Freeing Carmen

Calixto Bieito: In directing Carmen, I wanted above all to free this opera from clichés. I didn’t want to imprison it in myth, especially not that surrounding femininity. I approached Carmen like a universal human character, like those of Shakespeare.

C.B.: Yes, I contest the idea that Carmen seeks her own death and provokes José in order to be killed. Carmen wants to live and feel alive.

C.B.: Although I am from a family of musicians and was immersed in opera from an early age, I did not want to tackle Carmen weighed down by tradition. I had no image in my head; my work was constructed by listening attentively to the music. For this production we have created different lighting effects that refer as much to Goya or Zurbarán as to the light one might savour in the Moroccan desert. We don’t refer to a precise period: this could be the end of Franco’s dictatorship just as it could be the early eighties… The quintet contains a parodical reference to traditional Spain: I wanted it to be disjointed, sarcastic and cynical. Mercedes and Frasquita wear flamenco costumes that remind us of what the tourists come to see in Spain. Of course, this is heavy with irony.   

C.B.: Yes, although given the importance in the media of the immigration question, it might seem opportunist to describe it today as an essential element in a production created nearly twenty years ago. Carmen is a frontier, in a literal sense: physically as well as metaphorically. And when I created this production eighteen years ago, this issue was not as global or as unavoidable as it has since become. The geographical issue is, by the way, emphasised by the treatment of the stage as a desert area. The bull is not an image of virility: it evokes the idea of the solitude belonging to such places. It is just like the bulls that line the roads of Monegros, in particular, near Zaragoza. Mountainous landscapes inhabited by those giants that are visible from miles around. rony.

Interview by Marion Mirande and Simon Hatab