Embedded Files
By Manuel Ayala Sapelli
Bizet’s Carmen has been long regarded as a tale of frustration and conflicting love between a man and a woman but it is in the way the man and the woman are portrayed that the nature of the composer and more importantly the nature of the intended audience are revealed. Bizet’s support for male victim-playing in the 18th century is reflected in his musical juxtaposition of Don Jose, a perfect gentleman regardless of his murderous tendencies, and Carmen, a sexual aggressor. By comparing Carmen’s Habanera with Don José’s famous Flower Song, I suggest that this opera was written in part to portray this strong woman as a demon who is in complete conflict with the purity and character of a man’s love.
Set in a time where women were often dismissed and disrespected at the first sign of liberation, the first lines of the Habanera show Carmen to be a woman who seeks freedom from these social constraints. Carmen comes from a gypsy heritage and as such she is viewed as a dirty, free-spirited person. Gypsies had come from India which gave them the title of “outsiders” in European society. Since they were viewed as non-Christians, one way people would justify marginalizing gypsies was to call them immoral and project that immorality onto their perceived sexuality. Gypsy women, then, had it worst of all as they were seen as among the most highly immoral sexual beings in a society that shunned female sexuality (Leo, 1998).
Carmen shows her sexual nature as she sings the Habanera and with it, manages to seduce not only a proper military man, but the music of the entire opera leading up to her death. The beginning rhythms are a short but organic pulsing that drive Carmen’s hips even before she begins singing. She dances around the room during this piece, daring eager men to step forward and try to win her love. She teases the men on the stage and the men in the audience with her sensual gestures and intense stares. The element which captivates the man and the music is a focus on chromatic figuration in the melody. The melody falls from a starting pitch by half steps and refuses to give direction to the harmonic cadences. In fact, it seems to undermine the natural progression of chords at the time by trickling down to a leading tone and then turning the melody around so that it does not finish. This melody slips down seductively and oftentimes pauses and stays on notes that have a strong urge to move forward. This confidant sexuality all helps to establish Carmen as an apt seductress and a woman who cannot be contained. The chromatic slippage cannot be restrained either, as it presents itself throughout the entire work as a subtle reminder that Carmen's bohemian charms are still in place. Even the text shows how unrestrained her love is. She speaks of how love is fleeting and you should beware of falling in love with her because you might get hurt. The text also suggests that she enjoys the act of loving which can be taken as an innuendo and is meant to be ambiguous as another marker for her confidence. Everything about her is daring and proud and sexy and not at all like the woman engaging in “proper” courtly love. It is interesting to note that the hints of Carmen’s seductive chromatic slippage and pulse which are spread all throughout the opera stop abruptly when she is murdered by Don Jose. Her death allows for the “feminine” chromaticism to be purged from the score to give way for the prevailing major third (McClary, 2002).
If chromaticism symbolises the gypsy Carmen, then the major third symbolises the purity and longing of the 18th-century European man, Don Jose. He is a guard who Carmen seduces so that she would be able to escape her captors. He then loses his job and is put into prison himself where he continues to think about her. He struggles throughout the show to obtain Carmen’s love but he reaches a level of frustration that he cannot deal with and eventually murders her. However, he does it all in a proper way so the audience would not think too poorly of him. In his famous Flower Song, Don Jose tells Carmen all about how he longed for her in prison and how the thought of her kept him sane. He tells of how the flower that she threw him kept him company and how he treasures it above all else. The lyrics show how madly in love with her he is, but the music seems settled in and restrained, as it is firmly grounded in common triad harmony. The melodic movements are stable and lead from one to the other as one would expect. The harmonic content combined with the message of the text paints Don Jose as an honorable common man that most men of the time should aspire to be like. Bizet makes it easy for the men in the audience to sympathize with Don Jose, as naturally, audience members identify with people they find to be good people. However, Don Jose’s standing as a gentleman to be revered is completely undeserved based on the events that unfold.
Bizet’s portrayal of Carmen as a seductress and Don Jose as a proper man is clearly intentional. However, those two character descriptions do not fit their actions exactly. Sure, Carmen seduces him, but she never does any direct harm to Don Jose. She is always honest about her love and how it is fleeting. Her subject of affection changes from one man, a rich matador, to the other, poor Don Jose, whenever it suits her and her ambition. She knows she has the power to control her own destiny and that is what she does. Don Jose is the one who kills Carmen when he cannot take the constant uncertainty of Carmen’s love any more. Don Jose is the jealous one. He is the impatient one. He is the violent one and yet, the argument that “Carmencita, before being murdered, is indeed a murderess” is still prevalent (Leiris, 1992). It is as if people were saying she deserved it, almost as if she were asking for it. The only thing left is the “look at what she was wearing” argument and people might mistake this for a case of rape. This opera is the perfect example of how a man might get away with anything if the woman is liberated. The constant sympathy seeking from Don Jose and the extravagant flaunting of power from Carmen makes this opera seem like an excuse for men to play the victim. At the end of the opera, the chromaticism is extinguished and the lead is dead. That the plot of this opera is considered anything but a tragedy is telling of the society it has been presented to and it reveals a larger tragedy in a culture’s blindness to oppression.
Backès-Clément, Catherine, Betsy Wing, and Susan McClary. Opera, or, The Undoing of Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Leiris, Michel. Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Lucassen, Leo: Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach (New York: St. Martin's, 1998).
McClary, Susan. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Mosse, George L. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
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