Word: carmens
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...only Carmen in operatic history to commit suicide was an opulently constructed New Jersey girl named Gussie Seit. That was seven years ago, at the Chicago Lyric Opera, after terrible-tempered Tenor David Poleri, appearing as Don José, stalked off the stage in the final act snarling at the conductor, "Finish it yourself." Gussie finished it herself by singing Don José's part as well as her own. At the moment of truth, when Don José was to have stabbed her, she stuck her thumb in her chest and dropped on the stage...
Since then, Trenton-born Gussie Seit, better known as Gloria Lane, has all but adopted the role of Carmen, and Milan's La Scala has adopted Gussie. Last week fast-rising Mezzo-Soprano Lane demonstrated what it is about her favorite role that makes Latin blood rise...
...Scala's Carmen is a grandiose production featuring Todd-AO-sized sets, live horses and a chorus of hundreds. But when statuesque Mezzo Lane stepped onstage dressed in black stockings and a startlingly low-cut shirt ("I never wear a brassiere''), she stopped every eye in the house. Moving with feline grace, she developed a Carmen glittering with gypsy pride and animal excitement. "Singing with her," says a La Scala tenor, "can be pretty tough on a hot-blooded Sicilian like me." Even on La Scala's great stage, Mezzo Lane's voice was opulent...
...memories are crowded with the kind of incident that the chorus is usually the first to notice - and the first to cover up: the time Dramatic Soprano Rosa Ponselle got carried away in the fight scene of Carmen's Act I and yanked two strands of Mezzo Belleri's braids out by the roots; or the occasion, in Liszt's rarely performed Saint Elizabeth, when one soldier lost his tights, causing Conductor Artur Bodanzky to go into such a seizure of laughter that the orchestra had to finish the scene by itself. During half a century, Mezzo...
...Costa Rica in the early '30s, Betancourt met a lovely, brown-eyed kindergarten teacher named Carmen Valverde. At night they walked, talked politics, fell in love. "He was very fiery," Carmen recalls. But Betancourt spent his days in the university library in San José, reading so endlessly that the librarian finally reserved a regular seat for him. In English, French and Spanish he devoured the standard works of the intellectual left-but did not neglect studying oil trade magazines from the U.S. Suddenly Betancourt decided he was a Communist. Today, irritated at the endless necessity of telling...