My dear friend Nietzsche, never one to mince words, came over and held forth on the subject of opera. "You can have your Verdi and your Wagner," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "Give me Carmen, Bizet's Carmen. Io mi sento diventar migliore quando questo Bizet mi parla. I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me -- Bizet, who died soon after the Paris premiere in March 1875 and thus never learned that he had written that rarest of things, a popular masterpiece. I have seen it twenty times." "Twenty times," I exclaimed, lighting his cigar. "Twenty times in the last seven years," he said. It was 1888. “Bizet makes me fertile," he said. "Whatever is good makes me fertile." I asked him what he most loved about the opera. "Carmencita," he said, smacking his lips. "Carmen is fertile. She is a celebration of all that is healthy in life. She stands for the utter triumph of the utterly immoral, life-affirming sexual instinct: passion at odds with reason, lust mightier than even a mother's love, desire that leads ineluctably to degradation, humiliation, annihilation. She is authentic, innocent, cruel — and therefore precisely in line with the natural order." "The music is great," I said. Disregarding the interruption he said, "Carmen depicts love that is war and at bottom the deadly hatred between the sexes!" Nietzsche paused as my wife entered with a tray of champagne flutes. "Prost," I said. "Hoch," he replied. We sipped. "The greatness of Carmen," he said, turning courteously to include my wife in the circle of discourse, "is not only in its parable of jealousy to the point of homicide -- a theme worthy of Shakespeare -- but in the parade of vices, great and small, that it serves in its choruses and arias: smoking and drinking, gypsy fortune-telling and blood oaths, blood sport in a bull ring, knife fighting, smuggling, desertion, murder. Carmen deserts Don Jose as he has deserted his regiment. Hers is the greater will. She will not be a wife, a slave; he is the one enslaved, and because he is, she no longer wants him. She is willing to die sooner than yield her freedom.” He paused and let me relight his cigar. "And," he sighed between puffs, "the little boys and girls march along with the soldiers wanting to play war." A grin appeared on my friend's ordinarily dour face and he strode over to the piano and led the three of us in a spirited rendition of the Habanera and the Toreador song. -- David Lehman
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And the music isn't bad.
Posted by: Stacey | June 20, 2013 at 09:34 AM
But what, perhaps, does Nietzsche have to say about the American Song Book...now there's a cocktail party and a "parade of vices, great and small"....
Posted by: bill | June 20, 2013 at 01:00 PM