The most violent story of love and adventure of all time, "Carmen" has been numerous times committed to the stage: as a world famous opera by George Bizet all the way down to a pseudo-spaghetti western "Man Pride and Vengeance" with the Italian heart-throb Franco Nero. The story's title character has captured the imagination of many poets and writers. One of the most famous theatrical adaptations of the theme is "Carmen-Suite".
Part 2.
Carmen-Suite
Carmen-Suite is a one-act ballet created in 1967 at the Bolshoi Theater. The idea of the ballet originated with Maya Plisetskaya, the prima-ballerina of the Bolshoi. The Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso created the ballet to music by Rodion Shchedrin, Plisetskaya's husband. Initially the ballet was banned in the USSR as "disrespectful" to the opera of George Bizet. Since then it has become Shchedrin's best-known work, Plisetskaya's best-known ballet, and the face of the Bolshoi Theater.
{Extract 1 - Carmen's appearance}
The ballet is set in a circular arena of the Spanish corrida which symbolizes life with its passions. Carmen is dressed in a short black dress with a big red flower on her head. First, she appears standing in her famous pose of proud self-assurance and challenge. The colours of her dress match the black mask of a bull hanging above the arena against the red banner. Another ballerina dances a dual role of the bull in a bullfight scene and Carmen's Fate. Thus the corrida becomes a metaphor for the inevitability of the tragic finale.
The ballet is based on the third part of Mérimée's novella of the same title. Carmen is a passionate, free-spirited woman who hasn't met her match. When Carmen falls out of love with Jose she leaves him for the torero and Jose, mad with passion and jealousy, stabs Carmen to death.
{Extract 2 - Carmen's death}
In Carmen Mérimée created one of the supreme literary incarnations of the femme fatale, who surrounds herself with an aura of mystery, magic, and malevolence, with which she exerts a fatal charm on the weak and the unwary, exploiting her sexuality and the mystique she has created, in order to further her own ends.
Dishonest, unruly, promiscuous, shallow, vicious, callous, she is also vivacious, energetic, enterprising, resourceful, indomitable. A lover of her freedom before all else, she cannot allow any one man to call himself her master for long.
Carmen is Venus the Turbulent, vicious and vivacious. We are enthralled by her because, as Mérimée writes elsewhere, - "energy, even in evil passions, always awakens in us a feeling of astonishment and a kind of instinctive admiration."
But what really makes Carmen a supreme tragic heroine is the courage and dignity with which she faces death, and the resignation with which she submits to what she sees as her Fate.