Our Hometown Star

J'Nai Bridges as Dido in our 2025 concert performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens at McCaw Hall.
© David Jaewon Oh

Once hailed by Black Entertainment Television as “the Beyonce of opera,” J’Nai Bridges is a three-time Grammy winner who has performed at the top opera houses across the United States and Europe. Best of all, she’s our hometown star.

Welcome Back Sasha Cooke

© Stephanie Girard

In our recent conversation with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, we discuss what she’s been up to since her last appearance in Seattle back in 2016, recounting several memorable performances. We talk about what it means to debut Carmen, particularly at this point in her career. What’s more, Sasha gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how she’s preparing for the show.

The Exotic and the Familiar:

Cultural Contrast in Bizet’s Carmen at the Opéra-Comique

Zanda Švēde (Carmen) in Seattle Opera's Carmen. Sunny Martini photo

By Judy Tsou

In 1872, when Georges Bizet chose Prosper Mérimée’s infamous novella Carmen as the subject of his upcoming opera for the Opéra-Comique, the reaction was swift from Adolphe de Leuven, one of the producers: “Carmen! The Carmen of Mérimée? Wasn’t she murdered by her lover? And the underworld of thieves, gypsies, cigarette girls—at the Opéra-Comique, the theater of families or wedding parties? You would put the public to flight. No, no impossible!” We know that Bizet got his way and de Leuven eventually resigned. The subject was risqué, especially for the Opéra-Comique, which by the 1870s had become increasingly conservative. The audience expected G-rated “rom-com” operas.

The librettist, Ludovic Halévy, attempted to appease the producers and offered the following remedies: a tamer Carmen (did not happen), a good-girl foil to Carmen (Micaëla), a heroic male character (Escamillo, the bullfighter) in place of the original narrator, gypsies as comedians (not really), and Carmen’s death “glossed over at the very end of the opera [not! ], in a holiday atmosphere [yes], with a parade [before the murder], a ballet [no], a joyful fanfare [sort of].”

OPERAWISE: OPÉRA COMIQUE

Seattle Opera · OPERAWISE: Opéra Comique

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Opéra comique, a native French form of lower-brow musical theater, features spoken dialogue, catchy tunes with easy-to-sing refrains, and middle-class values. Many of the opéra-comiques still performed today (including Carmen, The Daughter of the Regiment, and Beatrice and Benedict, as well as opéra-comique derivatives such as Faust and The Tales of Hoffmann) deal, sentimentally or ironically, with a way of life and a value system which now belongs mostly to ancient history.

Praise for Carmen

Seattle Opera presents Carmen. Sunny Martini photo

"All in all, it’s Seattle Opera’s most thoroughly successful show since last summer’s dazzling Porgy and Bess, and I encourage you not to miss it." - Seattle Magazine 

"...in Ginger Costa-Jackson and Frederick Ballentine, Seattle Opera has the most real, most convincing Carmen and Jose I’ve ever seen. (Zanda Švēde and Adam Smith takes the roles in the production’s alternate cast, and Ballentine, unbelievably, stepped in for ailing tenor Scott Quinn on just a few days’ notice.) - Seattle Magazine  

Carmen offers "three acts of exquisite earworms and engaging action scattered with visual pop-culture references, followed by a final act — still beautifully sung — that is horrifyingly effective." - The Seattle Times

Women of Color decolonize the art of Carmen

Perri Rhoden, Sara Porkalob, Aramis O. Hamer, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and Naomi André. Sunny Martini photo

Prior to its May performances of Carmen, Seattle Opera held a panel discussion that amplified the perspectives of Women of Color, and unpacked themes of patriarchy and white supremacy in Western art and entertainment. 

By Gabrielle Kazuko Nomura Gainor

When Georges Bizet created Carmen in 1875, his home country, France, was obsessed with conquering the-so-called “Orient” (which, at the time, French people lumped the Middle East and Africa into, as well as Asia). Carmen herself is a sort of embodiment of these “faraway” cultures that France wanted to dominate. As a Roma woman—an ethnic minority in white European society—Carmen brought an exotic element to the opera that French people could build fantasies upon. And like the “the Orient,” Carmen could not be fully tamed; in the end of the opera, she pays the ultimate price at the hands of Don José.

