Review | Visually stunning Bizet’s Carmen in Hong Kong recreates original 1875 staging
The Hong Kong Arts Festival’s presentation of the famous opera gives a fascinating sense of what audiences experienced 150 years ago
Arguably the most popular of all operas, Carmen is especially beloved of Hong Kong audiences. Fittingly, in the year that marks the 150th anniversary of both the opera and of the death of its composer, Georges Bizet, the Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF) presented a production that recreated the original staging of 1875.
The result was visually stunning and gave a fascinating sense of what audiences experienced 150 years ago, while offering a refreshing contrast to the modern trend of transposing Carmen’s story to later periods.
It was also a powerful reading in its own right, with director Romain Gilbert drawing on the original novella by Prosper Merimée to bring out the story’s violent side, personified in Kevin Amiel’s searingly intense and agonised Don José.
Bizarrely, Carmen was a failure on its March 1875 premiere in Paris. Its subject matter and characters were undoubtedly ahead of its time – it was not for another 20 years that the verismo school spearheaded by Puccini would bring a new realism to opera. Carmen, with its amoral, heartless heroine and obsessive, murderous hero, caused general outrage – it was panned by the critics and snubbed by the public.
What is harder to understand is that the opera came under attack not only for its content but also its music, which was excoriated as inferior and even “dull” – an adjective that is very difficult to associate with this liveliest of scores.