Don't keep quiet

In her essay Shut Up, Michela Murgia states that «of all the things we can do in the world as women, speaking and doing it in a problematic way is still considered the most subversive. A woman who speaks in a contradictory way provokes».

At the end of the first act of Bizet's Carmen, the brigadier Don Josè, stunned by Carmen's exuberant personality, so bold and indifferent to authority, orders the protagonist to be silent: «Shut up! I told you not to talk to me». She is certainly not intimidated and responds: «I won't talk to you, I sing for myself alone... and I think! Thinking is not forbidden!». When she pronounces these words in the orchestra we only hear the strings, which vibrate with a warm and sensual tone, almost as if they wanted to mitigate the anger of Don Josè, helpless in the face of Carmen's strength, who claims her freedom of thought. The musical theme associated with the protagonist makes its appearance right from the overture: a few notes, played by the cellos, which are repeated inexorably like the fate of death that awaits her. This theme will return throughout the entire opera, to signify that for a woman like Carmen, who chooses to challenge social rules, refusing hetero-imposed roles, the only possible space to fully act out her freedom is the tomb.

It is the first case, within an opera, of femicide, a term that indicates not only that a woman has been killed, but why: for having violated the rules of a system that wants her subjugated to man, reduced to an object of property. Escaping this logic of possession can still be very risky today, as demonstrated by the over one hundred femicides that occur every year in Italy. The protagonist's death is in fact born from Don Josè's refusal to abandon her. In the very famous Habanera, a popular song of Cuban origin, with a slow rhythm and a hypnotic character, Carmen shines in all her nonconformism as a woman free from conventions: "Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame, it is called in vain if it wants to refuse".

As the musicologist and musician Giovanni Bietti points out, the prevalence of the popular element in the work over the lyrical element reflects the prevalence of Carmen's personality over the conventional one of Don Josè. Reading the words written by Michela Murgia, the modernity of this work emerges even more forcefully: "Where there's a will, there's a way, says the proverb. But women are allowed to believe that their power is to be wanted. It is a deception: desiring makes you an active subject and teaches you to choose, rather than to be chosen. "That's exactly what Carmen does, claiming her right to freely choose who to love, reminding us all that in love there can be no possession, because love is a little gypsy who knows no law.

Carmen is not a heroine but a woman who actually lives on the margins of society, a cigar maker without education but lucid and intelligent, capable of reasoning and above all of fighting, killed in the end by the very man who said he loved her.


Mauro Tabasso
with Valentina Giaresti
NP January 2025