At a recent panel discussion called “Decolonizing Allure: Women of Color Artists in Conversation,” Dr. Naomi André said that this concept of “Orientalism” and the “Other” should encourage us to consider what’s at stake when we view these works.

“While [Carmen] is entertaining and wonderful—and I love Carmen, and I love that she’s bold and can say, ‘I’m interested in you. And now I’m not interested in you’—remember that she’s punished at the end. She’s died at the end. It’s as if this voice is way too powerful and it has to be snuffed out.”

A scholar of Blackness in opera among other topics and a professor at the University of Michigan, Dr. André moderated “Decolonizing Allure,” which featured four additional speakers. For the Asian American woman writing this article at least, the evening offered radical and transcendent food-for-thought where many of us whose identities do not always feel centered in art forms like opera, ballet, and theater, were prioritized and honored.

The Cinematic Lives of Carmen

From The Simpsons episode "Trip to the Opera."

By Julie Hubbert

A Seattle native who grew up attending Seattle Opera, Hubert is an associate professor of music history at the School of Music at the University of South Carolina where she also teaches in the Film and Media Studies Department. This fall, with the help of a NEH Fellowship, she will complete a book on music in films from the New Hollywood Era. 

What do Nietzsche and Bart Simpson have in common? It’s not a trick question. In fact, the answer reveals a hidden collaboration that has shaped the reception of this opera for over a century. The answer is Carmen. Nietzsche loved Carmen, although this admiration was certainly colored by misogyny and his growing contempt for Wagner. Bart Simpson’s connection to Carmen, however, is equally compelling and perhaps even more complex. In the second episode of the animated series, after Bart cheats on an IQ test, his mother Marge rewards him with a night at the opera. While there, Bart and his father Homer delightfully skewer opera conventions (a soprano with a healthy appetite does end the opera), but they also display an intimate knowledge of the music, especially when Bart sings the time-honored contrafactum of the Toreador’s Song: “Toreador, please don’t spit on the floor. Please use a cuspidor, that’s what it’s for.”

Telling Carmen's Story

Seattle Opera interviewed our two Carmens: Zanda Švēde, left, and Ginger Costa-Jackson, right (photo by Suzanne Vinnik).

“As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.”
― Georges Bizet

Carmen, Bizet’s heroine, attracts a variety of labels. Some view her as a powerful sexual being or even as a feminist. Others see her as a Roma stereotype, or as a woman who must be punished for daring to do what she wants in a patriarchal society. Seattle Opera sat down with our two Carmens: Ginger Costa-Jackson and Zanda Švēde. We learned more about what it's like to sing this role, and what to make of the work's famous and brutal ending in 2019. Neither of the two mezzo-sopranos would probably encounter Carmen in real life. (Carmen would likely be more into dancing the night away, singing karaoke, and being the life of the party, whereas the two singers are more quiet, homebody-types). But both Costa-Jackson and Švēde described a deep admiration for how Carmen inhabits her own body, how she is brave and un-apologetically herself, and how her ferocity resonates with audiences long after the curtain has come down.   

Costuming Carmen

A toreador costume from Carmen. Trevor Giove photo

Seattle Opera sat down with Costume Director Susan Davis to learn more about the costumes for Carmen, which were envisioned by Gary McCann, Production Designer. Every Seattle Opera production takes approximately six weeks to costume from start to finish. This includes making garments from scratch, modifying or refurbishing existing costumes, and making any modifications that come up before opening night. This is the 10th time Seattle Opera has presented Carmen, and each time it looks a little different, Davis says. Bizet set his opera in the 1840s, and the fashions of this time period have an almost comical flair to modern sensibilities, Davis says. "But when you see an opera in a time period you recognize, it can offer audiences a closer connection to the story."

