High expectations for von Otter came from reviews of her first appearance at Glyndebourne, the famous British festival near Brighton, in 2002.

In the open air of the northern New Mexico, she captivated the audience from the first bewitching moments of the Havanaise. Carmen's signature song - "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" or "Love is a bird on the wing" - set her apart and set the tragic machinery of the play into its perpetual motion.

Carmen's sexuality, as embodied by von Otter, was not the bare-midriff and diddling tease of the teeny-bopper, but the truth of a fully realized woman in tune with her own body.

Not that she wasn't childlike and volatile, nor an absolute hellcat.

"A dog and a wolf don't make a happy couple," she explained to Don Jos/, when it was all over.

But the kind of freedom she stands for, the kind that lives in the moment on the fruits of love and burns with a gem-like flame to die young, is not safe for ordinary domestic consumption.

Ultimately, von Otters’ Carmen was a cunning and passionate woman — often frightened but always bastioned in her own pride, and never a boring pseudo-Gypsy full of two-ton winsomeness.

Her dramatic concentration, buttressed by Rudolfsson’s direction, was amazingly high. Her stare at José as she mesmerized him was like a snake approaching a rabbit, while the twitch of her feet as she watched Escamillo in the tavern was sultry and suggestive. The sudden light in her eyes and eagerness in her stance when José left the smugglers at last, was like a floodgate of wicked joy opening. And these character definers happened literally every minute.