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Special Study Session Presentations Pheonix, Arizona, October, 1997 What to do about Carmen? James Parakilas Bates College I need to start by declaring that I am not a Hispanicist and that the music I am going to talk about this evening is not Hispanic. In fact, I am going to talk about the very music that has long stood in the way of native musical representations of the Spanish. The music that we might think of as the problem, not the solution. It is in that sense that I have called my remarks here "What to do about Carmen." The most obvious thing to do about Carmen would be to stop teaching it. To get it out of the way in order to make room to teach the music of Hispanic musicians. And in some situations, that would be the best solution. On the other hand, it can be argued that some of the greatest stage and concert music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is music on Spanish themes by non Hispanic composers--Glinka, Verdi, Bizet, Wolf, Debussy, Ravel. So maybe we should teach that music because it is such great music. This seems to me not such a good solution--or at least, it is an inadequate argument, an argument that ignores not only Hispanic music, but also the highly interesting issues that connect Hispanic music to non-Hispanic music about Spain. And part of what I would like to argue for today is "integrating" those issues into "the Western-music curriculum." I would like to suggest three ways in which Carmen--and other non-Hispanic music about Spain--can be used to raise those issues. The first has to do with the complex collaboration of Hispanic musicians with non-Hispanic musicians like Bizet in creating an exotic musical image of Spain in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The second has to do with the dilemma of Hispanic composers in living with a national musical identity marked as exotic--or mapped, as it is in Carmen, as a fatal choice between the exotic and the unexotic. And the third has to do with the dilemma of Hispanic performers whenever they assume that exotic identity, as for example when a Hispanic singer plays the role of Carmen. All of these issues I believe can be made comprehensible and compelling to college or graduate students today. In the first place, then, let's consider the musical image of Spain as we find it in Carmen--the Spain of the Habanera and the Toreador Song--not simply as the fantasy of Bizet and other Frenchmen who couldn't even be bothered to take a trip over the Pyrenees; but instead as an image evolved over a period of decades, mostly in Paris, through a process that owed everything to the presence of Spanish musicians there. Paris, after all, was the capital of Spanish music throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, just as it has been the capital of Afro-Pop in recent decades. Paris is where Manuel García made his fame, where Fernando Sor made his career, where the greatest dancers of the "bolero school" held the stage, where Sarasate went to study the violin and stayed to meet the composers who would create the Symphonie espagnol, and other masterpieces for him, where Falla went to learn his craft. There is plenty of irony in this catalog, since what brought the earliest of these musicians to Paris was the devastation of Spain by French armies under Napoleon and what brought the later ones was the cultural imperialism that France maintained over Spain for more than a century thereafter. Nevertheless, if we're going to think about integrating Hispanic music into the curriculum of Western music, it would be a mistake, I think, to focus on the least "integrated" Spanish musicians of the nineteenth century--those who stayed in Spain--and ignore the ones who went to Paris. Likewise, it would be a mistake to ignore the dealings those Spanish musicians had with French musicians, French publishers, French critics, and the French public. After all, García and Sor and the dancer Dolores Serral and all their emigrant compatriots were not simply singing and dancing and composing Spanishly in France; they were creating music that represented Spain to a French and international public. No doubt when Manuel García arrived in Paris, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, he wasn't intending to define Spanishness in music for himself or his new audience; but Parisians, unlike the folks back home, viewed him as a representative of Spanishness, and from that moment the process of defining Spanishness in music was underway. He and later Spanish musicians in Paris, defined by their situation as representatives of the exotic, could hardly help exoticizing their own country, exoticizing themselves, in their music, and they did it before Bizet was even born. But then, we might ask ourselves: if we have scores and recordings of García's music--as we now do--and of other music by Spanish musicians who worked in Paris, what do we need Carmen for? But it is precisely when French musicians get into the act--get into the business of creating musical Spanishness--that the issues get really interesting. One use