Carmen (10 page)

WHY ANOTHER CARMEN?

I first heard excerpts from the opera Carmen, by Georges Bizet, as a ten-year-old in a music appreciation class in Harlem. The music was brilliant and the story, as our teacher described it, exciting. Some of the music even sounded vaguely familiar.

Harlem was full of music when I was growing up. If you started on 125th Street at Broadway and made your way cross town toward the East River, you could actually hear the music change as you walked by different blocks. Broadway was Irish and German, and that was the music coming from the small bakeries and butcher shop we frequented.

At St. Nicholas Avenue the neighborhood turned into a mixture of races, and the music in the record shops along the most famous Harlem thoroughfare was African American. The blues blared out from speakers hanging by wires outside of shops so narrow you had to turn sideways to get into them. Harlem above 125th Street had become the Black cultural center of America. Churches shared the streets with nightclubs, funeral parlors, and shady jazz clubs. Across from Blumstein’s, the department store, a small shop sold gospel records.

As you neared the Apollo Theater it was all jazz. As a kid I listened to live bands led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway. This was the music that Harlem became known for and, unlike today’s music, which is heard mostly on individual iPods, it filled the streets.

The next change along Harlem’s main drag came as you passed Lenox Avenue on the East Side. Suddenly there was a Latino beat in the air, a beat that sometimes mixed with Harlem jazz and sometimes stood alone. Latino musicians had been around for years in Harlem, playing mostly in smaller clubs, at house parties, and at picnics in the local parks. East Harlem had once been primarily Italian, but by the end of the First World War (1919) the population had changed dramatically. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Brazilians lived and worked in these streets, and they brought their music with them. The famous Harlem Hellfighters Jazz Band had more than a dozen musicians from Puerto Rico alone. Latino music became very popular, and by the time the classically trained composer and percussionist Tito Puente came along in the late forties, both Harlem and the outside world were ready for him.

This mixing of peoples in Harlem strongly influenced the rest of New York’s culture as well. Spanish poets such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Federico García Lorca were attracted to the vibrant life in East Harlem, heard its music, and were affected by this thriving community. But cultural exchanges are not new—the opera Carmen itself reflects its French composer’s ideas of Spanish culture.

Georges Bizet himself borrowed the story from another Frenchman, Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), a novelist and historian who wrote Carmen as a novella.

I liked Carmen when I first heard it as a ten-year-old, despite the fact that I didn’t know where Spain was, had never seen a bullfight, and didn’t know the opera’s history. When I grew older I learned that there was more than one version of Carmen. That was a bit of a shock because I thought you couldn’t mess with “classical” music.

The first version of Carmen that I actually saw was Carmen Jones, starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. This all-black movie was based on a musical, also all black, first performed on Broadway in 1943. The movie came out in 1954, the year I dropped out of high school, and I saw it at an Army base in New Jersey. While the music was still intriguing, I thought the story line was trite. Carmen, played by the lovely Dorothy Dandridge, worked in a parachute factory instead of a cigarette factory, and Don José was a soldier. But what bothered me most about the film was that the lyrics of the songs were changed to black stereotypes. The “Gypsy Song,” beautiful in the original opera, was now reduced to “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum.” “La Habanera” became “Dat’s Love.” In short, I felt that the lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, was looking down on black people.

The French of Mérimée’s time would have considered the poor people of Carmen’s class exotic. Parts of Spain, the setting of Mérimée’s novella, had been ruled by the Moors, people from North Africa, until the fifteenth century. The term Moors is used in many ways and is not precise but, generally, it refers to people who have some North African heritage. When, in the novella, Mérimée says that he thinks that Carmen’s copper-colored skin and coarse hair meant that she was a Moor, he was accurately describing many of the people I have seen in that part of Spain.

