and elsewhere. I don’t know how Bizet’s audience would have heard them. But I agree that José’s ethnicity is a much smaller deal in the opera than in the novella. I also agree that it’s interesting that Halévy, Meilhac, and Bizet passed up the chance to have José sing a Basque song, though they’d have had to put it in a different place.)
What’s the context? I might have thought he was making a distinction between Basque and Navarrese there. If he used them as sunonyms wouldn’t we expect her Basque to be fluent?
Maybe I should have included more context. José is saying that he should have known she wasn’t Navarrese because of her appearance and her bad Basque, so he assumes that any Navarrese would be fluent in Basque.
JWB, I’ll see your 70’s pop culture reference and raise you one. Never having consciously heard or listened to Carmen, I decided to turn it on, and immediately caught a subtext that made a Gilligan’s Island scene funnier. In the castaways’ goofy musical production of Hamlet, they’re actually singing Neither a borrower nor a lender be (“Do not forget.! Stay out of debt!”) to a tune from Carmen.
I want to acknowledge how much this place expands my life. This week Carmen. Last week, at the library trying to pick up a Simenon novel Hat had mentioned and not finding it in English, I skeptically picked it up in French and found I could make it through (with a lot of help from google.) There’s something here pulling me just beyond my range all the time.
Not to mention that in most social settings in my life, I’d feel self-conscious mentioning I could read a French novel, and here I’m self-conscious mentioning that I can only do it with difficulty.
And as the opera continues while I write, I now recognize the Gilligan tune for “I ask to be or not to be, that is the question that I ask of thee.” Hilarious.
At the time, the province of Navarra was only partly Basque, the southern part had already become Castilian speaking (I think in the Middle Ages the kingdom of Navarra was basically Basque speaking). IIRC (I reread the novella only recently, but that doesn’t guarantee perfect memory) the narrator is at first surprised that there are still Basque speakers in Navarra. According to a map in Trask’s History of Basque, in the 19th century the northern half of Navarra was Basque speaking.
I’m self-conscious mentioning that I can only do it with difficulty.
Hey, my French isn’t what it used to be, and I have to gird my loins approaching a French book now. But I enjoy the struggle, as apparently do you!
On Saturdays we buy La Marseillaise, the local communist newspaper (but don’t tell anyone from ICE that I read a communist newspaper). Each Saturday it has a page in Provençal, which, when I’m feeling energetic, I struggle through. Unfortunately it uses classical spelling, whereas I regard Mistral’s spelling as the “right” way to write Provençal (for no good reason: it’s just that I came across it first, and the Provençal grammar that I once had (now lost, alas) used Mistral’s spelling.) The classical spelling seems designed to make Provençal look as much like Catalan as possible, loses two strikingly unusual features: invariant nouns (no plural marker), and -o as the mark of the feminine. The classical spelling boringly makes plurals in -s and feminine nouns end in -a. As in French (most of the time), final -s is silent, and Frédéric Mistral took the common-sense view that if it’s not pronounced it doesn’t need to be written. (Final -s in Catalan is not silent, so it makes sense to write it.)
@ryan
I think you might be overestimating the average LH contributor’s reading comprehension in French. Here is an extract (not the most demanding one) from le Père Goriot by Balzac and my observations:
—
1.Quand Eugène eut achevé cette lettre, il était en pleurs, il pensait au père Goriot tordant son vermeil et le vendant pour aller payer la lettre de change de sa fille.
2.— Ta mère a tordu ses bijoux ! se disait-il. Ta tante a pleuré sans doute en vendant quelques-unes de ses reliques ! De quel droit maudirais-tu Anastasie ? Tu viens d’imiter pour l’égoïsme de ton avenir ce qu’elle a fait pour son amant ! Qui, d’elle ou de toi, vaut mieux ?
1. Why eut instead of avait? Is he in crying or in tears? Does it matter? What is a vermeil and what does it mean to tord it? Is a letter de change some kind of promissory note or is Goriot planning to change sex?
2. Now I see what tording is, either pawning or selling. Does it matter which? Se disait-il = he said to himself; is he muttering, speaking aloud or thinking? Did the aunt actually own relics or are they jewels or some other objects? “De quel droit maudirais-tu” A must be “what right would you have to curse A” but the grammar looks foutu. What is égoisme de ton avenir? Is it egoistic pursuit of your (desired) future? Qui, d’elle ou de toi, vaut mieux?: again this looks foutu–why not write, Qui vaut mieux: elle ou toi? This would also be foutu but would be briefer and (for me) read more naturally.
—
Because the imparfait really is imperfective: you can’t be receiving a letter for hours.