for Carmen in the classroom, then, is to place it in a history of French-Spanish exchanges--of integrations and counter-integrations in both directions--so as to raise real, complex questions about exoticism, authenticity, and national identity in music. We can reconsider, for instance, Bizet's creation of his Habanera out of Sebastián Yradier's coy lovers' duet, "El arreglito." I say "reconsider" because scholars like Winton Dean have written as if Yradier in this duet was actually trying to compose the Habanera and, lacking Bizet's genius, simply failed; whereas, when we take the trouble to examine Yradier's duet on its own terms, it provides a far more interesting comparison: it shows us a difference between dramatic characters who express themselves in Spanish style and a dramatic character who embodies a stereotype of the Spanish. Then we can move into the afterlife, or reception, of Carmen, and consider how an obviously inauthentic piece of Spanishness like Carmen might nonetheless have helped impel another French musician, Chabrier, to go to Spain seeking a more authentic Spanish musical experience, and how, having found that in the flamenco centers of Seville and Granada, he went home to Paris to integrate what he found into a further exoticization of Spain, the orchestral work that he called Espagne. And we shouldn't stop there, but should ask our students to think how it might have affected the flamenco musicians of Seville and Granada to see Chabrier sitting at their performances transcribing their music, or what it meant when Carlos Saura and Antonio Gades made a Spanish movie called Carmen in 1983, a movie about flamenco performers based--however loosely--on Mérimée’s story and Bizet’s music. And I think there could be no better way to raise the issue of what constitutes authenticity in music than to ask our students to consider the development of flamenco for the past century and a half under the constant influence of promoters, tourists, governments, experts, and intruding cultures in general. Now I come to my second issue, the dilemma of Spanish composers deciding how to position themselves in relation to the images of musical Spanishness that have confronted them and that they themselves have been instrumental in creating. Carmen belongs in this discussion not simply because it defined musical Spanishness to the outside world, but also because it creates its drama out of a conflict between two different images of Spanish identity, two different stereotypes of the Spanish. Or so it appears if we understand the central conflict between Carmen and Don José as a conflict between the Spanishness of Andalusia and that of Navarre, between the Spain of the North and that of the South, between the Spanishness of the Gypsy and of the non-Gypsy. In that sense, the opera maps the most important boundaries across which Spanish identity, musical and otherwise, has historically been contested. Students who have learned to recognize this conflict in the very schematic form it takes in Carmen will be well prepared to consider why Spanish composers have sometimes felt the need to fasten on one regional or ethnic branch of Spanish music as the most Spanish-Manuel de Falla, for instance, in the period when he was creating a neo-Andalusian style to stand for Spain as a whole. For that matter, students who have learned to think themselves into this dilemma of Spanish composers will be better able to understand the comparable dilemma of composers in America who have wanted to create an American national music; they may be able to understand why some of these composers, asking themselves what American musical source was the most American of all, have fastened on music of the Appalachians, some on native American music, and some on African American music. But to return to the map of Spain as we find it in Carmen, there are other ways to read that map. One is to see a Spain in which the Pyrenees have been moved a bit south, so that Don José, coming from Navarre, is no longer a Spaniard at all, but a Frenchman. He is the nineteenth-century Frenchman to whom Carmen's Spain represents a fatally attractive and fatally unavailable dream, the Frenchman who pictures Spain as an exotic realm, an exotic woman on whom he tries to enact his fantasies of sexual freedom and power. I think this is a fruitful way of mapping Carmen. But it is a way of mapping the opera's Frenchness, and it probably doesn't shed much light on Spanish music. Paradoxically, if we move the Pyrenees south one more time, until both Carmen and Don José become French, then the opera again raises issues that pertain to national identity in Spanish music. In this light, the opera is a story about the tension between two ways of being French, between two sides of the French character, one bourgeois and disciplined and "European," the other untouched by modernity, wild, "Mediterranean." In the opera, this tension about being French is mapped metaphorically onto Spain, where coincidentally it also fits. That is, Spaniards have felt the same tension about their national character, and in pretty much the same