In Mérimée’s time the city of Seville, in Spain, was the cigarette capital of the world. Thousands of young women worked in the industry rolling cigarettes by hand. These were not good-paying jobs, and the women who worked in the factories were often looked down upon. Neither Mérimée’s novella nor Bizet’s opera give much background for Carmen herself. It was enough for them to think of her as simply “different.”

There have been many versions of Carmen, from a silent screen version to countless stage versions. Some productions treat Carmen as an independent woman who could have an affair or openly flirt with soldiers because her norms were different than those of white European women. But as I approached this project, I knew I wanted to treat this fascinating young woman with the respect she deserves.

Many opera and film directors have moved the time, setting, and medium of their productions to update the work and make it speak to their own era. Some have moved the time from the mid-nineteenth century to the later nineteenth century and even the twentieth century. In recent years there have been stunning dance versions, for me the absolute best being a breathtaking flamenco performance—captured on film—directed by Carlos Saura. Matthew Bourne’s version, called The Car Man, depicted a gay dance performance. Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s film, Karmen Geï, takes place in Senegal, West Africa.

However Carmen is performed, each version works because of the strength of its characters, as well as the strength of its music. Bizet’s own music tells the story brilliantly. In Carmen: A Hip Hopera, starring Beyoncé, the music never rises above the ordinary, and the production becomes just another run-of-the-mill urban flick.

For a while I lost interest in Carmen, primarily because opera performances are simply too expensive in this country. To me the point of opera is the whole stage presentation along with the music. I didn’t just want to hear the music. If you couldn’t afford to go see a stage production, why bother?

But when I read the original novella by Mérimée again, I found a lot more in the story than most stagings display. In the original story the character of Don José is much more sinister. He’s really a nut job that Carmen happens upon. Carmen herself is a shady character who accepts a life of crime as her lot in life, but I saw her independence not as an example of some kind of women’s liberation but as a needed strength in a very hard world, a world I thought I knew.

I see Carmen as a young, tough Dominican woman who has done the best she can in an environment that is ready to use her and abuse her if she allows it. But she is also tired of this life and sees, in José, a love interest that might be her way out. Having lived most of my life in this same kind of setting, I knew I was feeling Carmen in a big way.

The idea rested in the back of my head for years until, one day after watching yet another light version of the opera, I happened into my local bodega to buy milk. There was an animated conversation among the three cashiers—mostly in Spanish, with a smattering of English—and a lot of finger pointing toward the door where someone who had offended them had just gone through. I was reminded of the fight scene between the factory girls at the beginning of the opera. And they were much closer in my mind to the real factory girls from Seville than the carefully gowned women in the opera I had seen. Also, they were all very young, as I thought the girls should have been. But where was my Carmen?

Then the door opened and my Carmen walked in! She was beautiful, young, and pissed! Some dude had done her wrong, and she proceeded to tell the other girls. I wanted to rush right home and start writing.

When approaching my own version I gave myself several rules. The first was to respect my characters! Carmen would not be flirtatious simply because she was Latina or just to satisfy the story line. She needed to have fully rounded human desires. The second was to respect the community in which the story takes place.

The music to Carmen is readily available through the Internet. Recorded versions can be rented and the original score is out of copyright, so school and small theater performances are quite possible. I still love Bizet’s original music, but I didn’t think much of the lyrics; I felt the words needed to be changed to fit a modern setting. One set of lyrics I really didn’t like was “The Toreador Song.” As a young writer I was commissioned to do a magazine piece on bullfighting and had attended my first one in Lima, Peru. It wasn’t at all to my taste and I haven’t seen a bullfight since. I think of Escamillo more as a businessman with the bravado of a bullfighter who has his hand in a number of fields. But it is Escamillo who raps over the background and who represents, to Carmen, yet another opportunity to move out of the cycle of despair that is so much a part of inner-city life.

