The Western Australian dispute over the banning of a planned production of Bizet’s Carmen because Act One of the opera (composed in 1875) is staged in a cigarette factory - see previous blogs - has been heating up.
According to reports, the Western Australian government has insisted that Australia’s “Healthway” health promotion agency - which was responsible for financing the cancellation of the production - must withdraw its bribe, which has been causing an international outcry. The performances, it has been decreed, must be allowed to go ahead, even though the state opera company, it seems, was perfectly happy to accept the cash to withdraw them.
The health organisation has agreed to back down, even although it is continuing to claim that the performances could be a bad influence on people’s smoking habits, and - at least for the moment - the opera company has said it is happy to restore Carmen, widely considered the most popular opera ever written, to its schedule.
Meanwhile operatic plans for the Edinburgh Festival - where one of the greatest and costliest productions of Carmen was staged at the King’s Theatre in 1977 with Teresa Berganza and Placido Domingo in the leading roles and Claudio Abbado as conductor - are evidently proceeding smoothly with news of Ivan Fischer’s revolutionary Budapest staging, or semi-staging, of The Marriage of Figaro, a work whose success in the 1780s was also endangered politically, though perhaps for less trivial reasons.
15 October 2014
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