In late 1957, Maria Callas sang a concert at the Dallas Civic Opera that included arias from Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Bellini’s I puritani, Verdi’s Macbeth and La traviata, and Donizetti’s Anna Bolena.
Many claim that Callas’s voice was in precipitous decline in 1957, but neither her hair-raising Dallas program nor her supple, easy singing therein support that claim. The Dallas concert itself was not recorded, but the rehearsal was, and she sang the Puritani mad scene with her customary pathos and flair (the downward runs in particular sounding like cascades of diamonds). What’s more, she ended the scene with a huge high E-flat.
Her singing here—with a trusted colleague and friend, Nicola Rescigno, and without the pressure of a “gala” audience—to me suggests that Tito Gobbi was perhaps right. He opined that Callas, “desperately nervous” and a “vulnerable, lonely, elusive” creature, never lost her voice but lost her nerve.
Vincenzo Bellini, who died on 23 September 1835, not quite 34 years of age, was by some accounts Maria Callas’s favorite composer.
Callas became Callas, if you will, when she performed “Qui la voce” from Bellini’s I puritani for Tullio Serafin in Venice in 1949. He was auditioning her to replace Margherita Carosio, ill with flu, in a run of Puritani due to start in a few days. Serafin reportedly listened to Callas with tears streaming down his cheeks, and then prevailed upon her to learn the rôle of Elvira in less than a week.
At the time, Callas was also singing Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre. No soprano in recent memory had sung such vocally divergent rôles—though, as Callas herself often observed, notions of vocal category or Fach were extremely elastic in the nineteenth century when these operas were composed.
(Indeed, Wagner can be sung properly only by singers with impeccable bel canto schooling. The leathery barking and foghorn declamation that we most often hear today in Wagner represent a betrayal of his music.)
Callas’s masterful performance in Puritani, hailed in the Italian and international press, put her on the map as a prima donna assoluta, capable of singing (in theory) any music written for the female voice.
She recorded Elvira’s mad scene for Cetra later in 1949. If I had to choose a single recording to represent Callas’s art, I think that it would be this one—a miracle of expression and musicianship, with countless felicities of phrasing, rubato, and portamento.
The next time that you hear Bellini’s music, remember that he left this earthly life at a pitifully young age. In 1898, Verdi, normally chary with praise and hyperbole, wrote to the French critic Camille Bellaigue:
Bellini, it is true, was poor in harmony and instrumentation, but rich in sentiment and in that melancholy tint that was his alone! Even in his lesser known operas, Straniera and Pirata, there are long, long, long melodies (melodie lunghe lunghe lunghe) that no one wrought before he did… Note, my dear Bellaigue, that I do not intend (G-d forbid!) to pass judgment, only to offer my impressions. You speak with the greatest indulgence of Otello and Falstaff. The author is not complaining…
On this anniversary of Belllini’s passage into eternal life, let us hear his music sung by one of its greatest interpreters.
[Her voice], for artistic reasons, can possess a false and insidious candor; it can also possess an authentic candor. At times, her virtuosity can seem inborn spontaneity, as if she surmounted difficulties, step by step, on the strength of instinct alone. Her voice, already dark and even shadowy, can become soft and light, with the iridescence of a soap bubble. Emilio Radius
Emilio Radius was an Italian journalist of the past century who wrote for Oggi, a popular magazine. I know little about him and would like to learn more.
His essay about Maria Callas in Da Mussolini alla Callas: Ricordi di un giornalista (1961) is one of the best things I have read about her. (What a pairing in the title, though!) The essay bears multiple readings and, at times, layers irony upon irony, metaphor upon metaphor.
The snippet I offer here seems to me relatively straightforward, and also insightful and beautifully written. Oh, to have journalists of this caliber writing today!
The musical excerpt is from the legendary Cologne performance of Bellini’s La sonnambula, with the tenor Nicola Monti.
Despite the central role of the singer’s body in the production of opera and the production of voice, opera studies persists in thinking of voice as extra-corporeal. Carnal voices are either lacking or absent… As for the body of the singer, opera studies has tended to ignore it altogether unless it possesses currency as the object of desire or of a fetish. And when this happens, both the body and voice of the singer become secondary to the affect or erotic desire of the spectator. Michelle Duncan, “The operatic scandal of the singing body: Voice, presence, performativity”
This clip of the final scene from Bellini’s La sonnambula is valuable for several reasons—because it features lovely, evocative stills, including lesser-known ones, from Luchino Visconti’s incomparable production of the opera; because it captures Maria Callas in magical form; and because it gives some sense of what her voice sounded like in the theatre, with “air” around it. (Her EMI recordings were close-miked and most unflattering.)
And, yes indeed, she makes a diminuendo on a high E-flat. I believe that this, and the performance as a whole, are what Ethan Mordden would call “demented.”
Rumors persist that video of a complete Cologne Sonnambula survives, surely the saint graal of pirates. Let us pray that it comes to light!
A work that the author perhaps did not hear more than once in his [sic] lifetime (as was the case with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the majority of Mozart’s works) becomes accessible to a multitude of people, and becomes repeatable outside the spectacle of its performance. It gains availability. It loses its festive and religious character as a simulacrum of sacrifice. It ceases to be a unique, exceptional event, heard once by a minority. The sacrificial relation becomes individualized, and people buy the individualized use of order, the personalized simulacrum of sacrifice. Jacques Attali on recording and repetition, in Noise: The Political Economy of Music
A diva with whom Callas was often paired throughout her career is Giulietta Simionato, who turns 100 years young in May. (Cent’anni ancora, Maestra!) With her plush voice, remarkable range, and bold temperament, Simionato was a worthy partner to Callas onstage and a sisterly friend to her offstage.
On December 7, 1955, both Callas and Simionato were in blazing form as they opened the La Scala season in Bellini’s Norma—still recalled as one of the greatest nights in that illustrious theatre’s history.
These clips show Maria Callas’s curtain calls during and after Tosca and Norma, c. 1965. I suspect that they may be removed from YouTube before long, so view them while you can.
Update: The owner of this material has advised me that he has no intention of removing it from YouTube.
The first clip is silent, while the second has audio added.
There is a wonderful book by Paul Fryer, The Opera Singer and the Silent Film, which explores how Caruso, Chaliapin, and other singers, oddly, helped to establish silent cinema as a popular medium.
The silence in the first clip of Callas is an accident. Yet how much silent footage of Callas has survived—along with, yes, dozens of audio recordings shorn of visuals, which constitute, as Jürgen Kesting puts it, a “theatre of the imagination.”
Of course, these clips show us Callas as “Callas”—in some twilight world of identity, somewhere between “Callas” the public figure, Maria the woman, and the characters she was portraying.
Dear friends, the main Callas site has succumbed to who knows what, perhaps a winter virus.
Off-topic, but bear with me: Lady Gaga and Cathy Berberian. Separated at birth?
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