Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
CARMEN
Victoria de los Angeles, Nicolai Gedda
Janine Micheau, Ernest Blanc
dir : Sir Thomas Beecham
Original recording 1958-1959
Warner Classics high definition remastering 2016
96 kHz, 24 bit FLAC files + digital booklet
Source: HDTracks
Source: HDTracks
Sir Thomas Beecham conducts “Carmen”
Bizet’s Carmen had an awkward birth at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in March 1875, though it was by no means the outright failure many commentators continue to claim it was; it was, nevertheless, a severe disappointment to its composer, who died exactly three months later on 3 June 1875, aged just 36.
One of the consequences of Bizet’s early death was that while he was able to edit the opera’s first vocal score, he did not have time to fulfil his contract to compose the sung recitatives required for all those theatres where the original production’s spoken dialogue could not be used — the vast majority of opera houses other than the Opéra-Comique.
The task of providing these was passed on to his friend and colleague Ernest Guiraud (1837–1892) — a successful theatre composer in his day, though now largely forgotten except for his usefulness in editing posthumous works by other composers and filling in the blanks where necessary; he arranged, for instance, the second orchestral suite from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne and the two orchestral suites from Carmen, as well as taking on the substantial task of putting Les Contes d’Hoffmann into a performable state following Offenbach’s death in 1880.
For about a century, Guiraud’s recitatives remained a standard part of Carmen. Though they are now out of critical fashion and have been more or less discarded, listeners will find them here on Sir Thomas Beecham’s celebrated version, made in Paris in 1958–59.
By the time he’d begun the making of this, his final opera recording, at the age of 79, Bizet’s score had been in Beecham’s repertoire for 56 years — he first conducted Carmen for the “grandly named but decidedly ramshackle” (as his biographer John Lucas describes it) Imperial Grand Opera
Company at the Shakespeare Theatre on Lavender Hill, Battersea, south London, on 2 April 1902. He would go on to conduct it at many more glamorous addresses, becoming on the way an exceptional interpreter of much of the 19th-century and early 20th-century French repertoire — a good deal of which was unfashionable at the time.
Company at the Shakespeare Theatre on Lavender Hill, Battersea, south London, on 2 April 1902. He would go on to conduct it at many more glamorous addresses, becoming on the way an exceptional interpreter of much of the 19th-century and early 20th-century French repertoire — a good deal of which was unfashionable at the time.
One of these venues was the Metropolitan Opera in New York, with whose company Beecham conducted 25 performances of the opera, either at home or on tour, in 1942–44. Just a week before the first of these, Beecham indicated in an interview in the New York Times how he viewed the
title role. “Any singer”, he said, “who fails to make her portrayal of Carmen in accordance with the refinement of the music is doing something that is an aesthetic offence. To make a harridan of Carmen is at complete variance with fact, for the people of Spain have the best manners in the
world. I have visited that country many times, and never once have I seen anyone there, gypsy or native Spaniard, who was a vulgarian.”
He might well have been describing the performance of the protagonist in the recording he would go on to make 16 years later. A soprano rather than a mezzo Carmen, de los Ángeles first sang the title role on Beecham’s recording, and would not appear on stage as Carmen until starring in a
production by the New Jersey State Opera in Newark, New Jersey on 4 November 1978, by which time she was 55 (she had been obliged to withdraw from an earlier planned production to be directed in Dallas by the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel due to pregnancy).
Carmen’s foil, Micaëla, had long been de los Ángeles’s role on stage, including at the Met during Sir Rudolf Bing’s regime. Though she longed to take on the world’s most famous gypsy, “Mr Bing always saw me as a shy, sweet sort of person”, she complains in her authorised biography by
Peter Roberts, “and just could not imagine me playing Carmen, so I was always put down to sing docile little Micaëla”.
Robert Baxter, Operamagazine’s reviewer of de los Ángeles’s Newark appearance, gives an account of her belated stage debut in the role that accords remarkably well with the purely sung performance offered on her earlier Paris recording. “Carmen is no lady. But neither is she the bosom-heaving,
hip-swinging slut portrayed by most interpreters of the role. Los Ángeles created a sleek, sensual gypsy, a playful but proud woman who embraced love flirtatiously and faced her tragic fate with dignity […] She projected the elegant sensuality of Bizet’s music and conveyed the ironic humour and matchless charm of Meilhac and Halévy’s text […] I shall not soon forget the magnetic spell she cast in the first entrance or the beguiling grace with which she bewitched Don José […] She was a radiant, unforgettable Carmen.”
