Listening to Carmen in Tehran

Bizet's best-known opera, Carmen, was written in 1875.  A romantic tragedy about a free-spirited gypsy girl and her two lovers, it opens with one of the most famous arias of all time, the Habanera.

“Love is a rebellious bird
that no one can tame,”  Carmen sings.

“Love is a gypsy child;
he has never, ever, known the law.
If you love me not, then I love you;
and if I love you, you better watch out!”

La Habanera celebrates the untameable passion and the human spirit.

I love both the original opera score and the 1960’s ballet adaptation “Carmen Suite” by the Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin. 

In 1988 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the so-called Islamic Revolution, passed away.  For almost a month Iranian officials and security agents orchestrated a display of national mourning; a kind of vast passion play.  Thousands of people were bused from far and wide to the sprawling public cemetery outside Tehran.  It’s a bleak area on the way to Qom that was once used for military junk and scrap metal.

Wealthy merchants congregated at this makeshift funeral parlor to hand out food and mementos.  The co-opted mourners, dressed in black, made a great display of beating their heads and chests in ritualized grief.  Those pictures were carried hour after hour on state television overlaid - believe it or not – with the soundtrack of Carmen!

Never mind that Carmen celebrated the very free-spiritedness Khomeini disapproved of.  Or that he had for years explicitly rejected Western culture and music as un-Islamic.  The irony was even more delicious because in pre-Revolutionary times the music from Carmen was well-known as a publicity jingle for a private mortgage bank on the Shah’s TV network.

At the time of Khomeini’s death and the televised mourning spectacular, I had a friend working as a producer at state television.  The great political purges of post-Revolutionary Iran had begun and I worried about him.  What if someone with Revolutionary clout discovered that the music of Carmen wasn’t imbued with Islamically correct piety, but with sexual passion and bohemian rebellion?

When Carmen Suite was first performed in the Soviet Union in 1967, government arts watchdogs - in their official cultural “superiority” – were outraged by its celebration of independence and eroticism.  The Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, tried to ban it as “insulting” to Bizet’s masterpiece and accused the Suite of making a Spanish heroine – Carmen - into a whore.

Fortunately, Khomeini’s funeral planners knew more about marshalling mourners than they did about Western music.  They had no idea that Carmen was possibly the most inappropriate theme tune of all for an Islamic zealot’s funeral. My TV producer didn’t to worry about accusations of insulting God or Khomeini the Great.

That’s not to say the Iranian regime and its army of officials and bureaucrats didn’t grow into a repressive machine. They did. Intellectually ignorant, but just as tyrannical and arrogant as the more culturally aware Soviet version.  And we hope just as doomed.

For the present though, we all scrape along.  Our economy is weak, unemployment is high and we’re faced with a crippling drought.  The regime’s enforcers still perpetuate a crackdown that started with Khomeini’s death.  It targets free spirits of all kinds: musicians, actors, sports figures, young women with visible hair and young men with visible tattoos.

Back in 1989, many Iranians dared hope that Khomeini’s death heralded an end to dictatorships the world over.  Sadly that burst of optimism was short-lived.

The only way I can re-capture it these days – a giddy, free-spirited gypsy joy – is to close my eyes and plunge into Carmen.  Vive la Habanera!