On January 7th, at the Opera di Firenze, the director Leo Muscato proposed a version of Carmen, the opera by Georges Bizet, in which the young gypsy heroine kills her rejected lover Don Jose with a pistol instead of being stabbed by him, as in Merimee’s libretto. As explained by the director to members of the press who were shocked, the reasoning behind the change is because the moment has come when it is no longer acceptable to portray women being dominated; they must prevail against men who mistreat them. He went on to explain, the opera, as is too often the case, must not put on a spectacle of victory for stalkers and rapists.
Many critics were outraged. However, all the shows were sold out.
What now? The critics protested: are we going to rewrite all the opera and theatre classics to please feminists? Will Phaedra, Berenice, Esmeralda, Ophelie, Norma, and Violetta now know a less fatal destiny? What a sacrilege! A work of art, they say, must not be modified according to the whim of ideologies. As an example, critics also cite the history of totalitarianism, which provides gloomy precedents.
In fact, lest we forget that it has always been the privilege of the opera directors, even in the least constrained democracies, to be granted all the freedoms with the original work, even allowing them to change the period in which the action takes place, the social condition of the characters and sometimes even their gender.
Furthermore, no director of a great lyric theatre would venture to represent an opera as it was written.
There are times when directors and production designers take extreme liberties without bringing anything of interest. However, there are also times when they totally reinvent an existing work in a jubilant way, as was the case recently with the brilliant production of La Traviata revisited by Benjamin Lazare, Florent Hubert and Judith Chemla in the Bouffes du Nord in Paris.
As such, considering that women are so often depicted as victims by the playwrights, changing the end of an opera to make women survive is one of the least modifications that a director will have imposed on a libretto.
One stipulation is that we ought to be careful and not allow the pretext of a new righteousness as totalitarian as the preceding one to lead us into a new ideological sphere to the point that it becomes no longer possible to maintain the original librettos.
The right to modify a work of art is not limited to opera. It actually touches all live performances, including ballet and theater as well. Today, not a single director deprives himself of the right to sign their name on an adaptation of a foreign play that they are directing, including the greatest masterpieces. In the process, the directors modify and modernize the translation and incidentally they collect royalties that no Shakespeare or Chekhov beneficiary could claim.
On the surface, such a right does not concern any other dimension of art. You cannot modify a painting or a sculpture.
We cannot make the work of a painter or a sculptor say something else than what it already says.
Therefore, we must accept the Death of Sardanapalus and the Yound Ladies of Avignon for what they are. And perhaps admit or reject it as a whole.
But it is not that simple:
No doubt this will be debated: If a created work uses as a pretext or purports to support racism, sexism, or depicts other forms of vulnerability, can we consider it as a work of art?
In any case, we should start analyzing these works with the same critical spirit that we utilize for literary and theatrical works, and contextualize it in the process. We ought to avoid falling into a new dogma that would swallow the essentials of art of the western world.
The debate is just beginning.
J@ATTALI.COM