Opera: New Go-Go Girl in Town

As a licensed real estate agent in Los Angeles 15 years ago, Shirley Verrett was pretty good at selling houses. Today, she is even better at selling them out. Mezzo-Soprano Verrett last week made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the heroine in Bizet’s Carmen. Be fore the night was out, she had men smiling to themselves and women wondering how a flower might look in their teeth.

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,” Verrett explains. Lighthearted before, Carmen now senses only doom in her affair with José. It is a difference that points logically to her murder in the fourth act.

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.

She also had to do an Act II dance on a small tabletop; understandably, her movements were less than abandoned.

But the interpretation was forceful enough to rank Verrett with the best Carmen of the day—Regina Resnik.

Contests, Contests. When Shirley was a child in Los Angeles, her Seventh-day Adventist parents were dismayed at her interest in opera: they loved “good” music but considered opera almost as frivolous as theater and jazz. But she was a girl with aggressive drive and unyielding self-assurance—and so proved it in her brief venture in real estate. Then Shirley won an Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts show in 1955, and the Juilliard School of Music gave her a full scholarship. Graduated in 1961, she had already made a successful Town Hall debut and been featured in a number of major concerts and recitals. She had also won $30,000 in a string of musical contests. “I always picked the one that gave the most money,” Verrett says.

For three years running—1962, 1963, 1964—the tall, shapely mezzo sang powerful Carmens in Spoleto, Moscow and at the New York City Opera. But it was the Met that Verrett was aiming for. She declined Rudolf Bing’s offer to sing several minor Wagner and Verdi roles. At length, Bing came through with the role she craved.

Shirley prepared for it by dieting away 35 pounds (she now weighs 150 Ibs.), taking lessons from a castanet specialist, and studying with a drama coach. At the final dress rehearsal, she was still “improving” her interpretation. After she was knocked to the floor by Don José—Jon Vickers—during an Act III fight, Verrett thought it would be a good idea to get up and walk to another part of the stage, and she did. When Vickers turned to sing to her, there was no one there. Outraged, he shouted: “If you start improvising now, I’ll improvise on opening night!” Later, they worked out their differences backstage, and at the performance, Verrett stayed on the floor in Act III, the way a good Carmen should.