Killing Carmen

by Nils Strunk, Lukas Schrenk and Gabriel Cazes

In German, French and English language with surtitles

“I was already warned that I would have to fear for my life,” Carmen declares—foreseeing her own doom—in the finale of Bizet’s “opera of all operas” (as Nietzsche once called it). A few minutes later, she is dead, stabbed by the man who was still her lover only moments before, the soldier Don José. The team behind Killing Carmen—Nils Strunk, Lukas Schrenk, and Gabriel Cazes—asked themselves from which perspective this opera, after its many adaptations (including pop-cultural ones) throughout the 20th century, could be retold once again. These three exceptional artists, who for years have devoted themselves to daring and high-energy reinterpretations of the classics, continue the opera’s story: What happened after Carmen’s murder? What void did she leave behind?

Killing Carmen takes place 13 years after the events of the opera: Don José has been imprisoned all this time and is now to be executed by hanging. On the day of reckoning, various characters return to Lillas Pastia’s tavern and renegotiate their differing memories: one of them has become complicit, another still clings to a former love, a third can look back on a life fully lived—but perhaps only because she was not “the chosen one” back then… Where do the characters stand 13 years later? And what meaning do their partly glorified, colorful, and emotionally charged past experiences still hold for them?

In a fast-paced reworking of both music and text, Nils Strunk, Lukas Schrenk, and Gabriel Cazes weave together flashbacks and continuations. Bizet’s famous melodies meet a wide range of musical styles—from jazz, flamenco, musical theatre, and pop to country, chanson, and much more. The stylization of the classic Carmen as the notorious femme fatale has shaped the opera’s reception history. Yet this also always harbors the danger of a subtle reversal of perpetrator and victim: whether through romanticizing or demonizing, Carmen is, almost unconsciously, assigned a share of the blame for her fate. But is that truly what Bizet and his librettists Halévy and Meilhac intended to convey?

“Free I was born, free I shall die,” Carmen proclaims in the finale of the original. Does Carmen die because of the way she chooses to live? And does freedom itself perhaps die with her? Every person carries a world within. When a person is killed, that world dies too.