The ending of Carmen is tragic, and the music Bizet created for it, which I have called the “Destiny Theme,” portends the fatal drama. I was so moved by this music that, as I wrote, it was constantly on my mind. But it was one of the pieces written by Bizet to separate the acts of the opera, called Entr’actes, that I felt expressed Carmen’s character even more. This piece, often played as a flute solo with a harp or guitar background, is beautiful and hopeful—as I saw Carmen—and yet there is a haunting melancholy to it as well.

This piece reflects how I see Carmen, a young Latina woman searching for love but finding, instead, yet another man willing to sacrifice her for his own very dark reasons. I asked my friend, Kwame Brandt-Pierce, an arranger and composer, to add a Latino beat to this piece. Over a snack of sangria, Italian bread, and black olives, my editor and I worked with the young composer/arranger to decide how we would handle this portion of the music. His arrangements of Bizet are spectacular and stirring and will undoubtedly become part of the legend that is Carmen. You can download them at
www.egmontusa.com
or
www.walterdeanmyers.net
.

Stories work because they touch the hearts of the audience they are trying to reach. I hope this version of Carmen touches your heart.

About the Music

The story of Carmen—as are the stories of all operas—is told in many ways, each having its own purpose, meaning, and flair. A composer learns of, or imagines a story that he or she would like to tell. Perhaps he found a novella or play that inspired him, or she came across a historical event that intrigued her? Or perhaps even a melody suggested a story?

Once an opera is started, there are many elements for its creators to consider. There is a libretto, which is the writing out of the story, complete with dialogue. The dialogue might be spoken or, in most operas, sung.

Carmen began as a short novel and was later performed as a play. Something in the story attracted the young composer Georges Bizet (1838–1875) and he began working on the piece, completing it in 1874.

The libretto, the text of an opera, tells the story in a straightforward manner. The composer understands that the play will be acted, and he must rely on the writer to give the opera sufficient action to make the viewing interesting. So the libretto tells the story, but that is not the only way the story is told. It is also conveyed through the actors and by their costumes and the set design.

Sometimes there is dancing in an opera, and the dancers contribute to the movement and entertainment of the work, but they also aid in the laying out of the story.

However, it is the music, the score, that is the chief medium of an opera. The score must reflect the emotions being portrayed onstage, and at this, Bizet, in Carmen, absolutely rocked!

Another way of learning the story of an opera, which is often overlooked, is in the programs handed out to a theater audience. If you don’t know the story of an opera, and you can’t understand the words, how will you know what’s going on? Some opera performances today have subtitles on a monitor, but if you don’t know the plot before you take your seat, it’s difficult to appreciate the full range of the opera you’re seeing.

When working on this adaptation, I knew that there were things I wanted to say. I wanted to depict Carmen as a tough Latina woman, but one with feelings I’ve seen in the inner cities across America. Yes, she is tough, but she is also very, very human. She needs love and affection as we all do. I looked at what Bizet was doing with the music and the story, and I knew I could translate it to this year, this time.

Although the original French lyrics created by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy are dated, the music still works. If a different setting is used, then the words are sometimes changed to fit that setting. I chose a modern urban setting to write Carmen but always with the original in mind.

Songs

All music composed by Georges Bizet

1. El Ritmo del Barrio (variation)

Arranged by Kwame Brandt-Pierce

2. La Habanera

3. La Seguidilla

4. Destiny Theme

5. The Toreador Song

6. Love Has Flown Away

7. Love Has Flown Away (variation)

Arranged by Kwame Brandt-Pierce

“El Ritmo del Barrio” (variation on a theme from Carmen) Arranged by Kwame Brandt-Pierce

Kwame is a young composer-arranger. I asked him to put together some arrangements of Bizet’s music that would reflect a modern musical scene. Here he does a spirited and rousing rendition of one of the opera’s pieces, an entr’acte, by adding merengue rhythm and instrumentation. This version reminded me of the section of Harlem that was called Spanish Harlem, with its mixture of music from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, which is why I use it as the “rhythm of the neighborhood” in this book.