No.
It doesn’t say.
Keep it more literal, and it works: “By what right would you curse”. Don’t overlook the conditionnel in there.
@ulr: I believe you about the linguistic situation in Navarre, and Mérimée says the same thing in a note, but I still think that José doesn’t distinguish. However, the one I quoted is the only that suggests that, as far as I can tell.
@dm
https://la-conjugaison.nouvelobs.com/du/verbe/recevoir-feminin.php
I suppose the eut in the Balzac excerpt is like use of “il fut” in written French (dunno if B does this).
The point of my post is to illustrate that in French I read and construct some approximate meaning, using heuristics and contextual cues (e g., maybe vermeil is ? something to do with noodles, because Goriot is a retired grain merchant) and I only halt when I really can’t make sense of the text. Sometimes I realise later on that I have missed something important, and I have to backtrack. If Hat puts a long text in Russian up, I may read something like [NAME] [VERB(PAST, 3P)] [ADVERB] [NOUN(ACC)] for some part, and if I am lucky, this part becomes clearer with reference to a part of the text I think I understand better.
Compare the wonderful DeWitt quote in this post (“It is truly something and something which the something with the something of this something has something and something, so something also this something might something at first something”).
I don’t think Francesca Zambello’s local production last season had anything unusual or controversial. Drogen even returned.
Not to mention that in most social settings in my life, I’d feel self-conscious mentioning I could read a French novel, and here I’m self-conscious mentioning that I can only do it with difficulty.
The only languages in which I’ve ever read entire novels are English, Welsh and French. (AFAIK, there are no novels in Kusaal.)
Of course, the Hattery Collective can read novels in Russian, and indeed, often does. I am happy to participate vicariously.
Eut achevé is past anterior, and is used here instead of the normal pluperfect because the action immediately precedes another.
BT
Duh, sorry-Was even at my link..
Oh wow, where did I get “receive” from? *blink* *blink* What Ben Tolley said.
The word ‘vermeil’ suggested the colour red to me, which is indeed what it means as an adjective (c.f. vermilion) – but as a noun it apparently means silver-gilt, which must be what Old Goriot disposed of. But I can’t find any reference to ‘tordre’ meaning anything but ‘twist’ and variants thereof.
Thanks. I don’t know if G needed to melt down his silver service (because it had a monogram or crest on it, maybe the jewels had a similar problem), in order to get anything for it, maybe tordre refers to deformation by melting.
The vermeil is some silver tableware that Goriot literally twists into an ingot shape (I don’t quite see why, but I guess just to create a memorable scene for Eugène to witness) before going to have it melted down for sale. I know that’s not the main point of the original comment, though! It made me realize it’s been a while since I’ve read much in languages where I have to constantly guess things from context, and how much I miss that. Even the gross misinterpretations. It’s like walking down a country road at night without turning on your flashlight; there’s something precious and exciting about it despite the risk of stepping in a puddle or mistaking a tree stump for a wild boar. Thanks for reminding me to start doing that again.
And now Escamillo lost his Jaguar.
A word about Basque. Around 25 years ago I spent a couple of nights in a hotel in Bilbao, and I tuned the television to a Basque channel so that I could hear what it sounded like. I was very much struck by how much like Spanish it sounded, especially when I was too far away to separate the individual words. (There is no way on earth one could say that about Portuguese, especially in Portugal, which sounds more like Russian than Spanish.) Asking a Basque speaker afterwards I was told that Spanish owes its rather small vowel inventory to historical Basque influence, and indeed Basque and Spanish have much the same vowels, and I don’t think Basque has many consonants that Spanish speakers can’t pronounce. So, does anyone here have sufficient background in linguistics to know if this analysis is valid? Larry Trask would be the ideal person to ask, but it’s more than 20 years too late for that.
And now Escamillo lost his Jaguar.
Wow, I knew the Met was having financial problems, but I didn’t realize they were that bad.
In short, yes; Basque and its neighbors (lately Castilian and Gascon) have spent the last 2000 years making their sound systems (vowels, consonants, phonotactics) more similar to each others’.
I vaguely recall a discussion here where various (non-Welsh) people asserted that they thought Welsh sounded very like English.
The idea strikes me as risible, but I am perhaps particularly unqualified to say.
