Carmen

Youngest Daughter brought the opera Carmen home from the library. Her two loves at the moment are horses--she's got a part-time job at a stable--and opera. She has a wealth of opera detail at her fingertips which she uses to try to initiate conversations with a "Did you know that" or "I don't know why they do X instead of Y." She tends to pace wildly when listening to exciting passages, especially daggers-drawn and mad scenes. With Carmen playing she alternates between sitting and reading the notes and imitating an ideal gas molecule rattling around the living room and hall.

So we are once again marinated in Carmen: the sound of the music and the tentative efforts at analysis YD makes--usually starting with overgeneralizations. Maybe I should try.

Every Carmen plays differently: freedom-loving, out-of-control, fey; but over the years my attitude towards her has changed a bit. At the climax she rejects her suitor/stalker Don José and proclaims her freedom, and he stabs her. Tragedy, of course. But, as a judge reportedly said about an assault with a golf-cart kickstand by a jealous husband, this is just one of the more readily foreseeable consequences of her actions.

The more thorough the conquest Carmen makes, the more of her worshiper the man becomes--and the more he will feel that she is betraying him when she leaves. So long as she sticks to dalliances with men who don't care about her she's relatively safe from sharp objects, but trying to make somebody really care invites trouble. If her professed "freedom" isn't being wasted in meaningless time spent with men who don't care, it is breaking men who do. Like a man demanding the freedom to eat gravel, she violates her nature and suffers accordingly.

And so for me Carmen has become less of a dramatic tragic figure and more pitiably foolish.

Not that Don José is a paragon of wisdom...