Carmen : Voice of the Anima and its Echoes in Literature, Opera, Film and Music Video

Sammanfattning: Since its publication in 1845, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen has been adapted many times for stage and screen. This essay focuses on the novella, Bizet’s 1875 opera, Saura’s 1983 film and Paul Van Haver’s (known by his stage name Stromae) music video. Already the novella describes Carmen’s exotic aura as a strong, enigmatic presence in her laughter, singing, dancing, magic spells, and strange Gypsy dialect–qualities of otherness that Bizet effected musically in his opera. I propose a Jungian approach to Carmen (José’s anima tainted by his anxious desires) and in particular to her voice in order to explain archetypical aspects of her character in two musical numbers that would henceforth become her signature tunes: the Habanera and the Seguidilla. Both numbers are characterized by juxtapositions of transgressive chromaticism and plain diatonic, triadic tonality. Carmen’s voice, both as an object of desire and as a source of perilous power, is essential to her character and persists in Saura’s choreographic “backstage” Carmen (1983). Here, a peculiar ensemble of onscreen tape recording, diegetic humming, and metadiegetic daydreaming recalls Carmen’s vocal presence as surrogate voices of an avowedly inexperienced singer. While in Stromae’s music video, Habanera’s rebellious love-bird is transformed to Twitter’s blue bird, sitting on the shoulder of the user, casting its shadow on their life. The habanera is performed by the male-singer tuned with a rhythmic rap beat and its emblematic lyrics takes the aria into another level. In conclusion, I argue that different versions of Carmen retain and problematize her voice in spite, or rather because, of stark differences of their aural and visual settings as the ontologically ambiguous centerpiece of her character.