Universal culture and Spanish culture in particular have a problem: how to erase the trace of bulls in so many consecrated works, in the biographies of many creators or in operas, such as Carmen, in which the bullfighter embodies the mythological hero, hero and from Seville?
The formula staged last Tuesday in the performance of Carmen at the Liceu adopts a funny way out of the dilemma. A yes but no sibylline. We have a love triangle (Carmen, Corporal Don José and a bullfighting figure whom Bizet named Escamillo). Unlike Don José, eaten away by jealousy and capable of stabbing the woman he claims to love, Escamillo is a hero of the people to whom Carmen decides to give herself. In such a bullfighting and “operatic” city – Seville boasts the record of operas set in its streets, they say 153, many of them capitals such as Don Giovanni, The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro or Carmen – Escamillo shines for the admiration it arouses.
And how does the Liceu production treat the character, at least in one of the two casts, that of the American baritone Eric Greene, with a basketball-like physique?
Like a jester.
No one has dared, for the moment, to retouch Bizet’s script and turn Escamillo into a striker for Sevilla CF or Real Betis – “scorer, scorer” could sing the famous chorus – but it is clear that his status as a matador makes people uncomfortable. the creators of the 21st century. Hence the perversion of dressing Eric Greene… in yellow (a cursed color in bullfighting, a deceitful way of stripping the costume of lights of its priestly symbolism). It is not a cane and gold suit, old gold or straw, but yellow…
The other detail of the contemptuous spirit is the farewell gesture that Escamillo dedicates to the bandits who accompany Carmen, whom he invites to his next bullfight in Seville. Bullfights may be torture, but they have a sacred aesthetic code where nonsense, the fair ones. Well, Escamillo (Greene) waves goodbye with a gesture typical of the NBA: shooting those who cheer him. In such careful productions, it’s either sloppiness or bad work.
These are, yes, two details, in Calixto Bieito’s production, transgressive but less so, premiered in Peralada in 1999. Nothing to object to that chusca, somewhat Aznarian and Legionary Spain. But for Escamillo to dress and gesticulate as a mountebank is as inappropriate as if they dressed Carmen as Pedroche on New Year’s Eve.
Fitting the ancestral rite of bull sacrifice into a liturgy contrary to common sense and in front of normal people is very complicated. That is the dilemma that the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, has, who detests a spectacle whose defense is part of the obligations of his office. A monumental contradiction, like Carmen – the free woman – falling in love with a murderer.
However, people of culture should not cast a stone and hide their hand. Making it seem that bullfighting is alien to Spanish cultural tradition (Barceló continues to create, as far as I know) or to universal artistic creation implies cheating the solitaire and constitutes good-natured censorship. Sorry: good vibes.