Music: New Carmen

As operas go, Carmen, credible in story and neat in tunesmithing, is nearly perfect. But plump divas and paunchy tenors have often flawed it. Last week Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera produced a new gypsy heroine, a slim, long-legged, flaunting quean. The Met’s new Carmen, a recruit from the Brussels and Paris operas named Lily Djanel (pronounced John L.), was a bit wobbly in voice, especially in early moments of apparent stage fright. But she proved a plausible charmer, raised many a hair when she read death for herself in the cards.

Soprano Djanel’s Carmen was backed up as expertly as a debutante could wish: in the pit was Guest Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who has been pulling opera performances together for 40 years. (He has been known to conduct from memory with no more preparation than a last-minute query: “What’s the opera to night?”)

The fall of France sent Lily Djanel to the U.S. some 16 months sooner than she had planned. She sang in Paris five days before the Germans arrived, then spent three days getting to Bordeaux. Soprano Djanel has sung Carmen 80 times in her twelve-year career. She is blonde, wears a black wig for the gypsy and her other special role, Salome in Richard Strauss’s opera. But the Met has canceled plans to present Djanel’s Salome—partly because it involves heavy royalties to the Nazified composer (although now he could not collect them)