Robert Townsend's MTV Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001), can be used here as an example of palimpsestic writing, in which Townsend has transformed the highbrow operatic music and libretto into an updated, hip-hop musical production. In one of the more significant sequences in this version – the seduction scene – Beyoncé Knowles, as Carmen, sings to Hill the policeman (= Don José). Along with the hip-hop beat, familiar musical phrases are repeated several times. Interposed in the musical score and woven into the new version, they function as familiar signposts of an impending tragedy. These phrases, and especially a few familiar phrases from the Habañera, are identifiable as Bizet's music. In order to maintain the spectators’ pleasure, however, Townsend has adopted the coarse hip-hop style only partially and refrains from giving Carmen's credo its full performance.

Act I of Carmen, the opera, is structured so as to make the Habañera its main theme. This occurs at the moment when Don José kneels to pick up the flower (the glove, as it were) cast at him by Carmen, thus declaring the central, anticipated conflict of the plot. The Habañera, with its metaphor of rebellious love, condenses the central problematic of the tale, that of Carmen's social transgression. In this sense the Habañera, from DeMille (1915) to Aranda (2003), is also present in versions that use Mérimée as their main source. It provides one of the “main knobs” (to use Hofstadter's term, 1985a [1982]), through which we can follow the same element in the different versions, that is, the varying “twists” of this core element of Carmen, and explain its secret charm.

Olympia

In order to exemplify the game between constant and variable while introducing the cultural dimension of repetitions, I will turn first to the famous painting Olympia and its chain of variations. Notably, Manet's Olympia (1865) was inspired by Titian's The Venus of Urbino (1538), which was in turn inspired by Giorgione's The Sleeping Venus (1509-10), and then functioned as a source of inspiration for numerous visual rewritings over the course of the 20th century.