What’s your favorite thing about the costumes for this show?
It’s interesting to be doing this Carmen—it’s definitely new and different from what you saw on our stage last time, in 2011. Stage Director Paul Curran and his collaborator Gary McCann have set the work in the late 1950s. So onstage, you’ll see real clothes; vintage pieces (things you may recognize from your own closet if you were alive in the 1950s), and costumes used in Opera Philadelphia's production. As director of this work, Paul is thinking a lot about the haves, and the have-nots—from the factory workers struggling to make ends meet, to the upper-class in this story without a care in the world.

Cultural Contrast in Bizet’s Carmen at the Opéra-Comique

Soprano Célestine Galli-Marié, the first Carmen.

By Judy Tsou

Tsou is a music librarian emerita at the University of Washington, where she also taught opera analysis for two decades. She has published extensively on critical studies of gender and race in operas and musicals. Tsou is a member of the Seattle Opera Board of Directors.

In 1872, when Georges Bizet chose Prosper Mérimée’s infamous novella Carmen as the subject of his upcoming opera for Paris's Opéra-Comique, the reaction was swift from Adolphe de Leuven, one of the producers: “Carmen! The Carmen of Mérimée? Wasn’t she murdered by her lover? And the underworld of gypsies,* thieves, cigarette girls—at the Opéra-Comique, the theater of families or wedding parties? You would put the public to flight. No, no, impossible!” We know that Bizet got his way and de Leuven eventually resigned. The subject was risqué, especially for the Opéra-Comique, which by the 1870s had become increasingly conservative. The audience expected G-rated “rom-com” operas.

The librettist, Ludovic Halévy, attempted to appease the producers and offered the following remedies: a tamer Carmen (did not happen), a good-girl foil to Carmen (Micaëla), a heroic male character (Escamillo, the bullfighter) in place of the original narrator, Roma as comedians (not really), and Carmen’s death “glossed over at the very end of the opera [not!], in a holiday atmosphere [yes], with a parade [before the murder], a ballet [no], a joyful fanfare [sort of].”

Decolonizing Allure: Women Artists of Color in Conversation

Seattle Opera's upcoming panel subverts Carmen’s white, patriarchal narrative at 7 p.m., Friday April 26. Panelists include: Michelle Habell-Pallán (top left), Naomi André (bottom left), Aramis O. Hamer (center), Perri Rhoden (top, right) and Sara Porkalob (bottom, right). 

At one point in time, a Seattle Opera ticket offered a relatively predictable experience: an enchanted night out, a grand presentation, and often a familiar telling of a popular work. But in the past few years, Seattle Opera has been inviting audiences to explore this art form from a different perspective. This is why, prior to the company’s May performance of Carmen, it plans to hold a free panel discussion that will flip the opera’s depiction of the exotic “Other” on its head. On April 26, the company presents “Decolonizing Allure: Women Artists of Color in Conversation.”

Carmen on the Couch: Analyzing Bizet's Bold Heroine

Denyce Graves as Carmen, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Metropolitan Opera Archives

By Tom Huizenga 

Article via NPR

Every opera season the perennial favorite, Carmen, by Georges Bizet, takes the stage at opera houses in places like New York, London and Vienna (And Seattle!).

Carmen owes its longevity, in part, to Bizet's sparkling music, and to its fearless, flirtatious title character. But for all her sexual charisma, Carmen's own fate, in Bizet's opera, says something about how society views strong women.

Carmen in Pop Culture

Carmen is often described as the most popular opera of all time, so it should come as no surprise that its music has been referenced by everything from the Muppets to Major League Baseball. Here we’ve compiled some of our favorite nods to Bizet’s masterpiece.

Opera’s Greatest Witches

Witches—be they sopranos, mezzos, contraltos, or (coming up in this fall’s Hansel & Gretel at Seattle Opera) tenors—bring intense drama and spectacular music to any number of great operas. Enjoy these memories of great witchy performances at Seattle Opera! If you’d like to listen to them all in one go, open our Witch Album over at SoundCloud and simply press play.

