Gussie's Glory

The only Carmen in operatic history to commit suicide was an opulently constructed New Jersey girl named Gussie Seit. That was seven years ago, at the Chicago Lyric Opera, after terrible-tempered Tenor David Poleri, appearing as Don Jose, stalked off the stage in the final act snarling at the conductor, "Finish it yourself." Gussie finished it herself by singing Don Jose's part as well as her own. At the moment of truth, when Don Jose was to have stabbed her, she stuck her thumb in her chest and dropped on the stage.

Since then, Trenton-born Gussie Seit, better known as Gloria Lane, has all but adopted the role of Carmen, and Milan's La Scala has adopted Gussie. Last week fast-rising Mezzo-Soprano Lane demonstrated what it is about her favorite role that makes Latin blood rise.

La Scala's Carmen is a grandiose production featuring Todd-AO-sized sets, live horses and a chorus of hundreds. But when statuesque Mezzo Lane stepped onstage dressed in black stockings and a startlingly low-cut shirt ("I never wear a brassiere''), she stopped every eye in the house. Moving with feline grace, she developed a Carmen glittering with gypsy pride and animal excitement. "Singing with her," says a La Scala tenor, "can be pretty tough on a hot-blooded Sicilian like me." Even on La Scala's great stage, Mezzo Lane's voice was opulent and brilliant, rich as piled velvet. When she went to her death, proudly erect and dressed in white lace, the house burst into round after round of applause.

In her comparatively brief operatic career, 29-year-old Mezzo Lane has made something of a specialty of dying gracefully. The daughter of an immigrant Russian harnessmaker, she heard her first music in a Trenton synagogue where her father was baritone cantor. Gussie Seit became Gloria Lane in her teens, after she won a Y.M.H.A. amateur contest singing Let Yourself Go. She abandoned a $40-a-week secretarial job to win the role of the secretary in Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul, later sang the role of Desideria in Menotti's Saint oj Bleecker Street, a part that, like Carmen, required her to die of a knife wound each evening. ''I've been dying for a couple of years," said she at the time, "and I wonder if there's any future in it." Mezzo Lane sang her first traditional operatic roles at Manhattan's City Center--Carmen, and Amneris in Aida, neither of which she had ever seen. Now married to St. Louis-born Conductor Samuel Krachmalnick, Mezzo Lane has sung Carmen so frequently and exhaustingly in recent months that she has had to drop virtually everything else--even, she reports, "making love." A fiery, volatile woman, she regrets only one thing about the role--the succession of Don Joses she has to deal with. "Most tenors," says Lane-Carmen, "are s.o.b.s who think they own the stage even if all they do is sing 'Dinner is served.' "

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