Opera, or the Undoing of Women by Catherine Clément

What did you expect?”-to the freewill retort-“Does he kill her? Or does she decide to die on his blade?” But neither of those nor the many other ripostes that I have previously pondered seemed satisfactory outside the classroom. Everything from the rejoinder generic-“It’s a tragedy. As a university professor who’s taught and thought about Carmen for years, I had on the tip of my tongue many themes with which to improvise an answer.

It’s tricky to know how to answer that question, especially when it is posed to you by your three-year-old. Then, one day, she asked me, “If Don Jose loves Carmen so much, why does he kill her?” We even watched Francesco Rosi’s cinematic montage of bullfighting and lust in the dust of Seville. She especially loved the children’s chorus-“Taratata, taratata!”-as they imitated the marching soldiers bugling and fifing out the old guard for the new. It used to serenade us on our daily commute to her nursery.

to protect her privacy until she’s ready to tell her own story in the way she wants to) also recognized that there was something seriously wrong going on between men and women in opera. Louder and clearer than ever, I’m hearing opera as critics like Catherine Clément long have: as the undoing of women by men.įrom an early age, my daughter (let’s call her O. In this modern moment, it’s difficult not to hear opera as the highly aestheticized echo of our deeply sordid reality, a harmonization of voices wrung from women’s suffering. But the courage expressed by these female choirs has made me question my enjoyment of another kind of music.

These days, we hear soloists, ensembles, and choruses of women singing out against abusers. From the Welsh National Opera’s staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

Opera, or the Undoing of Women by Catherine Clément