In the mornings when I was early to my classes and rehearsals, I would sit alone and listen to the violin and cello students as they warmed up. I liked to feel the notes along the bench under my fingers, in the floor beneath my feet, at my back—they bounced along the wooden walls of the Conservatoire as if we were all inside an enormous wooden instrument of many parts.
I also liked these young men with their intemperate musician’s dispositions, their various pettinesses, they reminded me of unbroken colts. They did not know me by sight, and so they smiled at me as they entered and left unlike my fellow singing students.
Aristafeo had mentioned his time here to me, and it was strange to be here after him; I was helpless to think of how I might have met him earlier had I passed that previous audition, though, of course, what separated us then would likely still have kept us apart. On those mornings, though, it felt sometimes as if I’d been admitted to his past, empty of him, a little victory over his death.
Here I learned that the first classical stories of the House of Atreus and their ilk had been sung but the music was lost—opera was new clothes for old tragedies. I liked this idea, the opera stories as refugees of some ancient conflict accommodating themselves anew among us—much as I suppose I was, along with many others. I remember I wondered if there would ever be new great tragedies and then came Georges Bizet and Carmen.
Bizet I knew as one of these young men, one of their heroes, a recent graduate who himself was at the very edge of succeeding. He hid gentle, pale eyes behind gold spectacles, and under his suit jacket, the soft shoulders of a man who couldn’t lift a crate. He had quietly married the daughter of his mentor at the Conservatoire, a composer himself.
It was said he was too proud to teach, but many times, when I arrived at rehearsals, he was at the piano working as an accompanist to earn extra money to pay for rehearsals of what he was sure was his masterpiece, Carmen, a commission from the prestigious Opéra-Comique.
Students often bragged to one another about the clear successes among the school’s graduates. I think we imagined that before a career began there was a bargain to be struck with Fame and that the way to learn how to do this was to study those Fame had chosen. Bizet’s story was told with every possible detail, for at any moment it seemed as if some deciding success or failure would descend and supply the lesson the story lacked. There were as many signs supporting a good end for him as a bad one.
Bizet had won the Prix de Rome, but the students spoke assuredly on how he’d chosen his previous librettos badly and that this had held him back as a composer. The libretto he’d chosen this time, though, came from a famous novel, and the librettists, Meilhac and Halévy, were widely considered to be the best. And Halévy was related to Bizet by marriage. This was thought to be a good omen.
Pauline told me what she had heard of his struggle from Louis, who knew the director of the Opéra-Comique well.
The story was of a young seductress, murdered when she steals a young man away from an arranged marriage and then rejects him. This troubled the theater’s manager, for the Comique was a family theater and marriages were regularly arranged between performances or even during them. The bourgeois families paid for boxes in order to have a better view of one another, not the stage; and they typically talked all the way through, believing the real drama was with them. They were famous to the singers, composers, and musicians of the Conservatoire as Paris’s most ungrateful and wealthiest subscription audience, and so when the management began canceling rehearsals of Bizet’s opera, saying it was for lack of funds, the students scoffed. Bizet only took them at their word and earned the money required, and so the rehearsals continued.
It soon seemed there was no one who would not betray him. The most famous song, the Habanera, he rewrote thirteen times at the insistence of the soprano who was creating the role of Carmen, and she still hated it; the orchestra complained, incomprehensibly, that the music was “Indochinese.” This made me laugh—there was a pidgin used inside of a maison close, I knew, that this referred to—but then the soprano put her disappointment in a letter to a friend, delivered by what would seem to be a very deliberate accident to the director, who, in turn, kept the dress rehearsals empty in order to protect the debut. More letters still appeared the next day, published in all of the newspapers, denouncing the opera as immoral—the complaints of ghosts.
The opera finally opened. Many of us from the Conservatoire attended, proud as the audience applauded vigorously at the end of the first act—but this was when the very proper young Mica?la brought a note to the young soldier from his mother that was the opening of a marriage negotiation. Carmen appeared, and by the time the aforementioned Habanera concluded, it was clear, as the soldier picked up the flower Carmen dropped for him, that the marriage negotiation would be for nothing. Next the cigarette girls lit real cigarettes and stabbed each other with knives; Carmen wed the soldier in a Gypsy wedding in the mountains, their hands soaked together in a chalice of red wine; and then at the end, the young soldier murdered her for rejecting him. After he stabbed her to death, the audience sat in silent fury. No applause from them—though we, his claque, did try, full of dread.
The next day the papers were filled with reviews declaring it was “a revolting display of animal passion.” Bizet was heartbroken, refused our congratulations, and went away to his family’s country estate and did not seem to return. On the night of the thirty-second performance, the unlucky letter-writing lead soprano fainted during the third act, and when she was revived, she refused to go back onstage, overcome with a premonition of Bizet’s death.
It seems to me if she’d known what it would bring she likely would have stood and gone on.
By the thirty-fifth performance, after it was published that Bizet had been found dead of a broken heart at his country estate very close to the time of the soprano’s fainting, Paris rushed to see the opera, and the remaining performances sold out. It closed after the forty-eighth performance to go to Vienna, where the director sought to shock audiences further by adding real horses and a bullfighter’s parade. There, it triumphed.
For those of us students seeking a lesson in telling the story of his career, Bizet’s tale had finally concluded. The lessons were that sometimes the composer died in the third act and not the soprano in the fifth. You could devote yourself relentlessly to art and there would be no great reward; you could go to your death for all of your talent thinking you had failed at your great work. There was no bargain to be made with Fame, who was, perhaps, the most fickle god of all or, perhaps, the bargain was this—Fame had taken his life as its price for conferring fame on the opera. In this way, while Bizet did not teach, he did teach.
And so there was one opera, perhaps, in the history of music that I never wanted to sing, and that was Carmen. And yet I saw over the years the success of the imperial productions, the theaters across Europe eager to perform it, and the sopranos lined up to sing the “Indochinese” music as if waiting in a queue for eggs and milk after the Siege. I knew one day it would be offered to me, and I would have to choose.
This was that day.
I sat in bed and read the music pages and came quickly to the Habanera. I remembered the cold-eyed girls of the chorus exhaling their smoke that first night toward the virgins in the boxes and giggled in my bed.