No one who saw Régine Crespin underplaying the denouement of this opera at the Met 51 years ago will ever forget her. Returning his ring with disdainful composure to Plácido Domingo’s Don José, she made Carmen’s fatalism seem both the main takeaway and only logical dramatic choice.

But there are other ways to play the scene: consider this 1959 Italian-language blowout from Palermo, with Corelli’s infiammatissimo José. His mounting mania is Exhibit A of why Carmen is considered the proto-verismo opera: we don’t need deep-dive research by Skip Gates to tell us that this AWOL soldier and Canio share ancestral DNA (we half expect Corelli to swap in, “La commedia è finita!” as he whacks Carmen). Although this was Corelli’s favorite role, he never performed it in New York: his native language frees him here in a way his efforts in French on both his commercial recordings, whatever their considerable strengths, can’t match. You may quibble that the prompter is a buzz kill and that Corelli repeatedly flies sharp in the heat of passion. But I reckon lots of hardcore Parterrians will retort, “Mary, THIS is what was par for the course during The Golden Age—and what opera always SHOULD be.”