With Carmen, in 1845, Mérimée painted the portrait of a rebellious and cruel gypsy, inspired by the profiles of the women he had encountered during his many trips to Spain. While the character in the opera is somewhat toned‑down, she nonetheless remains passionate and profoundly Latin. Extremely popular with 19th century audiences, Carmen was also a figure fondly embraced by artists and depicted from a variety of different angles: the pernicious femme fatale, the fortune‑teller, the free spirited, emancipated woman…

Valentina Carrasco: When dealing with recent history, there is indeed a risk of sticking too closely to the events themselves. In the case of Nixon in China, the famous original, realistic production by Peter Sellars actually encourages one to break free from it. As I am neither Chinese nor American, and as I am taking on a work that has become a classic of the repertoire, it is my responsibility to offer a new interpretation. This is an opera that is performed regularly and, as such, can afford to be approached in a more abstract way than it was at the time of its premiere. The characters I present are historical figures, but treated in a more conceptual manner. This is made possible in particular by the progression of the work, which initially aims for realism and then gradually evolves toward something more surreal.  

Valentina Carrasco: Yes, I started from the rather intuitive idea of a ping-pong table, which turns out to be a powerful image for symbolizing the political game: two spaces facing each other, with the players batting responsibility back and forth. Ping-pong is also very percussive, much like John Adams’s music. Several pages of the score are highly rhythmic and evoke the back-and-forth of a ball. It is also a visually striking, highly choreographic sport, which is particularly interesting for this work, where choral scenes are numerous.

This initial intuition was reinforced when I discovered an event in the history of the United States and China: ping-pong diplomacy. It refers to the invitation to China, at the initiative of the Chinese team captain, of the U.S. national table tennis team for a tour. The two teams had met at the World Championships in Japan, where Chinese players had been instructed not to interact with the American players. Nevertheless, Americans and Chinese eventually mingled and congratulated one another on their respective play…

It was this sporting visit to China—the first official trip to the country by Americans—that paved the way for Nixon’s visit the following year, subtly prepared by Henry Kissinger, who understood the need for openness and the role it could play in resolving the Vietnam conflict and in asserting influence vis-à-vis the USSR. This sporting tour was therefore decisive. Mao himself reportedly said of the Chinese captain that he could have been a diplomat.

Valentina Carrasco: Absolutely, there are many examples. One interesting case is Romania and the use of its gymnasts, who were treated as ambassadors and subjected to enormous pressure. Sport is a concrete battlefield, particularly in a Cold War context. How do we measure a country’s power when they are not at war? In part, through sports competitions, which always celebrate a winner or a record, thereby reinforcing a country’s dominance internationally. It is a demonstration of power.

Today, with the resurgence of conflicts and political divergences leading to a new polarization of the world, sport once again occupies a central place among tools of influence. We have seen this recently with the FIFA World Cup in Qatar and the calls for boycott. Sport also asserts itself as a means of communication and exchange in situations where nations cannot talk to one another. A sporting or artistic encounter then becomes a form of mediation.

In this regard, there is an event that particularly interested me, brighter and more positive, so to speak, than Nixon’s visit: the invitation by China of the great American violinist Isaac Stern, who was invited to give concerts and masterclasses. It is interesting to see, in the documentary about him, that Stern was received and escorted in much the same way as Nixon had been. Yet he interacts with musicians, including the director of the Shanghai Conservatory—people who speak the same language as him. The rapport is much more evident than between Nixon and the communist leaders, whose exchanges did not really resolve the points of divergence or the questions of Taiwan or Vietnam. Stern’s visit shows people coming together, revealing the unifying power of music. Where politics always remains shadowy, nothing is guaranteed.

In staging Carmen, my primary aim was to free this opera from clichés. I did not want to deal with myths, and even less with that of femininity. I wanted a human character, approached in the way one approaches Shakespeare’s characters. My Carmen is made of flesh and blood. She embodies no one other than herself: a woman of her time with her own DNA. She is a very concrete character, as Don José is as well. Returning to her humanity meant highlighting her many contradictions, the dark sides and the luminous sides of her personality.

I believe it is a mistake to see Carmen as a femme fatale; she is simply a complex woman with multiple facets, all of which are revealed by Bizet’s music. Carmen no more than Frasquita or Mercédès is not a prostitute. She may sometimes lead soldiers on, make them drink, give herself to them if she feels like it, however brutal they may be, and take part in small-scale trafficking as well… But above all she is solitary, not particularly educated, simple. She wants to love, to feel desired, to run, to fly… I reject the idea that she seeks death and provokes José in order to be killed. Carmen wants to live and to feel alive.

José is a violent man in pain, struggling against himself, against duty, the influence of his mother, and against his obsessions. Through him, I wanted to highlight an everyday, contextual violence. We are living in particularly cruel times, in which intolerance and violence affect the social and economic spheres and, of course—I am thinking here of Spain—the domestic sphere.