MACBETH: A Stage Full of Witches
Something wicked this way comes! When he set about transforming Shakespeare’s Macbeth into an Italian opera, Giuseppe Verdi multiplied Shakespeare’s three witches into a whole bevy of them, and then wrote them some spectacularly creepy music. The scene in the witches’ cavern becomes a huge production number as the witches brew their hell-broth and await the evil king. Seattle Opera’s 2006 production of Macbeth was conducted by Nicola Luisotti.

LOHENGRIN: Ortrud Invokes the Ancient Gods
In Wagner’s Lohengrin, wicked witch Ortrud transforms the young Christian prince Gottfried von Brabant into a swan with all the powers of hell.

Staff Chat with Assistant Conductor PHIL KELSEY

Seattle Opera’s assistant conductor Phil Kelsey has a passion for music that is as contagious as it is omnivorous. A self- described Ring junkie, he not only coaches our singers but teaches at the University of Washington, plays harpsichord, listens to jazz and Indian classi­cal music, and rises in the early hours to catch inter­national soccer matches before taking the ferry from the Kitsap Peninsula to Seattle Opera’s offices.

As Seattle Opera’s assistant conductor, what are your responsibilities during performances?
I am responsible for what I call “noises off,” which is any music that gets performed from the wings or backstage. There is a shocking amount of this music in opera. Hardly an opera goes by without some sort of fanfare or drum roll or dance band or choruses or any number of things that are supposed to sound like they are coming from a different space than the one that the stage and orchestra occupy. All this offstage music has to coordinate with the orchestra, which means that I’m looking at a closed-circuit TV monitor of the conductor, I’m conducting instrumentalists and singers backstage, and trying to make it all coordinate in time. It’s a bit tricky because sound is delayed when it comes from a distance, so that offstage musicians have to play a little bit ahead of the orchestra at all times, and the amount of how much ahead depends on the set. If the set is wide open and lets a lot of sound pass through, then there’s a tiny time delay. If you’re playing from behind huge con­structions, it can take a long time for the sound to travel.

How do you figure out the time delay?
The question is how do you figure that out in only one musical rehearsal before the two dress rehearsals! We perform our parts backstage, and one of my colleagues gives us feedback from the auditorium—it’s a little behind, it’s a little ahead, it’s a little too loud, it’s a little too soft.

And these offstage instrumentalists are called the banda, correct?
A fun thing about tra­ditional Italian opera was that pretty much every town had their own municipal band (or “banda”). They would bring them in to play offstage marches and dance music. Because every band was a little different, the band music in Donizetti and Verdi is almost never scored. Every bandmaster arranged it for their band. So I am also sometimes the band arranger. We try to make to make a small but noisy bunch of instruments sound like a wonderful raucous loud bunch of instruments.

Will there be a banda in Attila?
You will hear some fanfares. The soldiers are called to bat­tle with fanfares and then you hear women’s voices singing prayers. Carmen had stuff from beginning to end, and Bizet wrote it very cleverly. He would stop writing for a particular instrument in the orchestra and give them time to get backstage. Maybe the Opéra-Comique in 1875 was on as tight a budget as we are.

At orchestra rehearsals, what do you listen for?
Wrong notes and balance issues. If there’s an error, I need to ask, was it someone’s momen­tary misery or a wrong note in the printed music? If it’s wrong once, it was probably a mistake; if it’s wrong twice, then there’s some­thing wrong in the parts.

You can hear a single wrong note?
I’d better be able to hear it. It could be well buried, but I can hear that there was something wrong somewhere and it was a D natural so who’s playing a D natural? There’s the culprit.