I do also recall another discussion from which it seemed to emerge that English had actually become more like Welsh phonologically since Shakespeare’s day, at least in the reanalysis of the p/b t/d k/g contrasts as a largely a matter of aspiration rather than voice. That can scarcely be a contact phenomenon, though (I don’t think even John McWhorter would go for that.) Perhaps it’s the weather …
Maybe I’m not as far behind here as I thought. I read Spanish with fair fluency, and have read a few dozen Spanish novels and histories. But it surprises me that French comes as easily as it does, with only a year of instruction in high school. I’ve had much more Spanish, including two years in college, maybe a combined 4 months in Mexico and Spain. And briefly in high school I read Latin fluently, but was disappointed to flounder utterly with the Gallic Wars after it came up in a thread or two here.
The difference between my Latin and my French is counterintuitive in some ways.
I’m wondering whether there’s something similar to what you’re discussing about Basque/Spanish and Welsh/English. I’m also reading the Joan of Arc that Hat recommended in his end of year post, and it’s making me realize how, even as the French language made its well known, deep inroads into English, England was sending tendrils deep into France. Did English have significant influence on northern French dialects, through decades of occupation and centuries of interlocution with French lords?. Have the two languages been sufficiently intertwined that it’s easy for an English speaker to intuit much of the mechanics of French?
Or is it just that French triangulates well with Spanish and English, one filling in the gaps the other leaves?
I do agree, Paddy, that there’s a bit of finesse to my French reading, in the card playing sense – rather than sort out exactly what something means, I often finesse the trick and hope it plays out the way I guessed.
For Welsh/English; while I would agree that what I regard as ‘mainstream’ pronunciations of the two are far apart, there are quite a few _individuals_ using very similar phonologies for both (whether people with distinctly Welsh accents in English, or adult learners of Welsh struggling to acquire an unfamiliar sound system), so I suppose people could come away with that impression from limited data.
Yes, that makes sense.
I’m not sure about that. There remains an aspiration-free zone somewhere in northern England (unfortunately I don’t know where) – as far away from both Wales and Scotland as possible?
Of all the translations I can more or less do, translating from English into French is the worst by far: it’s practically impossible not to end up with something that is largely comprehensible but horribly unidiomatic and contains a few actively misleading features. Translating between French and German is a whole lot safer – the semantics and the idioms are generally more similar.
I think all English rule in France was done in French or Occitan, so the English language shouldn’t be expected to have left any influence there. But my experience with French north of Paris is limited to Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis…
an aspiration-free zone somewhere in northern England
I think that’s exactly where it ought not to be, if we’re hypothesising that the English phonetic distinction was due to Brythonic influence. Yr Hen Ogledd … Elfed, Rheged …
I suppose Wessex English might also have had significant interference from Brythonic, but mainstream Modern English is not based on that dialect, but on more or less exactly those dialects where persisting Brythonic influence is least likely.
I invoked McWhorter because his theories about modern English do-support also entail mysterious covens of remnant Brythonic speakers in England who were sufficiently numerous at this late date to affect English syntax profoundly. Had such speakers actually existed, I dare say their phonetics might also have influenced the develoment of English after the sixteenth century.
>an aspiration-free zone in northern England
LOL welfare state don’t you know.
(Only joking. Just thought the pun was funny.)
Yma o hyd. Ac yng Ngogledd Lloegr hefyd.
(Er gwaetha hen Fagi a’i chriw.)
‘Ey, no need to invoke welfare state, just it’s grim up north.
The North Will Rise Again
>I think all English rule in France was done in French or Occitan, so the English language shouldn’t be expected to have left any influence there.
Sure. I just assumed that their French would have had lots of English taint. But perhaps not enough, and not long enough and penetrating enough in France to have had much impact on French. Maybe it’s Spanish/English triangulation that makes French seem easy to me.
David E., you’re arguing against any Welsh influence on English since Shakespeare. And I certainly have no reason to doubt you. But I wonder whether there is any evidence of “mysterious covens” or rural pockets of Welsh speakers outside the modern boundaries before or at the time of Shakespeare? And I mostly do wonder about pockets, as opposed to areas contiguous to the rest of the Welsh-sprach. The maps of Welsh I easily find go back to 1700. The Cornish wiki page has a map starting at 1300, with such a neat and perfect recession of the outbound tide, 7 miles every century, that I doubt it’s based on much of anything except interpolation of some sort.
…annnnd here’s a native speaker of French feeling the same!
Ah yes; that’s different, because it would be classic substrate influence, while I’m proposing a sound change spreading as a fashion. There are better-understood examples of that happening, like many individual features of the High German Consonant Shift spreading north one by one, umlaut spreading south (with more and more restrictions as you go south), [u] > [y] spreading from Gascon into northern Basque (with restrictions)…
John Wells once had a blog post on the Welsh-speaking area extending a tiny bit northeast of Wales even today; but again that’s different.