Carmen according to Brook

For the second title of its Spring season, the Chicago Opera Theater produced Peter Brook’s La tragédie de Carmen, an adaptation of George Bizet’s Carmen. In reworking Bizet’s most famous opera, Brook intended to purge it of any opéra comique influence, and at the same time to reintroduce some of the elements of Prosper Mérimée’s short story which had been left out from the opera. On one hand, we lose the second-act quintet and the third-act trio (this latter piece is reduced in a solo for Carmen), while on the other Carmen’s husband, Garcia, a character that had disappeared in the opera, is reintroduced, and the conclusion of the plot is significantly altered: Carmen is not murdered in front of the arena where Escamillo is fighting in a corrida as in the opera, but in a wood. Brook took all the music from Bizet’s score, but arranged the…