Passion of Don José

At the Berlin Staatsoper, the evening after he conducted Parsifal Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen, a sequence that would have had a strong appeal for Nietzsche, who advertised the Mediterranean virtues of the latter’s music over the ‘tragic grunts’ of the former. Whether Nietzsche would have approved of Barenboim’s way with Carmen is more doubtful. Though it wasn’t slow and turgid à la Bernstein, it was performed, orchestrally, in an exaggerated style. Barenboim must be, too, the most ostentatious operatic conductor since Karajan. Sitting in the stalls, one couldn’t avoid seeing his figure high above the orchestra, gesticulating melodramatically and probably unnecessarily. He took the accompaniment to the ‘Card Song’ from sobbing near-silence to a climax that suggested the murder of Klytemnestra. Elsewhere he was relaxed, but there was not much colour in the music, just as there wasn’t on the stage. A version with spoken dialogue was wisely used, but the singers had been trained, it seemed, to mutter rather than to speak, and I had to rely on the surtitles (they had them for Parsifal, too) to see what they were saying. A large chunk of music for the scene between Don José and Escamillo slowed up the action, which is in any case getting unclear at that point.

In fact, this should have been renamed The Passion of Don José, for Carmen played an incidental role in his downfall, which was preordained. The opera opened with a firing squad killing him, and that was how it ended, too. So the work itself was his memory or fantasy. That approach, which isn’t new — something similar was staged in Edinburgh in 1976 — runs into problems since José is absent for so much of the time, or should be; while Carmen is normally aggressively present.