Carmen: Short introduction with Lotte de Beer

Director Lotte de Beer: „Carmen is a true ‘Volksoper’, with dialogues, with music that is ‘operetta-like’ in the best sense of the word, and only in the fourth act does it turn into a tragic opera. Carmen is a woman from the working class, a minority, and she wants to be free. But she is constantly oppressed: by the factory, by the authorities, by Escamillo, who only wants her as a trophy wife, and by a jealous Don José. It’s very clear that this is not what she wants; she keeps walking away. You know what she doesn’t want, but I asked myself: What does this woman want? What does this woman really want, who is braver, smarter, and more uncompromising than anyone else, and who somehow understands better what game we’re playing here, But when you approach it psychologically, at some point you hit a wall because she’s not a real woman; she was created as a 19th-century opera character. Carmen was created for a bourgeois audience that loves to see a rebellious woman doing all the things they wouldn’t dare to do themselves. The rebellious woman is celebrated at first, with everything that opera has to offer: ballet, toreadors, castanets, chorus, children's chorus, stunning music. But to restore order to the world, she has to die in the end.”