Bizet – Schedrin: Carmen
„Song of the flowing blood”
Georges Bizet’s opera, the anthem of passion, desire and death is about an Andalusian gipsy girl who steals an officer’s heart and convinces him to sacrifice his family, rank and honour for her and than turns her back on him for a toreador…
The virtue of the musical framing of the story about longing that supresses the sense of duty and jealousy that leads to murder, is the effective display of deep emotions and dramatic confrontations, eventfullness and spanish temperament. After the opera’s undivided success and through the following adaptations Carmen became the symbol of low-lived women: beautiful but dangerously seductive who give their love away too easily.
Carmen-suite is a one-act ballet created 55 years ago by cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso for russian musician Rogyion Schedrin’s wife, prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Eventhough Plisetskaya previously vainly asked Sostakovits and Hatsaturyan – known as a ballet composer – to create a dance drama from Bizet’s piece for her, they both refused. That is when Schedrin appeared on the scene who was not frightened by the opera’s popularity but aimed to „get as far away as possible” from it.
The Carmen-suite, orchestrated to strings and percussion that operates with unexpected rhythmic turns and subtle changes of chords, is not only a tribute to the great ancestor but the „creative meeting of minds”, a kind of retelling of Bizet’s piece.
Naturally the Soviet culture policy then in being did not share the western critic’s enthusiasm: too much erotica for them.
