The Met's New Carmen: Gentele's Legacy

By William Bender

When Goeran Gentele was killed in an automobile accident barely two weeks after taking over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera last July, he had already established himself as an affable, informal man with thoroughgoing administrative expertise. But last week, as the Met opened its 88th season with a new production of Bizet's Carmen that Gentele had conceived and intended to stage, the question was: Could he also produce opera?

Answer: Yes. The Gentele-inspired Carmen is a masterpiece of taste, wit, theatrical imagination and, most delightful of all, good music. It is a gift of fresh spring rain after the long winter of interpretative obfuscation that, in one opera house after another (including the Met), has virtually turned the work into a gypsy folk opera. This Carmen does not carry a rose in her teeth; she would bite it off. Don Jose is no innocent victim of Carmen's wiles; to her obvious fascination, he is a brute with enough temper to kill. With the hauntingly Iberian sets by Czech Designer Josef Svoboda, one can believe that Seville is steaming hot (it literally is: 280,000 watts of light beam down on the cast from behind the proscenium), that Pastia's tavern is a fun place to go, that the mountain pass is desolate enough to make people fall out of love, as Carmen and Jose do. One can, in fact, begin to believe again in opera itself.

How does a dead stage director leave an operatic production behind him? In Gentele's case, in scrawled notes on a mere five pages of his Carmen score, as well as in the sketches for the sets and lighting that Svoboda had worked up for him last winter. The rest lay mostly in the minds of the people he had talked to about the production. His widow Marit also contributed valuable detail (since Gentele had not wanted Jose or Carmen to be pitied, she suggested that Jose should not kneel or sob over Carmen's body). It then fell to Stage Director Bodo Igesz, recruited from the Met staff, and Conductor Leonard Bernstein to put the various pieces together.

That they did, under the deft direction of Acting General Manager Schuyler Chapin, and with considerable help from Leading Lady Marilyn Horne. "Gentele felt that I had the ingredients within me instinctively to make the kind of Carmen he wanted," Horne recalls. They just may have included the fact that she owns one of the great soprano voices of the century, and controls its reach and richness with a mind and manner unsurpassed by any soprano singing opera today. Horne also proves, to the surprise of many, that she can act --not as well as she can sing, but well enough. As Carmen, her face is a catty catalogue of all the baser emotions. Her hands are a dithyrambic dialogue, as when she plays the castanets with her arms around Jose's neck (a genuine feat, considering the size of Tenor James McCracken). Horne may not so much dance as insinuate dance, and may need a gallant helping hand in order to hop on a chair at the end of her Gypsy Song, but she nonetheless succeeds in making Carmen a woman of real flesh and blood--earthy, unpredictable, infuriating, irresistible.

McCracken relies too much on falsetto in soft, high passages, and Baritone Tom Krause (Escamillo) moves more like a waiter than a bullfighter; yet both contribute to the spirit of the show. The biggest surprise in the cast is the Micaela of Soprano Adriana Maliponte -- vocally ravishing, physically beguiling -- who, it is to be hoped, will be heard soon as Manon or Mimi.

To understand the success of the new Carmen, one has to realize that the opera is one of the three most frequently performed works in the Met's history (along with Aida and La Boheme). Everything and anything have been tried with it over the years. For all her moods and allure, Carmen is hardly a character susceptible, like Don Giovanni and Boris Godunov, to continuous re-exploration. English Cinema Director John Schlesinger (Sunday Bloody Sunday) once declined an offer to stage Carmen at Covent Garden because he felt that he could not improve on what the world had done with it already.

For Gentele, as well as Igesz and Bernstein, the secret was not so much in making improvements as in going back to the original. They scrapped the musical recitatives written after Bizet's death by Ernest Guiraud and restored much of the original spoken French dialogue--never before heard at the Met. Even listeners with only high school French got a better sense of the plot. Bernstein looked at the score as though he had never conducted it before --which he had not--and came up with a broad, slow but crackingly taut performance that underlined Carmen's sense of doom. "Perhaps," says McCracken, "the sense of tragedy was even more influenced by the death of Mr. Gentele. The real tragedy influenced everyone's approach." qedWilliam Bender

qedMore people have heard Marilyn Horne sing Carmen than are aware of it. In 1954 she dubbed the sound track for Dorothy Dandridge in the 20th Century-Fox movie adaptation of the musical Carmen Jones. Otherwise, she has been in no hurry to sing the role on America's major opera stage. Born in Bradford, Pa., raised in Los Angeles, Horne is one of a number of outstanding American singers who prefer to come to the Met only when they are ready for it--and it for them.

Mainly as a result of her stubborn faith in her own instincts, Horne at 18 flunked out of the opera workshop at the University of Southern California. To sing Carmen at that age, as the director insisted, would ruin her voice, she felt. Yet at 21, she was one of Los Angeles' more prominent singers, performing Palestrina and Brahms with the Roger Wagner Chorale and Igor Stravinsky with Igor Stravinsky.

Horne recalls that it was her father, an assessor and sometime tenor, who first recognized her talents. "He'd let me go out and play evenings," she says, "but then he'd be waiting for me at the piano when I came in." She went to Europe in 1956 and rose through the apprentice shops of Germany and Italy. She especially remembers arriving in the small German village of Erkenschwick to find that the theater had no dressing rooms. She and the rest of the cast changed in the bus. "The whole town cheered us one by one as we got off the bus in our costumes," she recalls.

Marilyn, 38, is known to her friends as Jackie, a nickname given her by her older brother because he wanted a brother. In Orange, N.J., she is also known as Mrs. Henry Lewis, the mother of Angela, aged seven, and the wife of the conductor who in 1968 became the first black ever to head an American symphony orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony. When she was getting ready to marry Lewis back in 1960, her friends warned her of possible black-white hostilities. As it turned out, the real problems were not interracial but interartistic. Says Horne: "There are times when Henry is coming back from a tour and needs me to soothe his wounds, or I am coming back and need someone to soothe mine. God forbid that they come at the same time."

A mezzo-soprano with a phenomenal 2 1/2-octave range, Horne is helping to bring back the days of the 19th century's Malibran and Pasta, who were really contraltos, mezzos and lyric sopranos rolled into one. "I don't call myself anything," says Horne. "I just sing what I can sing." What she can sing ranges from the atonal lyricism of her Marie in Wozzeck (her San Francisco Opera debut in 1960) through the heart-stopping bel canto fireworks of her Adalgisa in Norma (her Met debut in 1970) to the lyric drama of her current Carmen. She no longer performs in Erkenschwick, but the audiences are still standing at attention and cheering.

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