What Nietzsche’s love of Carmen can say about his hatred of women

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One thing you probably know about Friedrich Nietzsche was how notoriously little he thought of women. When he veered off topics such as nihilism, godlessness and Uberman, he amused himself by calling women such cheery epithets as "cows," "weak," "inconstant" and "typically sick."

One thing you might not know about Nietzsche was that he was obsessed with the opera Carmen. "How such a work completes one! Through it one almost becomes a masterpiece oneself," he wrote in The Case Against Wagner. (By the 1880s, Nietzsche's friendship with the pre-eminent German composer had soured and his operatic devotion transferred entirely onto Georges Bizet.)

These two sentiments – love of Carmen, hatred of women – will seem either harmonious or discordant depending on your take on Bizet's enduringly popular opera, a version of which the Canadian Opera Company is opening in Toronto this week. If you consider the work to be about a dishonest and manipulative "femme fatale" whose power extends no further than what her sexuality affords her, then the philosopher's endorsement won't be too surprising. But if your Carmen is more complex than this, if she's a woman who wills her own autonomy – who embraces love as ephemeral and non-exclusive and would rather die than compromise her sexual/romantic freedom, then Nietzsche's approbation might give you pause.

When Carmen opened at Paris's Opéra-Comique in 1875, it offended audiences and was panned by critics. (Sadly, Bizet didn't recognize this as a foolproof recipe for its happy posterity; he was shaken by the poor reception and died a few months later, at the age of 36.) But while the public found the opera vulgar and obscene, the musical establishment rallied behind its achievements, notably Tchaikovsky, who was floored by its spirit and compositional genius and predicted that it would become the most popular opera of all time.

Tchaikovsky wasn't far off the mark – Carmen remains one of the most frequently performed operas ever written. If you've seen it, you know why. The opera is three hours of total, unremitting entertainment. The score's variety is remarkable; one infectious melody is followed by another, each entirely different in tone and feeling. Then there's the sultry atmosphere, the characters writhing with desire, the intoxicating melding of music and action. To claim you don't delight in Carmen is a bit like claiming you don't like chocolate: You'd have to rely on such backwards arguments – too rich, too delicious, too addictive – that no one's ever going to be properly convinced.

But in the 21st century, the plot presents some problems. This is a story in which the metaphor of sexual irresistibleness is literalized: When the woman refuses to be penetrated sexually, she is stabbed, instead, with a knife. The opera follows a soldier called Don Jose as he abandons the army and his childhood sweetheart to pursue a Gypsy with a reputation: She's sexually aggressive and well-known for enjoying her attractiveness. Carmen claims to be in love with Don Jose for a little while – long enough to secure impunity for her involvement in a factory brawl. There's a brief interlude of romance before she leaves him for a dashing toreador named Escamillo. Don Jose begs her to return to him. When she says no, he stabs her onstage.

What we end up with is a killing that has the tenor of an exorcism. Don Jose is morally absolved of whatever violence he may enact upon Carmen's body because, according to the trope of the femme fatale, he is the real victim. He has been seduced against his will, lured by the "cunning suppleness of a beast of prey" (that's another Nietzschean definition of women, from his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil). So Carmen's death becomes a sacrificial purging, an act that delivers society from evil and re-establishes morality, civility and order.

The production trend in the past few decades has been to turn over or complicate this reading, reimagining Carmen as a sexually liberated feminist. Renowned theatre director Peter Brook directed a controversial version in New York in 1984. His approach was to go back to the original French novella by Prosper Mérrimée, claiming that Bizet's watered-down interpretation (necessary to duck the censors of late-19th-century France) simplified Carmen's character to the extent that it helped engender a one-dimensional stereotype. In 2007, film director Sally Potter directed her own version for the English National Opera. In a Guardian article, she explained that she envisioned Carmen not as a victim of male jealousy or violence, but as freedom fighter, determined to write her own destiny. Reviews of both productions were lukewarm; critics claimed these heavily reconceptualized Carmens were missing all the original heat.

In the Canadian Opera Company's upcoming production, the title role will be played by two rising international stars and very experienced Carmens. Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili has sung the role twice at La Scala, twice at the Metropolitan Opera and in the most recent COC production in 2010. French mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine has performed the role in Berlin, Munich and several U.S. cities – next year she'll sing Carmen at both the Met and the Paris Opera. Sitting down with them separately between rehearsals in Toronto, I wasn't expecting to hear such diverging takes on the role. I found the differences remarkable.

Margaine sees the opera as a fundamentally empowering portrait of a woman determined to live according to her own rules. "This is why it's so modern," Margaine tells me. "Carmen is fighting for her own freedom, towards men, towards society. That's something women still have to fight for – to be equal, to make your own decisions."

When I ask about the trope of the femme fatale, and the potentially problematic plot point that has Carmen's liberal attitude rewarded with her murder, Margaine suggests that this only underscores double standards about promiscuity. "There's still a feeling that a man who has many lovers is like a Don Giovanni – it's flattering. For a woman, I don't think that's the case. That's the problem for Carmen. She has lots of charisma. When she likes someone, she pursues it. She's very free with her own sensuality and sexuality. And this seems to be a problem for men at the time – and still nowadays," she adds, raising an eyebrow.

Rachvelishvili feels a profound connection to Carmen's strength, independence and will. Like Margaine, she sees Carmen's aggressive sexuality as fatally problematic for the men who love her. But – and it's a crucial exception – Rachvelishvili resists the idea that the opera is critical of this problem. In fact, Rachvelishvili thinks Carmen can be viewed as a cautionary tale of a woman who goes too far – an interpretation that she couches in some of her own ambivalence toward contemporary feminism.

"I'm a Georgian woman," she tells me with a wry glint in her eye. "I grew up in a family where the men make decisions. Our culture is like that. We have a deep respect for men."

For Rachvelishvili, this attitude demands that women show extra tact and patience. "We have this very funny saying about male-female relationships: The man is the head; the woman is the neck." She looks at me knowingly. "If you want to turn your head, you need a neck for that."

Rachvelishvili thinks Carmen destroys this delicate equilibrium. "She makes a stupid decision. She's provoking Don Jose all the time." She also thinks there's a crucial message in that for 21st-century women. "I think we are scaring the men around us. We are too strong. We are not afraid to show that any more. When we were afraid, it was okay, because men thought they were controlling everything. Now that we're not afraid any more, they're afraid of us."

Nietzsche also wrote about the way that women scare men. "What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature. …"

Maybe Rachvelishvili's interpretation of Carmen is exactly what Nietzsche imagined when he described the opera as depicting the "deadly hatred of the sexes." In fact, I wonder if Rachvelishvili and Nietzsche might just actually have a little something in common.

Carmen runs from April 12 to May 15 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Arts in Toronto (coc.ca).