Christine Nilsson is said to have decided that the rôle was not pure enough for her, but Adelina Patti, who has stated publicly that Wagner wrote _Parsifal_ for her and that she had refused the rôle of Kundry, could not forego the chance to appear as the Mérimée-Bizet gipsy. Her failure was abysmal. H. E. Krehbiel says she was seen "and occasionally heard" in the part. She "ignored its dramatic elements entirely, and cared only for the music, and only for the music in which she sang alone." But Pauline Lucca sang the part with success, I believe. Carmen was a rôle that Lilli Lehmann had frequently sung in Germany before she came to America and she made her American début in the part. Here is Mr. Krehbiel's description of her performance ("Chapters of Opera"): "Lehmann as the gipsy cigarette maker, with her Habanera and Seguidilla, with her errant fancy wandering from a sentimental brigadier to a dashing bull-fighter, is a conception which will not come easy to the admirers of the later Brünnhilde and Isolde; and, indeed, she was a puzzling phenomenon to the experienced observers of that time. Carmen was already a familiar apparition to New Yorkers, who had imagined that Minnie Hauk had spoken the last word in the interpretation of that character. When Fräulein Lehmann came her tall stature and erect, almost military, bearing, were calculated to produce an effect of surprise of such a nature that it had to be overcome before it was possible to enter into the feeling with which she informed the part. To the eye, moreover, she was a somewhat more matronly Carmen than the fancy, stimulated by earlier performances of the opera or the reading of Mérimée's novel, was prepared to accept; but it was in harmony with the new picture that she stripped the character of the flippancy and playfulness popularly associated with it, and intensified its sinister side. In this, Fräulein Lehmann deviated from Mme. Hauk's impersonation and approached that of Mme. Trebelli.... In her musical performance she surpassed both of those admired and experienced artists."