Although I come from a family of musicians and was immersed in opera at an early age, I did not approach Carmen bearing the weight of tradition. I had no image in mind; my work was built on an attentive listening to the music. It is a production to which we have given different kinds of lighting, referring as much to Goya and Zurbarán as to the light one can experience in the Moroccan desert. We do not refer to a specific period; it could be the end of Francoism just as well as the beginning of the 1980s…

In our reinterpretation, the theme of the border is very present. This may seem opportunistic today, given the media prominence of migration issues, to describe it as an essential element of a production created more than twenty years ago. Yet Carmen herself is a border, in a literal, physical, and metaphorical sense. And when I created the production, in 1999, this question was not as global and inescapable as it has since become. The geographical dimension is further reinforced in the treatment of the stage as a desert-like zone. The bull is not an image of virility; it points instead to the idea of solitude inherent to this space. It is identical to those that line the roads of the Monegros, near Zaragoza in particular—mountainous landscapes inhabited for miles by these giants, visible by the dozen from far away.

I wanted the arena to be very simple: a circle, a metaphor for a closed space from which no one can escape. I chose to associate the chorus with this space, suggesting the presence of the absent hero in a far more evocative way than if he were on stage. The disappearance of the torero Escamillo from the stage is conceived in a highly cinematic manner. It is followed by a light like those found in Goya, illuminating that moment of contemplation when the torero prays before the fight.

Even though we know that Verdi had to endure the ordeal of censorship, I consider his final version where the action no longer concerns King Gustav III of Sweden but the Governor of Boston to be the most coherent. Moreover, Verdi was not seeking deep psychological analysis in this work: at this point in his life, unlike what motivated him in Simon Boccanegra, he aimed to portray powerful emotions rather than to address political despair.

Here, the enlightened ruler embodies the symbol of buon governo, good governance, which from Act I onward in the governor’s audience chamber reveals his unwavering benevolence, despite the bass voices that, as in any nineteenth-century melodrama, represent traitors and conspirators. We also see the appearance of Oscar, the innocent face of fate, the messenger through whom good news arrives news that will ultimately prove fatal. The existence of Ulrica is likewise mentioned in this first act, so that traitors are shown to coexist within a world presented as harmonious.

Often in Verdi’s works, such characters are entrusted with embodying society’s outcasts. Ulrica belongs to that realm of intuition we have repressed, and in my staging this world is represented by a chorus of women, priestesses of a cult whose symbol is the serpent. Within this universe, it seemed interesting to me to portray Ulrica as a priestess of the voodoo cult.

The theme of the magical plant that grants forgetfulness the plant Ulrica invites Amelia to pick can already be found in Shakespeare, and this power of plants is also familiar in the Western tradition, with the myth of the mandrake, believed to spring from the final spasm of the hanged… When the governor, Riccardo, decides almost as a bravado to consult Ulrica, we clearly perceive the difficulty of this role: on the one hand, he is a “positivist,” as one would have said in Verdi’s time, yet within him there is also a taste for entertainment, and within the same character a blend of the comic and the tragic, as was already the case with the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto: a frivolity mixed with gravity that Verdi delights in exploring.

The composer plays with this duality just as he plays with the irrational, in much the same way that today we mock horoscopes in magazines. Nevertheless, in her “off-kilter” vision as a marginal figure, Ulrica has sensed the presence of the conspirators… A single, pared-down set represents the audience chamber. I do not claim that this governor, Riccardo Warwick, is meant to resemble President Lincoln, but the set should evoke a spiritual elevation, of which the eagle is the symbol pride included. In this sense, it is a political set, though not a small drawing room where one waits for dispatches. I wanted it to be something larger and more lyrical.

As for its opposite side, there are no longer architectural elements, nor a glossy black floor, but rather the earth, a realm where the serpent having taken the place of the eagle is the totem, the symbol of a dark psyche: Ulrica’s domain, which the characters of the first tableau visit for entertainment. The eagle represents reason and power. The serpent represents the power of the night, darkness, and also the feminine, the chthonic. These are symbolic beliefs that have been obscured in our culture by historical pressures, yet have not disappeared. The true subject of this work is impossible love the deepest despair in love, stemming from the fact that, as in Tristan and Isolde with King Marke, the rival is one’s closest friend, and such a friendship cannot tolerate betrayal.

Thus, when the governor is stabbed during the ball, everyone becomes aware of this contrast: the utmost outward display of social life confronted with the most intimate realms of love and friendship. The result is that three lives are destroyed in the end. The darkness of tragedy prevails the hidden side, the black eagle. One curious detail appears in the cast list concerning Renato, who is described as “Creole.” Creole, that is to say, born in the United States. It is also specified that Creoles are present at the ball. Did the librettist have mixed-race characters in mind? What remains, in any case, is that through his intransigence toward his wife—bordering on sadism and through his jealousy, which is not without recalling Otello, Renato directly reflects a psychology characteristic of the nineteenth century.

In depicting this passion, it is as though Verdi were searching for a new form, even abandoning a grand entrance aria for Amelia, as if the very idea of the prima donna had already become obsolete in his eyes. One senses here that Verdi is moving toward his great works: Don Carlo, Otello, Falstaff… The great lyrical moments of Act II are supremely beautiful, when the music becomes most absolute an outpouring of lyrical emotion. As with Mozart, one ends up wondering whether one prefers the recitatives or the arias. But I never choose between the expression of feeling and what drives the action forward. To my mind, every cubic meter of the stage must be filled with drama and music. Such is the lesson of my old master, Strehler.