JOSÉ
Carmen, I love you so much. You have to believe me.
CARMEN
Stars all look away.
JOSÉ
There is nothing in life but the two of us! Nothing!
CARMEN
Death opens her arms. She says, “Come to me.”
JOSÉ
I won’t give you to Escamillo.
CARMEN
(sings the “Destiny Theme”)
Life laughs at me now,
Sad, forsaken clown.
Dreams crumble and fall.
They die silently.
JOSÉ
We will always be together.
CARMEN
Where is there to turn to?
Where can I find mercy?
Love is what I needed,
All I wanted from this life.
CARMEN pushes away from JOSÉ one last time and desperately looks for a way into Madison Square Garden. JOSÉ aims his gun and shoots. CARMEN gasps, clutches her side, and falls.
JOSÉ
Carmen, I love you! I love you!
The two figures are silhouetted on the stage. JOSÉ leans over CARMEN’s prone body as the music continues in the background.
Slowly, the stage grows dark, and we continue to hear the melancholy sound of the ominous theme we have heard several times before.
Then, in the darkness, we once again hear “El Ritmo del Barrio”, the cheerful, lively music we heard toward the beginning of the play.
The End
Author’s Note
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.