“Cool,” said my 12-year-old son as we were making our way to New York’s Metropolitan Opera on a sunny afternoon this past Sunday. He was reading about the show we were about to see on his phone. “You never told me Carmen was about ICE agents guarding a gun factory on the U.S.-Mexico border.”
I laughed, and told him he had it all wrong: When the curtain lifted, I promised, he’d be transported to Seville, to a public square thick with colors and drenched in light, to a world of music and beauty and pleasure. I gave him a brief rundown of the plot: Carmen, a carefree woman, seduces a naive soldier, Don José, and he in turn abandons the army, pursues Carmen with a mad passion, and ultimately kills her in a fit of jealous rage. Nietzsche himself, I added, launching into one of those little talks about German philosophy that seventh graders find so endearing, praised the show for being a “return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, virtue!” Who in their right mind would wish to risk all that only to repatriate Carmen in the far less charmed and charming climate of contemporary, contentious American politics?
