Soprano Norah Amsellem alternates with Caitlin Lynch as Jose's childhood sweetheart Micaela. (Photo: © Rozarii Lynch)
Soprano Norah Amsellem is no stranger to the role of Micaela in Bizet’s Carmen. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1997 in the role, with Placido Domingo as Don Jose, though this wasn’t the first time she had sung with him. As an eight-year-old in France, at the Paris choir school for children, she was in the children’s chorus in Carmen with Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson as the leads.
Micaela has remained a role Amsellem enjoys each time she sings her, each time adding detail and subtext to her character. “I don’t want to repeat the role over and over again,” she says.
The character, however, is whoever the stage director says she is, and that can vary, Amsellem comments, from a drug addict to a convent novice. Sometimes she feels the stage director’s ideas are “off the wall, but you have to make it work, you have to find a way to make it work or look totally stupid. In a way it’s fun to do that.”
Seattle Opera’s upcoming production of Carmen, which starts Saturday, October 15, is a traditional one. Although set in Spain, the opera is French to the core, and this production with a French director, Bernard Uzan, brings that out.
“The essence of Carmen herself is very French,” says Amsellem. “Sometimes she is portrayed as vulgar and physical (which Amsellem feels is all wrong). She looks good because of her mind. Like Violetta (in Verdi’s La Traviata, a favorite role of Amsellem’s) she is charming and intelligent and knows how to get out of situations. And she is flirty.” Summing up, Amsellem says, “She has to have a certain allure,” and she says this in the French way, allure, so that one is left in no doubt as to the subtle come-hither aspect of allure.
Micaela, on the other hand, is a strong, tough peasant girl in her portrayal. “She comes from the country where she has been looking after Don Jose’s mother, going to the well, maybe a couple of miles, to fetch water. She’s an orphan who has had a hard life, and who goes to church. When she goes to find Jose, she finds the big city wonderful, but a bit scary as it’s all new to her.”
Amsellem presumes that Micaela is somewhere between 16 and 18, because she hasn’t seen Jose for three years while he was in prison, and now he doesn’t quite recognize her as she has grown up and changed, become more of a woman. She isn’t used to being flirted with by the soldiers, but is strong enough to handle them, joking, while it is a bit scary all the same.
At this point in the opera, Micaela hopes to marry Jose, as does his mother, but she sees him arrested again at the end of Act 1, while Jose still considers her a child, and “he’s no pedophile,” says Amsellem.
Returning to find him in the smugglers’ hang out in Act 2, she says Micaela has given up any hope of marrying him and of her hopes for a happy life, and is just trying get him home to see his dying mother.
While Micaela is always a role Amsellem enjoys doing, her particular favorites are Manon in Massenet’s opera of that name, and Violetta, because they evolve so much from beginning to end of the operas. “There are so many colors you can bring to the part, so it’s challenging and interesting to me.” Then, there is Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, again for the colors and she loves the music. Roles she has performed for Seattle Opera are Elvira in the recent I Puritani, and Gilda in Rigoletto.
On her wish list are Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, all three heroines in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, also Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Puccini’s La Rondine, maybe Bellini’s Norma down the road. Not Lucia di Lammermoor. “It’s too high,” she says.
Meanwhile, the young soprano is happy to be back in Seattle where she feels at home—enough so to complain about the rain. “I always love coming back here. Speight (Jenkins) is wonderful, always friendly, the singers all get along, and Speight and the conductor are always at every rehearsal—and that is not always so in other places.”
