Rewriting Carmen through Two Songs by Tosti and Tirindelli

Abstract

Bizet’s Carmen continues to provoke and disturb audiences for its frank depiction of a crime of passion. Yet it shocked operagoers in the 1880s and 1890s for a different reason: Carmen’s continued defiance of Don José, even up to the point at which he murders her. Enrico Panzacchi’s poem, which depicts a penitent Carmen who begs Don José’s forgiveness for her mistreatment of him, directly speaks to audiences’ frustration with the opera. Musical settings by Francesco Paolo Tosti and Pier Adolfo Tirindelli refer directly to Carmen’s music from the opera, including the famous “Habanera,” and attempt to purge it of its sensual appeal. Both Tosti’s and Tirindelli’s songs seem to have enjoyed some success with amateur audiences, suggesting that this music, by enacting her repentance in the salon, provided a way for middle-class people to safely enjoy Carmen’s transgression of bourgeois values on the stage. Thus these songs document a way in which middle-class audiences re-interpreted Carmen to fit their worldview.