Uma obra de todos, uma obra de ninguém: A Carmen entre adaptação e recepção

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the conditions that sustain the historical permanence of Carmen, from its genesis in Prosper Mérimée’s novella to its consolidation as an opera by Georges Bizet and its multiple reinscriptions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The central problem consists in understanding how the work exceeds the limits of its original media and endures as a narrative matrix continuously reactivated within the cultural imagination. The main hypothesis argues that the longevity of Carmen lies in its structural plasticity and liminal constitution, situated between genres, languages, and aesthetic regimes. The analysis articulates adaptation theory, performance studies, and reflections on regimes of reception, approaching the work not as a fixed entity but as a historical process in constant reconfiguration. Particular attention is given to the intersemiotic transposition from literary narrative to lyric stage, emphasizing how the integration of music, gesture, and staging inaugurates a new sensory economy and expands the character’s field of meaning.The investigation also considers the interpretative tradition and the role of recording technologies in consolidating the myth, as well as case studies that reveal symbolic disputes surrounding the legitimacy of who may embody the protagonist. The comparison between contemporary stagings and the trajectories of performers such as Jessye Norman and Maria D’Apparecida highlights discursive and institutional mechanisms of regulation within the operatic field, especially in the Brazilian context. The study concludes that Carmen emerges as a work belonging to everyone and to no one: appropriable by successive cultural agents and, at the same time, resistant to definitive fixation of meaning, sustaining its survival through ongoing negotiations between tradition and renewal.