Complexity of character

UNLOCKS THE SECRETS OF CARMEN,

IT’Sone of the world’s most popular operas — and also one of the most polarizing. Audrey Babcock most recently played Carmen in Anchorage, Alaska, and has also played the titular heroine in sumptuous seaside locations such as the Festival Lyrique en Mer in Belle-ile, France, and the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland, which is housed in a medieval castle. Babcock also toured behind an expanded version of the legendary opera that she calls Beyond Carmen in some form or fashion since 2005, and she’ll be appearing in the production with musical partner Andrés Vadin in Santa Fe on Saturday, April 13, and again in Albuquerque on Sunday, April 14.

“A lot of opera people may say it’s played out and it’s boring,” says Babcock of Carmen, one of opera’s most enduring characters. “The novice opera people are like, ‘I love it, it’s the only reason I go to the opera.’ People like me — I’ve done 250 Carmens — I still love her because she has so much to say.”

Babcock doesn’t just sing in her Beyond Carmen show; she plays instruments and also wears the hats of producer, writer, and creator.

You might also call her a bit of an archaeologist, as she digs into the past in order to tell the back story of the opera that people may not know.

Penned by Georges Bizet, the opera premiered in 1875, but it told a story already well known in French society. The story was based on a serialized novella of the same name by French author Prosper Mérimée in 1845, who had based his book on truelife events in Spain.

“His inspiration was a Sephardic Jew who was running away from her rabbi and causing trouble in the town and flirting with the soldiers and doing things her father was very embarrassed by,” Babcock says. “When I explored these roots, I was also studying Carmen for the first time. I decided to create an album called Songs for Carmen, and they’re all songs about love and death and infidelity and murder … but they’re all in Ladino.”

Ladino, also known as Judeo-spanish, is a Romance language that arose out of the Spanish Inquisition and the Diaspora of Jews across Europe, and Babcock says linguistics play a huge role in her Beyond Carmen production.

“Beyond Carmen is just a concert that we’ve created around these ideas of the musical heritage that would’ve happened if Carmen and her friends were around a campfire,” she says. “We explore the language of Ladino, which is Judeo-spanish. It was changed in the Diaspora when Jews were excommunicated from Spain. You had the conversos, the ones who stayed and converted to Christianity, and some of them practiced in secret. You had the ones who were just murdered, and you had the ones who spread across Europe, and they took the language Ladino with them. But it changed based on where they settled.”

In other words, listeners could think of Beyond Carmen as a prequel. It’s where the legend came from, divorced of any input from Mérimée or Bizet. Carmen as a character is still misunderstood today, and that’s partially because her character was distorted and scandalized by the original author as she hit the printed page. The character’s ethnicity was changed from Jewish to “gypsy,” Babcock says, to make her even more gauche to French society.

“Carmen is so problematic,” Babcock says of the novella. “When Mérimée wrote his story, he had his protagonist be the narrator. The narrator was a man on an anthropological journey; he was watching the natives and writing about them as if they were creatures in a zoo. He was writing about the ‘gypsies’ in a very pejorative way, and, of course, patriarchal things come into play when he’s talking about women. But it’s also extremely racist at its core.”

Babcock, who attended the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated at age 20, says she was originally a voice and flute major before choosing the opera program.

She later studied for an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita because she wanted to learn more about producing and dramaturgy.

Society, she says, still views women like Carmen with a jaded eye. “Femme fatale is a woman we associate with the ability to kill with her looks,” says Babcock. “And why is that? Because the desirer wants her, and she doesn’t want them back. That’s some sort of crime. If you’re a beautiful woman, you should be a commodity that everyone can buy.”

Babcock, who was a young artist with the Santa Fe Opera in 2002, says the character shouldn’t be perplexing. Carmen is quite clearly a murder victim — and all because she spurns the romantic advances of a man — but some observers say she’s a provocateur and that she in some ways brings on her own demise by saying “no.”

That kind of entrenched misogyny played into the initial reaction to Bizet’s opera, which was panned and considered overtly sexual. Carmen closed after just 45 performances in Paris in 1875, and Bizet died the same year, convinced that it was a flop. Today, nearly 150 years later, we know the opera is a huge success, but audience members still aren’t sure what to make of Carmen.

“A lot of people talk about Carmen as the villain, but she is the hero,” Babcock says. “She’s a woman before her time. A woman of power, a woman of her mind, a woman who’s not afraid to say ‘no.’ She’s definitely not a people pleaser, and we’ve all learned that people pleasing just gets us so far from our center. She’s never far from her center. She knows exactly what she wants and stands by it, and she doesn’t lie. She’s the only honest person on that stage. She gets killed for it. Because ... patriarchy. But she stays true to herself, even to the end.”