I admit it took me a little while to catch on. There might be a reason for Theater Erfurt‘s staging Carmen with SUVs, police cruisers, and junk cars. But so often operas in Eastern Germany get a modern treatment for no reason at all. I had to have it explained to me afterwards. Carmen, get it? Car-men.
The flamboyant toreador, Escamillo, made his entrance in the bed of a pickup emblazoned with his personal URL. When Don José set Carmen free at the end of Act I (instead of taking her to jail as he is supposed to), she drove away in a stolen squad car.
No, literally. Cars were driven on and off the stage. When you have the main plaza of the city as your stage, why not?
Erfurt’s Domplatz boasts two Gothic churches side by side on the hill towering over the Old City. St. Mary’s Cathedral sits just a few paces from St. Severus Church. When used for outdoor opera, the wide, shared staircase serves as a backdrop, and the ground-level plaza provides as much stage as any producer could want—big enough to drive in eight SUVs for the finale.
The orchestra sits in a temporary building off the side, glassed in, isolated for amplification. For this production, the building also provided a convenient façade for the police station. An orchestra confined to the police station? As we passed the players on the way out, they clearly had heard enough jokes about that already.
Junk cars littered the staircase, stacked all the way to the cathedral doors. Trash-can fires burned. (That works better outdoors.) Carmen could retire to a beat-up camper and taunt Don José through the window. And the whole scene worked (sort of) as the smuggler’s den in Act III.
All of this is, of course, unnecessary and often distracting. I’m not a big fan of anachronisms and modern staging, and I particularly object to operas being sacrificed to a producer’s political agenda. Erfurt has fallen prey to this in past productions, including what must count as the most egregious hijacking of an opera: its 2008 staging of Verdi’s Masked Ball with naked cast in Mickey Mouse masks and Hitler moustaches, all set in the ruins of 9/11. (No, I did not see it and would not have bought a ticket, even with the Elvis impersonator.)
Carmen was free of such sophomoric stunts. The unorthodox setting was lighthearted. Occasionally, but only occasionally, the incongruity adds something. In Act III, Micaela (the good girl counterweight to the libertine Carmen) descended the cathedral steps wading through junk cars to find Don José and offer him one last chance at redemption. Could Don José see the Gothic cathedral filling the sky above him? Apparently not.