You are also a vocal coach during the rehearsal period. Can you explain the difference between a coach and a voice teacher?
The basic distinc­tion is that a voice teacher teaches technique and a vocal coach teaches repertoire style inter­pretation. As a coach you want to be able to share with singers your experience of a wide range of repertoire and style. If you sing a line in Handel and Mozart the way you sing Puccini, it comes out all wrong. Singers are the only instrumentalists that usually have both a teacher and coaches, because they are the only instruments that live inside their machine. They are in a poor position acousti­cally to evaluate what they sound like because they’re inside the sounding board, which is why they need voice teachers. The other dif­ference between a singer and, say, a clarinet is words. An opera singer with an international career is as liable to have to perform intel­ligently in Italian, French, German and who knows what else. Coaches help singers not only with the correct pronunciation but with the correct understanding of the text. So most coaches, like me, are language junkies.

What languages do you know?
I’m pretty flu­ent in German, I read French, I understand Italian, I’ve studied Russian, I’ve studied Japanese, I’ve studied Czech diction and will happily try to pronounce just about anything correctly. It was way fun to do an opera in Hungarian, for example. I learned so much about the way that language works.

You must know the singers pretty well, as some come back again and again.
That’s a very, very fun part of the job. It becomes an extended family.

-Jessica Murphy
Photo by Bill Mohn
This Staff Chat first appeared in Seattle Opera’s program for Carmen in October 2011.

CARMEN: Smoking at the Opera

Carmen may have been the first (unwitting) advertisement for smoking cigarettes.

Situating Carmen as an employee of a cigarette factory was entirely plausible--the cigarette industry in Seville has a centuries-old history--and having Carmen make her entrance cigarette in hand immediately established her as the self-possessed, tradition-be-damned woman that she was. (Photo, above, of Geraldine Farrar from the 1915 film.)

But how could Carmen’s creators have ever known that their decision to put a cigarette in the hand of their desirable leading lady, offering cigarette smoking a certain sex appeal, would be an idea that films and advertising would use forevermore? Just the other day, tobacco researchers in the UK called for tighter control of how films represent smoking; The Independent had the story.

When Carmen arrives on the scene in Act I, with the other factory workers after their siesta, the workers, or “cigarette girls,” as they are often called, sing the praises of “la fumée,” likening it to the intangible quality of a “lover’s sweet words”:

In the air, our eyes follow the smoke.
Watch it rise towards heaven,
smelling sweetly.
It billows around your head
and gently carries you away.
A lover’s sweet words--they’re smoke!
Their passions and speeches--smoke!

And the guys who show up to watch them every day just eat it up:

Look at them, so brazen, so flirtatious...
Each of them with a cigarette between her teeth...

At the Vietnam National Opera in Hanoi, earlier this year, the curtain rose to let these men get a glimpse of the cigarette girls at work inside the factory for the smoking chorus:



But like any love affair--whether with a temptress like Carmen, a group of men outside a factory ogling the women who work inside, or a tobacco product--it gets complicated.

In this case, the complications--state tobacco laws, city building codes--manifest themselves more in the tasks and jobs of the props department than the storyline. In Seattle Opera's current production, Carmen will still be smoking, an act that may either attract or repulse you, depending on your point of view. But she won’t be smoking tobacco.

Today, the women’s chorus smokes “Puff Cigarettes,” which the props department purchases at a magic store in Pike Place Market. The factory workers will be “smoking” the prop-cigarette, a convincing replica, replete with brown filter, red sparkles and foil at the tip, and powder (or “smoke”). The puff you see is produced when they blow into the cigarette. (The Seattle Opera Chorus doesn't inhale!)

If we look back a few Seattle Opera productions, the story was different. In the 1970s, the props master went out and bought a carton of Marlboros (unless there was a request for a different brand or for clove cigarettes). Health or vocal chord risks notwithstanding, the chorus smoked the real thing onstage, and patrons and staff could partake themselves in the lobby and backstage.

In spite of Carmen’s timelessness, times have changed.

Our artists relations manager, for instance, thanks his lucky stars that he no longer has to navigate travel agencies to get singers on non-smoking flights back to their far-flung homes. And it’s interesting to note that four years ago, the cigarette factory in Seville shut its doors. The New York Times covered the story.

What do YOU think? Does the cigarette in Carmen's mouth make her sexy, or the opposite? What are your smoking-in-the-theater stories and/or memories?

Post by Jessica Murphy