Yet despite what would seem to be a perfect match between Beecham’s notion of the qualities needed for the role and de los Ángeles’s own appreciation of its essential character, problems arose at rehearsals that seemed likely to bring the whole project crashing to the ground. Though the
incident is played down in Baxter’s biography, it is clear from other accounts that there was a serious rift between Carmen and conductor. The sessions began at the Salle Wagram on 4 June 1958 and lasted for a week, with the orchestra with which Beecham had already made several highly successful discs of French repertoire in attendance. Apart from de los Ángeles and Nicolai Gedda — whose French was as immaculate as his sense of the opera’s style — the cast was made up of leading French singers well versed in their roles.
But according to Russell Miller and Roger Boar in their 1982 history of recording, The Incredible Music Machine, Beecham “was tired and irritable after a long concert tour, and relations between him and the soprano grew more and more strained. Finally, de los Ángeles telephoned [long-term EMI executive] David Bicknell at his home in England, and said that she could not stand it a moment longer — she was going home to Barcelona. Bicknell begged her to wait until he could get to Paris to sort matters out, but she would agree to meet him only briefly at the airport.
He caught the first available flight and found her waiting at Orly.”
De los Ángeles would not change her mind and informed Bicknell that she had not so much as told Beecham that she was leaving. He went immediately to the Ritz Hotel to do so. He knocked at the door of Sir Thomas’s suite. “Where’s Carmen?” the latter demanded. “Just touching down at Barcelona airport, I should imagine,” was the response.
After matters had been patched up, and owing to various commitments, it took a year before the remainder of the sessions could be rescheduled for 1–6 September 1959. When they finally did meet again de los Ángeles was received by Beecham with open arms and “Here comes my Carmen!”,
and — reports Humphrey Procter-Gregg in his Beecham Remembered— “the opera was completed to the satisfaction of both of them, and in the friendliest manner. Listeners are quite unaware that the sprightly performance covered two years.”
title role. “Any singer”, he said, “who fails to make her portrayal of Carmen in accordance with the refinement of the music is doing something that is an aesthetic offence. To make a harridan of Carmen is at complete variance with fact, for the people of Spain have the best manners in the
world. I have visited that country many times, and never once have I seen anyone there, gypsy or native Spaniard, who was a vulgarian.”
He might well have been describing the performance of the protagonist in the recording he would go on to make 16 years later. A soprano rather than a mezzo Carmen, de los Ángeles first sang the title role on Beecham’s recording, and would not appear on stage as Carmen until starring in a
production by the New Jersey State Opera in Newark, New Jersey on 4 November 1978, by which time she was 55 (she had been obliged to withdraw from an earlier planned production to be directed in Dallas by the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel due to pregnancy).
Carmen’s foil, Micaëla, had long been de los Ángeles’s role on stage, including at the Met during Sir Rudolf Bing’s regime. Though she longed to take on the world’s most famous gypsy, “Mr Bing always saw me as a shy, sweet sort of person”, she complains in her authorised biography by
Peter Roberts, “and just could not imagine me playing Carmen, so I was always put down to sing docile little Micaëla”.
Robert Baxter, Operamagazine’s reviewer of de los Ángeles’s Newark appearance, gives an account of her belated stage debut in the role that accords remarkably well with the purely sung performance offered on her earlier Paris recording. “Carmen is no lady. But neither is she the bosom-heaving,
hip-swinging slut portrayed by most interpreters of the role. Los Ángeles created a sleek, sensual gypsy, a playful but proud woman who embraced love flirtatiously and faced her tragic fate with dignity […] She projected the elegant sensuality of Bizet’s music and conveyed the ironic humour and matchless charm of Meilhac and Halévy’s text […] I shall not soon forget the magnetic spell she cast in the first entrance or the beguiling grace with which she bewitched Don José […] She was a radiant, unforgettable Carmen.”
