Rodion Shchedrin, one of the most prominent living Russian composers, conceived the idea of a Carmen ballet as a vehicle for his wife, the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.  The one-act ballet, which opened at the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow in 1967 with choreography by Alberto Alonso of the Cuban National Ballet, was entitled Carmen Suite, to indicate that the composer treated Bizet’s operatic score with considerable liberty.  The 13 movements do not follow the original sequence of the music in the opera; instead, they condense and rearrange the material to tell the story differently, somewhat in the manner of Peter Brook’s later Tragedy of Carmen (1982).  In addition to Carmen, Shchedrin also used themes from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne and La jolie fille de Perth.  

Shchedrin left the notes mostly unchanged, but he freely altered the tempos, the dynamics, and especially the orchestration, which uses an exceptionally large battery of percussion.  As a result, the character of the music is completely transformed.  Some melodies are interrupted in mid-course, others are played with important notes left out.  Accents are shifted, and inside voices brought out in a novel way.  For instance, one of the motifs in the famous Habanera was re-orchestrated in such a way that it suddenly begins to sound like a passage from Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony...

The story of the passionate Gypsy girl, the deserter Don José and the toreador Escamillo is not told with the same directness as in the opera, but rather hinted at and commented on in the language of the ballet.  The work is framed by a prologue and epilogue in which fragments of the Habanera, played by the tubular bells, waft through the air as nostalgic reminiscences.   From this dream world, a dramatic crescendo takes us directly into the very real presence of the heroine. Her seductive dancing immediately clashes with the opera’s ‟fate” motive, foretelling the tragic ending.  José’s military song, strangely distorted, seems to signal the undoing of this honest, but naive and irresponsible character.  Yet the greatest part of the suite is based on Carmen’s music, which is fitting if we remember that the entire project had been inspired by Plisetskaya’s artistry.  The smugglers’ quintet, one of the brighter episodes in the opera, turned into a brilliant scherzo with agile violin pizzicatos and powerful percussion effects.  The movements taken from the other Bizet works fit in seamlessly with the Carmen excerpts and add more facets—in turn lyrical and playful—to the drama.

The treatment of Escamillo’s Toreador song will, no doubt, raise some eyebrows as this number, like José’s song before, is treated with more freedom than Carmen’s music, again as a sign that no man can remain himself before this most fatale of all femmes.  José’s confession of love, beautifully orchestrated for strings, receives an exaggeratedly passionate makeover, with a fortissimo climax where Bizet had written a pianissimo high note for the tenor, perhaps in order to maximize the contrast with the following movement where Carmen confronts the spectre of death which the cards have prophesied her.  

In the intermezzo of Act IV, the bullfight music is scored for marimbas, a timbre that clashes forcefully with the darker orchestration of the fate motif.  A return of the smugglers’ quintet is not able to delay the tragic dénouement for very long: the final confrontation between Carmen and José, which leads to the murder, is milked for all its dramatic effect.  Finally, the curtain closes as the tubular bells wistfully recall the slain heroine’s memory.  

At the time of the premiere, Soviet officials criticized the work for what they perceived as a ‟mockery” of Bizet’s music and an undue emphasis on Carmen’s sexuality.  It was only after Shostakovich personally came to Shchedrin’s defense that the apparatchiks relented and the ballet could begin its triumphant career at the Bolshoy and beyond.