Word: habaneras
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Verrett's gypsy go-go girl was proud, alluring, pantherlike, intelligent and vocally velvet. Right at the start, in the opening Habanera, she rejected the tradition that makes Carmen a menacing femme fatale. "The music of the Habanera is not heavy," she says. "It is elegant, light, playful, seductive. If Carmen is nasty all the time, who needs that kind of woman, really?" Instead, Verrett was childish, beautiful, desirable -the kind of woman other women like despite her sexual superiority. "Then when she gets angry at Don José in the third act, it's a different character...
What Verrett lacked was only what most newcomers lack at their debuts-the kind of relaxed spontaneity that familiarity with an opera house and a particular production can bring. The Jean-Louis Barrault staging required her to sing the Habanera, for example, half way up a set of tall steps at stage rear, where the orchestra was hard to hear...
Miss Horne's greatest triumph lay in overcoming her own substantial bulk. In the first act, largely because of Maestro Lewis' absurdly fast tempi in the Habanera and Seguidilla, her Carmen seemed only a winsome, fat slut, but the virtuosity of her singing and acting for the rest of the opera made it easy to believe every man in sight found her irresistible. Her sensuous voice moved with perfect flexibility from the dark richness of a Leontyne Price to the brilliance of a Birgit Nilsson. The weight of her low register in the Tarot Scene was miraculous, and the delicacy...
With a plastic rose in her teeth, she is suddenly Carmen, doing the Habanera as an English patter song, clicking castanets. "I have to get these adjusted," she says of the castanets. "One is male and the other female. To me, they look much alike, but perhaps you are more discerning than...