which Shaw said was 'only a gentleman's dream.' It is
not really an opera at all in the sense that Wagner, Verdi and Berlioz—and Mozart, for that matter—have taught us to understand. With its delightfully contrived situations, its simplicity of motivation, its copious allusion to Mom, and that disarming facility of movement with which a toreador can stroll on foot into a remote fast- ness in the mountains in order to furnish the inhabitants with tickets for his next big fight, it is the first of the musicals, and the best. But at Covent Garden Carmen is seriously in danger of justifying its reputation for high dramatic truth by virtue of Jon Vickers's superbly virile and imaginative performance of Don Jose. About the rest of the show there, is less Gipsy than Gipsy Hill. Gloria Lane's Carmen has been wildly praised. It is well sung and intelligently acted, but it is not Carmen. There is no whiff of the animal, no suspicion of vice. As for Mr. Vickers, his newly acquired vocal subtleties are not yet so natural to him that he does not occasionally show them off as mere tricks, to the detriment of the musical line, as he was inclined to do in the Flower Song; but his performance of the last scene, in grandeur of phrasing, ringing tone, rhythmic strength and in the kind of murderous, hollow-eyed somnambulism of his look and walk, is one of the finest things we have seen at Covent Garden since the season opened.
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