Soprano Cristina Nassif knows Carmen, a mezzo-soprano role, is all about capturing the gypsy's fire. "It's a personality thing, not necessarily a vocal demand."
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published December 1, 2005
The title character in Carmen is one of the most famous mezzo-soprano roles in opera, but quite a few sopranos have found it suitable for their voices, too, including legends like Maria Callas and Victoria de Los Angeles.
Now soprano Cristina Nassif will be joining their illustrious rank in her first major performance as the gypsy femme fatale for Opera Tampa this weekend at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
"It's a temperament role," Nassif said. "It does sit lower than a lot of soprano roles. But I don't think I'm going to get myself into trouble singing it. It's a personality thing, not necessarily a vocal demand."
Nassif, who is scheduled to perform Carmen again next season with Virginia Opera, was focusing on the dramatic aspect of the role in rehearsal.
"The personality is what you really need to sink your teeth into," she said. "The vocalism will just happen on its own. I don't think of it as soprano territory or mezzo-soprano territory. I think it's more about what's in your blood when you sing this. You could do incredible things with the voice, but if you're not exuding what comes inherently with this woman, if you can't capture her fire, her abandon, it doesn't matter if you're soprano or mezzo."
Carmen is the ultimate flashy role, with lots of dancing and snapping castanets and catchy tunes. And she is one of opera's great liberated women. "She doesn't mince words, she just tells it like it is; that's one of my favorite things about her," Nassif said.
The soprano was enjoying working with Opera Tampa's ageless conductor Anton Coppola. "He is incredible. You feel everyone's admiration when you're in the room with him. It's great to work with someone who pays so much attention to the words," she said.
Coppola, 88, has performed Bizet's opera countless times with every variety of singer. When asked about his favorite Carmens through the years he mentions Rise Stevens, who was acclaimed for her interpretation, but he also brings up worthy but virtually forgotten singers, such as Coe Glade, an American mezzo with whom he once toured.
"Coe Glade was my ideal Carmen," he said. "Now that's not a name that's known today, and that's not fair. She was the representative Carmen as far as I was concerned. She just seethed with sexuality, tremendous emotionalism. There were some other fine ones, but there was something about Coe Glade. She topped them all."
Nassif has another asset in mastering the role in her mother, Cristina Herrera, with whom she had her early vocal training.
"My mom was a mezzo-soprano in Spain, and she did scenes from Carmen in concert," Nassif said. "She helps in so many ways, not just vocally. She picks up on things others wouldn't just because she knows me so well. Mom can just tell. Even if someone else doesn't know I'm about to run out of breath, she can feel it and she's breathing with me."
Performed in French, Carmen is one of the many works that was savaged by critics in early productions and then went on to become a classic. "If it were possible to imagine His Satanic Majesty writing an opera, Carmen would be the sort of work he might be expected to turn out," said London's Music Trade Review a few years after the opera's premiere in 1875.
Coppola thinks the opera's poor critical reception was because of its gritty portrayal. "Carmen was the innovator, the pathfinder for verismo," the conductor said, referring to the operatic genre that means realism in Italian. "This was the first time that an opera dealt with smugglers and low life and wanton gypsies and immoral people instead of gods and goddesses and royalty."
Carmen was originally performed with spoken dialogue, the tradition of the Opera-Comique in Paris, where the work premiered. After the composer's death, his pupil Ernest Guiraud set the dialogue to music, and that became standard until the last 30 years or so, when Bizet's version was restored by most opera companies.
Ever the throwback, Coppola and director Dorothy Danner are using the old-fashioned version with sung recitatives.
"A reason I avoid it (spoken dialogue) assiduously is that opera singers can't read dialogue as well as they sing it," Coppola said. "It's more of an opera the way we do it."
Opera Tampa performs Carmen at 8 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $29.50-$85. 813 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org
