Carmen by Georges Bizet

Suppose your racial or cultural heritage was best-known to outsiders by a work of fiction that got it all wrong? Even worse, suppose people believed those stories? For example, what if people got all their ideas about Italians from the mafia hoodlums in "The Godfather," or learned everything they know about Polish culture from the boorish rapist Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar named Desire?" or believed all Irish to be the cheerful, sentimental drunks portrayed in any number of films. Well, there is at least one group of people who continue to suffer this fate, and it's partially the result of being the central characters in one of the most popular operas ever written.

They are a people whose origin has been traced back to the region of India known as Hindustan. They began migrating westward across the continent sometime around the year one-thousand, and by now, they inhabit every corner of the globe. They call themselves Rommani, or Roma, but they are most often called Gypsies; that's an abbreviated form of the word "Egyptians," which is what the British thought they were.

Because these people kept moving, and because they were often confused with other races and nationalities, they apparently managed to stave off any major prejudice and strereotyping until the time of Henry the Eighth. Then, a royal edict expelled them from England, and a popular book described them as being "light-fingered, with few manners, but pleasant dancers all the same." The myths began to grow: they steal; they have other-worldly powers; they kidnap children and sell them; they're promiscuous, filthy, illiterate, colorful, carefree, virile, untamed.

When, in the 20th century, several Roma artists began to achieve international fame, the praise for their work often came in a backhand fashion: something like, "Hey - that's pretty good... for a Gyspy." That's basically what was heard from many music critics when jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt began incorporating traditional melodies and rhythms into his solos with the Quintet of the Hot Club di France, and when the lines were stretching for blocks around Carnegie Hall for flamenco wizard Ricardo Ballardo, who performed under the stage name Manitas de Plata.

Of course, 20th-century critics weren't the first "regular folks" to discover Rommani music. The Hungarian dances by Johannes Brahms are based on tunes he heard played by Rommini fiddlers. Franz Liszt admitted to picking up some of his flamboyant style from itenerant musicians passing through in caravans. He wrote, 'The chief characteristic of this music is the freedom, richness, variety and versitility of its rhythms, found nowhere else in like degree. They shy at no audacity in music, so long as it corresponds to their own bold instinct." And the most famous depiction of the Rommani may be an opera: Bizet's CARMEN. It's the story of a sultry woman with loose morals so infatuates a respectable young military man that he abandons his position, fiancee, and reputation to join her and her Gypsy friends in a life of crime.

But of course, the fact that CARMEN is so familiar and beloved doesn't make it an accurate description of the Rommani. So this week on At the Opera, host Lou Santacroce and his guests will look a little more closely both at the opera and at it's subject matter. Professor J. Patrick Lee will tell us about the surprising literary origins of the story, and regular guest Phyllis Chesler will discuss the opera's title character, and how she's affected by the stereotypes and predjudice that have haunted her people.

That's At the Opera, half-an-hour before curtain at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, from NPR.

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