4 - The musical languages of Carmen

Summary

All pieces of music develop in dialogue with many others. Far from being self-contained, a composition produces meaning through its use of codes transmitted and reproduced within a variety of repertories, its generic affiliations, the social contexts in which it is written and received, as well as through the strategic arrangement of its particular parts. This is true even of the most apparently autonomous of instrumental movements: its medium, formal procedures and aesthetic premises all have social histories, engaging associations that can neither be predicted in advance nor – even with the best of formalist intentions – kept altogether silent. But it is more obviously true of a work such as Carmen, which operates in large part on the basis of its transgressive mixture of codes, genres and styles.

Bizet's first audiences recognized this transgressive mixture and responded accordingly (see Chapter 6). But because we no longer possess their expectations with respect to genre, we now tend to hear the opera as an unruptured entity: whether listening to the placid lyricism of Micaëla or the third-hand Cuban strains of the “Habañera,” we hear only … Carmen. Thus, before embarking on a reading of the opera itself, I want to sketch out some of the principal musical discourses it engages and juxtaposes.

Opéra-Comique

Carmen belongs to the genre of opéra-comique, and it must be read in part in terms of the conventions of that genre, even though Bizet virtually imploded the opéra-comique with this work.