Yet despite what would seem to be a perfect match between Beecham’s notion of the qualities needed for the role and de los Ángeles’s own appreciation of its essential character, problems arose at rehearsals that seemed likely to bring the whole project crashing to the ground. Though the
incident is played down in Baxter’s biography, it is clear from other accounts that there was a serious rift between Carmen and conductor. The sessions began at the Salle Wagram on 4 June 1958 and lasted for a week, with the orchestra with which Beecham had already made several highly successful discs of French repertoire in attendance. Apart from de los Ángeles and Nicolai Gedda — whose French was as immaculate as his sense of the opera’s style — the cast was made up of leading French singers well versed in their roles.
But according to Russell Miller and Roger Boar in their 1982 history of recording, The Incredible Music Machine, Beecham “was tired and irritable after a long concert tour, and relations between him and the soprano grew more and more strained. Finally, de los Ángeles telephoned [long-term EMI executive] David Bicknell at his home in England, and said that she could not stand it a moment longer — she was going home to Barcelona. Bicknell begged her to wait until he could get to Paris to sort matters out, but she would agree to meet him only briefly at the airport.
He caught the first available flight and found her waiting at Orly.”
De los Ángeles would not change her mind and informed Bicknell that she had not so much as told Beecham that she was leaving. He went immediately to the Ritz Hotel to do so. He knocked at the door of Sir Thomas’s suite. “Where’s Carmen?” the latter demanded. “Just touching down at Barcelona airport, I should imagine,” was the response.
After matters had been patched up, and owing to various commitments, it took a year before the remainder of the sessions could be rescheduled for 1–6 September 1959. When they finally did meet again de los Ángeles was received by Beecham with open arms and “Here comes my Carmen!”,
and — reports Humphrey Procter-Gregg in his Beecham Remembered— “the opera was completed to the satisfaction of both of them, and in the friendliest manner. Listeners are quite unaware that the sprightly performance covered two years.”
One participant who was aware of the long gap, though, was Gedda. His international career had been launched in Stockholm in 1952 when the legendary record producer Walter Legge, looking for a Dmitry for his recording of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, had auditioned him with Don José’s Flower Song. “He sang [it] so tenderly yet passionately that I was moved almost to tears. He delivered the difficult rising scale ending with a clear and brilliant B flat. Almost apologetically, I asked him to try to sing it as written — pianissimo, rallentando and diminuendo. Without turning
a hair he achieved the near miracle, incredibly beautifully and without effort.”
Gedda would repeat the trick on this recording. But he had also been anxious to repeat those sections of the opera he had already recorded the year before. “I am afraid”, he warned the eminent conductor, “that my voice has changed since last summer.” Gedda recounts that Beecham looked at him in his superior way and asked in a refined Oxford accent: “For the better or the worse?”
Other members of the cast deserve a mention. Janine Micheau, who sings Micaëla, was born in Toulouse in 1914 and made her debut at the Opéra-Comique in 1933, remaining there until 1956; her roles at the venue included Mireille, Olympia and Leïla in Les Pêcheurs de perles, while at the Opéra she was heard as Pamina, Gilda, Violetta, Gounod’s Juliette and Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, also creating two roles by Milhaud: Creusa in his Médée (1940) and Manuela in Bolivar (1950). Covent Garden audiences heard her Micaëla in 1937, those in Chicago in 1946. She died in 1976.
Ernest Blanc (Escamillo) was born at Sanary-sur-Mer on the Provençal coast in 1923 and debuted in Marseilles as Tonio in Pagliacci in 1950. A long stint at the Paris Opéra (1954–80) encompassed many of the central repertory baritone roles, Rigoletto, Germont, Wolfram, Valentin, Amonasro, Enrico Ashton and Renato among them. His international career took in appearances in Milan, Vienna and London, as well as a notable Telramund in Bayreuth in 1958. In 1960 he sang Riccardo and Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne and in 1961 Rigoletto at Covent Garden, while Escamillo was also the role of his US debut in Chicago in 1959. He died in 2010.
Jean-Christophe Benoît was a leading French comprimario baritone who recorded the role of Le Dancaïre no fewer than four times. After 1971 Xavier Depraz transferred his acting skills to the spoken theatre, enjoying a highly successful career in French films and television. A curiosity of the
recording is that two singers share the role of Mercédès: Monique Linval and Marcelle Croisier. The reason is that Croisier died between the two tranches of sessions, and Linval took over the rest.
GEORGE HALL