Opera has always been as much about spectacle as it has been about fine music and voices. Audiences revel in elaborate sets and scads of supernumeraries as much as they do in the superb vocals of a diva or marquee tenor.
But what Seville, Spain, is planning for September may go down as the Ultimate Opera. From Sept. 2 through 12 during the First Seville International Music festival, the city will present nine performances of Bizet’s immortal “Carmen” in two of the actual physical locations where the opera’s four acts have always been located.
Acts 1, 2 and 3 will be performed in the Plaza de Espana and the adjoining Parque de Maria Luisa, a few short blocks from the Guadalquivir River. The plaza, which is the center city’s grand semi-circular public space, is where Act 1 takes place in the opera. Act 2, which calls for a tavern, will take place in a part of the Plaza de Espana that has been made to look like an indoor setting. Act 3 takes place in the mountains, and the festival organizers will transform the lush greenery of adjacent Parque de Maria Luisa into a high-country setting.
The opera’s final act takes place in the Plaza de Toros de Maestranza, where Carmen meets her tragic end. Seville will stage Act 4 in the actual stadium, giving the opera’s finale an unsurpassable element of authenticity. A pleasant wrinkle to the production will be the two-hour interval between Act 3 and Act 4. Opera goers will be able to pause for food and rest, then amble a few blocks through Seville’s medieval streets to the Plaza de Toros.
Seville’s idea for Carmen is not something that came to the city fathers as a bolt-out-of-the-blue inspiration. In fact, the city is working with a company called Opera on Original Site, founded by Michael Ecker, an Austrian who indelibly impressed the operatic world in 1986 when he produced Aida in Luxor, Egypt.
The idea of staging the opera in the very place where Verdi had imagined the drama of his heroine’s life unfolding was ground-breaking. Ecker followed that coup with a production of Nabucco in Jerusalem, and in 1998 staged probably his most audacious production, Turandot, in the Forbidden City in Beijing.
Carmen will not mark the end of Ecker’s presence in Seville. In 2005, he will present Beethoven’s Fidelio in the nearby ancient Roman settlement of Italica. Then, in 2006, in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, Ecker will produce Don Giovanni in the city.
