Word: habaneras
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Ever since French Novelist Prosper Mérimée locked a lustful Navarrese soldier and a lubricious Spanish gypsy in fatal embrace, Don José and his Carmen have danced their deadly Habanera through ligh art and mass culture. Although burdened with a sanitized libretto, Composer Georges Bizet transformed Mérimée's cautionary tale into a supercharged epic of erotic obsession that has become a fecund source of material for generations of movie directors. Cinematic treatments have run the gamut from Charlie Chaplin's burlesque Carmen (1916) to the soft-porn Carmen, Baby...
...nothing left to lose, no emotion to spend, and he plunges a knife into the kneeling woman's back as if he were an executioner doing his job. For her part, Carmen is an even more explicitly sexual creature than she is usually portrayed. She sings the famous Habanera while engaging in some erotic byplay with a cigar, thrusting it into Don José's mouth at the words "L'amour, I 'amour. " In its total bleakness this is Carmen seen by a man familiar with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, twin 20th...
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...