When Carmen was first performed in 1875, French conservatives were scandalised at the display of female independence, passion and eroticism by the mezzo-soprano with the lead role.
Célestine Galli-Marié, who has been described as the 19th century French Beyoncé, faced smutty jokes and outright indignation for refusing to play the part of a demure woman. But she ignored the criticism to leave an indelible mark on what has become the world’s most frequently performed opera.
Georges Bizet, the composer, has long been celebrated in France for his masterpiece, while Galli-Marié was relegated to the backstage of artistic history.
Now, on the 150th anniversary of the first performance, her pivotal role in shaping Carmen as a sensual, headstrong and rebellious icon is at last being acknowledged in her own country.
Patrick Taïeb, a musicologist and historian, is to bring out Et Célestine Galli-Marié créa Carmen (And Célestine Galli-Marié created Carmen), a biography of the Paris operatic star, later this month.
Eva Zaïcik, one of France’s leading contemporary mezzo-sopranos, has released Rebelle, an album in which she performs 15 of Galli-Marié’s greatest hits.
• Christopher Maltman: I had to lose my six-pack to be a better opera singer
Zaïcik said Galli-Marié had been, in effect, the co-creator of Carmen, bringing her full influence to bear on Bizet. “I think she must have been very persuasive,” said Zaïcik, who herself performed at Notre-Dame when the restored cathedral reopened in December after it was badly damaged in the 2019 fire.
Carmen tells the story of a Spanish cigarette factory worker of such beauty that Don José, a soldier, leaves his sweetheart, his mother and his career in the military to follow her. When he is discarded in favour of a charismatic bullfighter, he kills her.
Zaïcik said Galli-Marié had convinced Bizet to make Carmen an embodiment of women’s freedom in an age of patriarchal values. “You can imagine that she wanted [the audience] to feel straight away that she was a bohémienne [a Romani], free to make her own choices and to decide for herself.”
Take, for instance, the Habanera, her famous entrance aria. Bizet’s first version fell well short of her expectations. “She found that it didn’t have enough impact, that you could not see [Carmen’s] free and dangerous nature,” Zaïcik said.
Galli-Marié asked Bizet to rewrite the aria 13 times before she agreed to perform it. The composer was to die, reportedly of exhaustion, three months after Carmen was staged, but the Habanera, with its central message — “If I love you, be on your guard” — went on to become one of the popular hits of all time.
Taïeb told Le Figaro that reviews of the opera in the French press at the time highlighted Galli-Marié’s “quite daring erotic” performance. Catholic commentators were so appalled that the Opéra-Comique house had to stop staging it on Sundays.
In an era when opera had a wider appeal than it does today, Galli-Marié “was a star like Beyoncé is a star for us”, Zaïcik said. “She was someone who forged her own path and she broke with the norms for women at the time. She was sensual, wild and unpredictable when women were supposed to be decorative and bland.”
The end of the opera also owes much to Galli-Marié, according to her admirers. In a country that has historically used the notion of a crime passionnel to excuse and even sometimes extol men who kill their partners — the murder supposedly being the proof of their love — Galli-Marié ensured that Carmen’s death was depicted as brutal and realistic, Zaïcik said.
• French arts ‘riddled with sexual predators’, say MPs
“I think she was ahead of her time. She wanted to show that the justification of crime passionel makes no sense,” Zaïcik said. “She wanted to show that José was a man who we’d now call a masculinist.”
Galli-Marié knew what she was talking about. Nine months before Carmen was first performed, her own sister had survived a murder attempt by her former partner.
