When Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen” premiered in 1875, scandalized Parisian audiences couldn’t wrap their minds around the story of a woman who brawled, smoked like a chimney and refused to be tied down.
But to some clairvoyants, Bizet’s drama was a glimpse of a liberated future, not just musically but socially. “Ten years hence Carmen will be the most popular opera in the world,” Tchaikovsky declared.
He wasn’t wrong. Fast-forward 150 years, and “Carmen” is one of the most staged operas anywhere. Nowadays, opera companies are more concerned with keeping Bizet’s chef d’oeuvre spry than whether Carmen lights up onstage — not an insignificant challenge, when “Carmen” is still too often filtered through all manner of sexist, xenophobic tropes.
A “Carmen” kicking off this week at Chicago Opera Theater (COT) is right in the cause célebre spirit of the 1875 original. In the semi-staged production, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton stars as Carmen — astoundingly, a role debut — and fellow mezzo Stephanie Blythe sings as Carmen’s love interest Don José via her drag persona, Blythely Oratonio.
But hold on, opera acolytes everywhere might say. Don José is a tenor role. So, she’s singing it at a higher pitch, right?
Nope. As Oratonio, Blythe will sing the role at pitch — and easily.
“That’s where my voice is happiest now,” Blythe said during an Aug. 31 COT panel on voice type and gender. “When I’ve talked to people about (singing Don José), they say, ‘That’s hysterical.’ It’s not hysterical to me. To me, it’s an expression of a dream that was fed and watered by genderfluid and trans artists who showed me not to be afraid.”
Blythe wasn’t the only one for whom COT’s “Carmen” realized a long-held fantasy. When the company announced the production with the rest of its season in June, opera fans the world over — the vast majority of whom had never been to a COT production, if they were familiar with the midsized company to begin with — went into ecstasies. “GAY CARMEN WITH JAMIE BARTON. I REPEAT, GAY CARMEN WITH JAMIE BARTON. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” read one tweet. (Barton is bisexual; fans are still reeling from when she swung a giant Pride flag over her head while headlining the closing night of the 2019 BBC Proms, one of the most feted events in classical music.) “Guess this is where we find out whether all of queer opera Twitter can fit into a single theater,” quipped another.
Chicago Opera Theater currently has no official plans to stream “Carmen” after its two outings on Sept. 16 and 18, but the response has been so overwhelming that music director Lidiya Yankovskaya winkingly divulged plans to make “high-quality archival” footage of the production.
“I still get so many messages like, ‘I’m so excited, I just bought my plane ticket’ — like, people are traveling in for this,” Barton says. “We have a full generation of people who are so ready to see opera step into the world we live in now. Why not tell stories that make sense to every human?”
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As for naysayers who think the arrangement somehow debases Bizet’s original, Chicago Opera Theater convened two panels around the production with a message for all those pearl-clutchers (hey, didn’t Bizet write that one, too?): Gender-bending in opera is nothing new. The gendered vocal classifications foisted on modern-day singers flout opera’s own fluid history, seeing as castrated men sang what are now soprano or mezzo roles in Italian opera for centuries and women still frequently depict male characters onstage. For years now, savvy choirs, opera companies and vocal coaches have dropped gendered language around the human voice, with some — like ResonaTe, a trans-affirming choir in Chicago — foregoing terms like “soprano” or “bass” altogether in favor of a numbered pitch classification system from 1 to 4.
Also nothing new is opera’s history of cultivating queer fanbases. Wayne Koestenbaum’s book “The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire” (1993) discusses diva worship among gay men, and the collection “En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera” (1995) complies feminine perspectives on queerness in the art form. Both treatises toe the line between academic assessment and anecdotalism, but collectively, they gesture to a broader culture of escapism that took on deeper meaning for closeted audiences. “Where else but in the plush darkness of Covent Garden, the Met, or the Opéra-Comique, say, might a respectable woman of the nineteenth century have spent two or three hours staring raptly at another through binoculars?” writes critic Terry Castle.
While more and more up-and-coming singers are “out” professionally, as Barton is, what remains tricky is retrofitting contemporary labels on long-gone singers, even if they remained unmarried or cultivated hugely sapphic followings — like Chicago’s own Mary Garden (1874—1967), a superstar soprano who became the first female director of an American opera company while living here. What we can say for certain is that some voices — just as Blythe’s Oratonio is to opera-loving Twitter flocks — were a lifeline to audiences fed up of contorting themselves into something they weren’t. As Blythe pithily put it during the Aug. 31 COT panel: “I’m a straight, cisgender singer with a genderfluid voice.”
For economically independent prima donnas living in a pre-19th Amendment world, the great blessing of their lives was that they did not have to revolve around men. Carmen, of course, pays for that conviction with her life.
“Most of the women I play on stage are the third wheel in a romantic triangle entirely perpetuated and created by the man, and I end up spending all night long with my face in the ‘worried’ position,” Barton jokes. “But given the choice between going with Don José or dying, Carmen chooses dying.”
“This is a woman who is free — as she says, ‘Free as the air.’ And that’s not going to change.”
Sept. 16 at 7:30 p.m. and Sept. 18 at 3 p.m. at the Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph St. at Millennium Park; tickets $45-$150 at chicagooperatheater.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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