Every Olympics “Carmen” Performance, Ranked

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a figure skater in possession of an Olympics program, must be in want of a “Carmen.” Mirroring its ubiquity in opera houses season after season, it’s hard to think of a Winter Olympics in the last 50 years that hasn’t included at least one singles competitor or pair skating to a medley from Bizet’s most steadfast opera. Some games were particular boons: The 1988 Olympics in Calgary saw no fewer than four soloists and two pairs skating to a program in which “Carmen” made at least a cameo. Olympics correspondent Jack Whitaker called it a “heck of a year for Bizet.” Salt Lake City’s 2002 games stipulated that one of the ice dancing programs was to use Latin rhythms, resulting in a three-“Carmen” pileup on the ice. 

Why? For one thing, figure skating—much like opera—has been overly-beholden to tradition. Until the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, skaters competing in every category except ice dancing had to hew to music without lyrics. Risk-averse skaters looking to come out on top in terms of both technical skill and artistic expression also tend to go for familiar music. Even without words, Bizet’s score for “Carmen” is a sonic double for its main characters. Susan McClary writes in Feminine Endings that the character Carmen’s melodic lines “tease and taunt, forcing the attention to dwell on the moment.” In her first aria, known familiarly as the “Habanera,” McClary notes that Carmen’s “descent by half-steps through the tetrachord D-to-A is arranged so that we grasp immediately the outline she implies (and thus are compelled to desire the suggested outcome); but the way she moves through that descent alternately coaxes and frustrates.” 

In Culture on Ice: Figure Skating & Cultural Meaning, author Ellyn Kestnbaum notes a similarity between Carmen’s role and the sport’s longstanding association with femininity and, by extension, the male gaze. Character-driven programs became popular among male singles skaters beginning in the 1990s as a means for men to avoid “the effeminizing effects of positioning themselves as objects of the spectatorial gaze.” Which explains the influx of Escamillos on ice beginning in Lillehammer, Norway in 1994. “This is one of opera’s inspired and unconscious transferences,” Catherine Clément writes of this sonic connotation in Bizet’s work. “Music devoted to a woman convokes virile heroes.”