terms. Again, I think that when students have learned to apply these terms of analysis to the dramatic structure of a work like Carmen, they may be able to apply them as well to the compositional choices made by a Spanish musician. In this way, for instance, they might be able to apprehend the tension between nationalism and modernism playing itself out differently in the works of Falla and Gerhard, or--to move to the wider Hispanic world--in the works of Chavez and Ginastera. My final point today is that if Carmen embodies a tension between two ways of being Spanish, it also visits that tension on any Spanish, or Hispanic, performer who undertakes to play one of its roles. To put it another way, the exotic Spanish identity established in works like Carmen is not something that Hispanic performers can easily put on and take off; if they put it on, they may find themselves stuck with it. When the singer Julia Migenes-Johnson created a sensation with her filmed performance of the role of Carmen, she was trapping herself, it seems, in that single role. Other Hispanic musicians, would, I feel sure, understand what happened to her, and here the field does not need to be limited to opera singers. Sarasate could have told her what it did to his reception as a performer of Beethoven to be typed as the creator of the Symphonie espagnole, let alone of his own "Spanish" dances and fantasies. And if Pablo Casals was able to cloak himself in the mantle of Bach, he did it precisely by declining to present himself as a purveyor of Hispanic exotica, either native or foreign in origin. Wherever performers are from, they are expected to be specialists in the music of their own country; but it is only when a country's whole culture has been marked as exotic that performers find themselves in the bind of having to choose between representing that exoticism to the rest of the world and being taken seriously in the unexotic standard repertory. No one ever supposed, for instance, that because Sviatoslav Richter or Mstislav Rostropovich was an authoritative performer of Prokofiev, he couldn't be trusted to perform Beethoven or Brahms. Students nowadays may remember the recent controversy over whether an actress of Asian origin or descent should be cast in the title role of Miss Saigon. The question raised by that case is important to work out. The question I am raising here is different and, I think, no less important for students to consider. In a word, it is the question of why an Asian or Asian-American actress might not want to play Miss Saigon, or why a Hispanic singer might not want to play Carmen, or what it may mean to her, in either case, if she does get the role. In order to document the bind that I am describing, I'd like to read a little from a letter written by the Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza for publication in the booklet of the 1977 Edinburgh Festival, where she sang her first Carmen. The fact that she sang her first Carmen in 1977, two decades after her debut and long after she had established herself as one of the world's greatest interpreters of Mozart and Rossini, allows us to suspect her of some reluctance to undertake the most coveted of all mezzo roles and the one that defines her native country, however falsely, in opera. But then, this issue of defining the nationality of the role is precisely what concerns Berganza in her letter. She writes:
Berganza is clearly fighting any association of Spain with its Gypsies, fighting off any characterization of Spain in terms of Gypsy culture. But while she goes on about the universality of the role of Carmen, in some sense she does want it to represent Spain. Later in this letter she writes:
Now of course a "magazine-romance
Spain" is exactly what Mérimée and Bizet created; in fact,
theirs is the mother of all "magazine-romance Spains." Berganza has
talked herself into an impossible position here. But it's just for that
reason that her letter is instructive: the problem is not that she doesn't
understand the opera she is acting in. On the contrary, she understands
it all too well, and she is in denial about it. In fact, it's hard to
imagine how she could be the intelligent, educated, middle-class, modern
Spanish artist that she is without finding the role of Carmen both offensively
clichéd and deeply undermining. And at the same time, it is hard
to imagine how, as the leading Spanish mezzo of her day, she could avoid
coming to terms, somehow, with the role of Carmen. And so, when we teach
music that trades in national stereotypes--and here I am referring to
works by native composers as well as works by foreigners--one of the
most important things we can do is to ask our students to consider what
it costs performers who, whenever they perform those works, are being
asked to fit, or appear to fit, the stereotypes. References Songs of Manuel García
Guitar Music of Fernando Sor
Reviews of Spanish dancers by Théophile Gautier in the Paris press
Sebastián Yradier, "El arreglito"
Flamenco Carmen
Teresa Berganza on Carmen
By James Parakilas
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