“Carmen” from silent films and music of our time

Certainly, many people of a certain age will remember that huge success that took place in Spain from the 80s. Later, we could also watch it on TV (it still airs on some platforms today). “To be or not to be?” (1942), a funny comedy Lubitsch On the American stage. For many artists, this means that they have managed to cross the swampy waters associated with the transition from silent to spoken word cinema without going any further. The main character of the movie is Pola Negri.

The script starts with, Merimeethe music follows very closely bizetIt offers moments that can be extended by the insertion of entirely new fragments, or by extensions that start from the original music, extending recognizable themes with others, with added majors, appearing to emerge from the staff, becoming balls of unrecognizable notes, sometimes crowned by defined cells that take center stage above a sea of ​​defragmented sounds. We can already observe this, in which there is an explosion of various and shocking sounds, leading up to the prelude, which again splits into various broken rhythms, and is finally swallowed up by the Carmen motif, a flexible five-note cell that is identified with Carmen or Fatum.

It is also as if wanting to establish a chronological order.. The film begins in a town where Don Jose passionately kisses a woman. Meanwhile, another elderly woman simmers over the embers in a large pot. However, the first person is not Carmen, but Micaela (here called Dolores), and the second person is not a witch under a spell, but Micaela’s mother in the town, creating a beautiful duet in which the town and her life are evoked.

Because there is no voice, children’s choir They go to trumpets and trombones. of habanera It’s left to nature, but the guitar is present not only in the melody, but also in the strums, which provide the Andalusian color. Carmen’s arrest and subsequent escape is a very coherent story, one that almost always fails in opera.

and Prelude to Act II In Bizet, the party is ready, a fragment of an aria from a gypsy song is inserted, followed by a new echo of a love duet… A very different atmosphere from the previous one, the melody notes are very long and in a high register, as if going beyond worldly and amorous love. This dance is also more believable than many non-Andalusian carmenes, as is Don José’s seduction scene to raise his vocation to smugglers, and the moment of retreat, which is poorly understood in Bizet (he has just arrived from the barracks and has already had to leave; there is an urgency here because he has to stand guard at the hole through which the smugglers pass). Here Don Jose loses points because many smugglers appear and he has to confront them all.

he flower aria This piece is one of the most beautiful in the tenor’s repertoire, here played mainly by clarinet and oboe (in Bizet the oboe plays a salvific role), and the already beautiful melody is highlighted by various additions, but the finale is completed by trumpet and trombone.

Escamillo He appears towards the end and Carmen falls in love with him. It’s as if Lubitsch suddenly realized he had to end it and hasn’t developed his characters yet. The final decorations were great, with horse-drawn carriages, signs mostly written in Spanish, and very luxurious. And Carmen’s death is really tense, in just a short shot, and like that.

In any case, this film was recorded only 45 years after Bizet’s film, and we can get close to the period sets, costumes, and above all facial expressions, very wide eyes, very limited and exaggerated body language. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the premiere of “Carmen”.