Bizet's music - with its sophisticated interweavings of major and minor keys and yet its utter directness - embodies for most of us what opera ought to be. Perhaps we want too much from this opera. The final scene in front of the bullring literally explodes musically at the beginning and then begins to drift. The darkened tavern of Lillas Pastia wakens this ''Carmen'' from unconsciousness for a while, with splendid choral energy and a singing of the celebrated quintet as precise and vital as I ever heard it.
Why then are the sequences preceding Carmen's first appearance so interminable, and how can the famous habanera and seguidilla pass almost as nonevents? The visual, almost tactile conveyance of a specific climate is impressive it is the theater within the scene that appears so lifeless, prostrate as if with heatstroke. Still, spectacle by prior Zeffirellian standards is at a minimum. Horses and dogs join the various parades. Franco Zeffirelli's first-act set is theater for the eyes: people, clothes and landscape bleached of color by the sun, the houses of Seville emerging through the haze of late-afternoon Spanish heat. The elements are of consistent quality, but they do not consistently come together. So it went for three and a half hours on Thursday night: these visions of life force and near death in puzzling alternation. At its gloomiest, on the other hand, this production leaps into life. There are moments when it looks the picture of health, but it is precisely then that it behaves so badly: drooping into helplessness, dropsical and aimless. The Metropolitan Opera's new ''Carmen'' suffers symptoms difficult to diagnose.
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