New Carmen at the Met

The Metropolitan Opera got a new Carmen last week. She serpentined onstage in a dress of bare-shouldered abandon, and the rose in her hand glowed like the apple of Eden. She tilted her ink-black mane at a confident angle and poured out in seductive French: "When I'll give you my love? I'm sure I couldn't say; perhaps not at all--tomorrow I may." Her big voice had a dark, anthracite sheen, sometimes with more polish than depth, sometimes with not quite enough polish, but always firm and sometimes thrilling. By the time she reached her ultimate scene of terror and death, handsome U.S. Contralto Jean Madeira achieved a long-sought objective --to arrive at the top of the operatic heap in her own country.

Carmen has everything--true love and sensuality, hot blood and cold fate, betrayal and retribution, passionate songs and smoky dances--and the essence of Carmen is Carmen. It is about the most desirable of all roles for female singers, particularly if they have rich, dark voices. But where many women feel the urge to be a Carmen, comparatively few get the chance to face the footlights alongside a Don Jose or an Escamillo.

Jean Madeira (nee Browning), 37, got her first urge to sing the part when she heard the opera as a child in St. Louis. She started out, however, as a piano student with her piano-teacher mother. She wanted to continue her studies at Manhattan's Juilliard School, but a Juilliard piano teacher told her: "If I had a voice like that I would go into opera--you can always play the piano." Jean took the advice, and eight years later was hired by the Met. Once she sang Carmen from the Met stage, but only in a student matinee. She prepped for the real thing in a succession of out-of-town productions, from Munich, Germany to Pocatello, Idaho. At the Met she moved into many of the important second leads that inevitably fall to a contralto's lot. But to get her chance at the role she coveted most, she had to make a big splash overseas.

It happened in Vienna last fall. When she burst into Carmen's Habanera on the Theater an der Wien stage, she was just an unusually handsome singer from the states. When she finished the song, the house vibrated with ecstatic shouting, and she was a star. One cast member counted 45 curtain calls. The less-demonstrative Met was not so generous last week when the curtain came down (on St. Patrick's Day) on its new Carmen (only about 15 calls), but happy Jean Madeira was serenaded with applause and pelted with green carnations. "I'd be glad to sing Carmen for the rest of my life," she said. But the Met, to the benefit of opera lovers, has other plans as well for its new star.

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