Opera Carmen From The Perspective Of Feminism

With the development of contemporary feminism concepts,such as "Feminism" and "social gender",have become an increasingly significant topic in the international academic field.It is one of the important references for human beings to re-examine our history and reshape our cultural concepts,bringing the long-absent "female" back into people's vision.And when we introduce "feminism" as a new dimension to observe human social development,historical framework and cultural innovation,our criticism of human cultural innovations,including literature and art,goes into a new stage with another discourse and perspective.Feminist theory has changed the way people think about our history and made scholars re-examine the traditional mode of thinking.As a result,the feminist perspective is especially practical.On the one hand,it could intervene in the structure of human history to analyze the mechanism of social production and reproduction,so as to change the traditional cognition of human history;on the other hand,it could focus on some specific and detailed cultural issues,such as cultural criticism of literature,film,drama,art,etc.As a branch of New Musicology,feminist music criticism is a kind of new criticism method under the influence of feminist trend of thought,emerging in the 1960 s and 1970 s.It was originally used to collect and record women's music activities.And in the 1980 s and 1990 s,feminism paid its attention to the relationship between gender and music.After the 1990 s,feminism has developed to post-feminism,extending to the studies of homosexuality,semiotics,psychology,etc.Feminist study has a history of more than 30 years in China.Compared with other fields,the domestic music community has a certain understanding of feminism,which also has some achievements in the field of music history,music aesthetics,music education,etc.However,it is a rare area to interpret some specific music works,especially drama,from the perspective of feminism.As a world-famous opera,moststudies on Carmen focus on vocal singing and characters.We have to reflect on whether gender difference can also be the context of its analysis.Can gender study provides a new dynamics and perspective for musicology to explore this masterpiece?Completed by Bizet,a French composer,in 1842,Carmen is a four acts opera.It is his last but most skillful music masterpiece,which alludes to the French social background in the 19 th century.This opera is mainly made of exotic music material,and describes the living condition of people at the bottom of social class in the 19 th century.In addition,it represents woman's tragic role in the patriarchal society.The most salient character of this opera is his portray of Carmen.From the feminist perspective,this paper will unfold preliminary thinking of the relationship between gender and music culture,aim to analyze the characters of Carmen,Mica?la,José,and combine with its social background,plot,and music in order to explore the feminism in the comic opera Carmen and enrich the study of this opera.Besides introduction and conclusion,this paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter is Bizet's overview of Carmen,analyzing,from material sources,the contrast between Merimee's Carmen and that of Bizet.The second chapter traces the feminist thought in Carmen,from feminist music criticism to the feminist perspective of Carmen music mode analysis of the "exotic" Carmen and the dominant force in the opera.And the third chapter discusses the issue of dramatic role and gender transformation,and the different characters of those heroes and heroines.Last but not the least,the fourth chapter analyzes the background music,such as the overture and chorus,as well as the protagonists' chorus to investigate the feminist concept in Carmen.