Callas and Dacia Maraini II

Here is another excerpt from Maria Callas’s interview (c. 1969) with Dacia Maraini.

May I ask you something: Do you consider yourself a fortunate woman?

I feel privileged because I’ve had an extraordinary destiny. I am a creature of destiny. Destiny chose me and wanted me thus. I stand outside of myself and watch my life from without. I see myself clearly, and I see others.

As a woman I consider myself unfortunate because I have neither a man’s affection nor the love of children.

Do you feel nostalgia for your childhood?

No. Because it was not a happy childhood.

The sound clip is from Maria Callas’s 1954 recital, Puccini Heroines.

Read other entries relating to Maria Callas and Dacia Maraini.

Read other entries featuring the music of Puccini.

Callas seen by Maraini IV

This is the fourth and final installment of Dacia Maraini’s 2007 interview about Maria Callas. If you have not done so already, please read the previous installments.

Nowadays, we speak of Callas as if invoking a myth. But how does this myth overshadow the woman Maria?
Her case is a lucky one: Almost nothing is lost of Maria’s great talent. We have studio recordings, pirates, cinema, photographs, and many biographies. If she had lived even fifty years earlier, probably nothing would have remained of her. So she was fortunate—or rather, we were fortunate.

Nonetheless, a myth isn’t based on a person’s character but on what she accomplished in life. Paradoxically, to generate a myth, mistakes are all-important. A mythic figure usually makes flagrant mistakes, suffers greatly, betrays, and is betrayed. But deep down, there is an extraordinary talent, and Maria’s myth is certainly born of her extreme talent.

Her voice—which, to our great joy, we can hear again and again even in her absence—takes flight with the perfection of a bird who knows all secrets of the air and its currents, of clouds and the wind.

Were any characters in your novels inspired by her?
Yes. When I wrote Veronica Franco, Courtesan and Poet, a theatrical work based on a poet of the sixteenth century, I thought of her. Of course, the context is different, the story is different, the places far off, but Veronica’s character has something of Maria’s, indomitable and at the same time naïve and childlike.

Callas seen by Maraini III

This is the third (actually, the fourth) installment of Dacia Maraini’s 2007 interview about Maria Callas. Here is the preview, followed by part I and part II.

Tell us about Callas’s love for Pasolini. How did she love him?
They loved each other, but in different ways. She would have married him, but he wouldn’t have married her. She knew that he was a homosexual but believed that she could “redeem” him. Still, Pier Paolo never gave her false hopes. He never said that he would abandon his sexual habits. This love was a pious desire on Maria’s part. As usual, she preferred dreams to realities.

Did she ever sing in private—for example, for you and Moravia?
No, I never heard her sing behind the scenes. She never even hummed a song. She was very protective of her voice and always kept a scarf on hand even when it was hot. She was a singer through and through who knew the delicacy and fragility of the voice.

What did success and popularity mean to her? How did she bear them?
She seemed to take success as something natural, something that was her due given the magnificent voice that was nature’s gift to her. She knew her own worth as a singer, but only that. Otherwise, she was diffident.

When did you stop seeing each other?
When her “love story” with Pasolini ended. What’s more, she lived in Paris, and it was hard to meet up with her.

How did you learn of her death?
I heard it on the radio—early one morning when I got up and turned on the radio. I felt a sense of emptiness. I can’t say that she was a close friend, but we had spent time together in a spirit of affection.

From time to time she would ask me what I thought of Pier Paolo. I think that she didn’t understand him at all and feared disappointing him. Still, I never discouraged her, even if I thought that Pasolini never would have changed his inclinations on her account. Pier Paolo’s love for her was chaste, almost brotherly, even paternal. However, I thought that she had to discover this for herself. I wasn’t there to reproach her or warn her. She was adult enough.

The final installment will follow later this week.

Callas seen by Maraini II

Yesterday I brought you the first part of Dacia Maraini’s 2007 interview about Maria Callas. Here’s more from this interesting piece.

What was your relationship like?
She was reserved at first. Then, little by little, as she got to know me, she became affectionate. I remember her once confiding that she had always gotten everything wrong with men. She said that she had loved Onassis immensely, but that he had been brutal to her. Somewhat comically, she thought that she would convert Pasolini to heterosexuality. She was naïve and sometimes seemed like a little girl. Her love for jewels was that of a poor girl enchanted by a magic ring or dress.

What differences were there between her private behavior, with friends, and with the public?
There were enormous differences, if by “public” you mean opera audiences. She was free from uncertainty, shyness, fears; she was sure and sublime. But in private, with friends, she was awkward, though by nature she was a very controlled person, self-taught, who knew how to get by in life.

Tell us about the long trips that you took with Moravia, Pasolini, and Maria.
We took two long trips to Africa, both a month long, and one to Yemen. Wherever we went, Pasolini and Moravia would disappear when Maria was there. She was a queen, and that’s how they treated her. Heads of state came to greet her, planes and cars were put at her disposal. But she didn’t avail herself of them—on the contrary, she tended to resist getting involved with authorities.

She was used to luxury hotels, but she adapted even to hostels, which is what happened when we were travelling through central Africa in Land Rovers. We lodged where we could.

The funniest thing? Once, in a large hotel, I went up to tell her that dinner was ready, and I found her in a dressing gown, sitting in front of the radio. I thought that she was listening to an opera. To my surprise, she was listening, rapt, to one of Nilla Pizzi’s songs.

Callas seen by Maraini I

About a month ago, I promised you the entirety of the writer Dacia Maraini’s 2007 interview about Maria Callas.

For those unfamiliar with her work, Maraini is a keen observer of people and events and a gorgeous prose stylist. I have read only one of her works in English: The Silent Duchess (La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa), an unforgettable novel. (I reviewed it back in 1999, and please steel yourself, because my old site template is a horror.)

Maraini, who travelled with Callas and Pasolini, describes their meeting in the first part of the interview.

When did you meet Callas?
Pasolini introduced me to her one evening at dinner in a Roman trattoria. Of course, I knew her as an artist: I had heard her sing, and I admired her greatly. I had formed a different image of her having seen her on stage, where she seemed to be a panther. In private, she was shy and awkward. I took an immediate liking to her because of her shyness and awkwardness. There was nothing of the diva about her.

What kind of personality did La Divina have?
I realized immediately that she was a complicated person but also simple. She wasn’t an intellectual, and she was probably somewhat ashamed of this. She wasn’t well read. She trusted her instinct. She was extremely sensitive and highly intelligent, but hers wasn’t a systematic or rational intelligence. She was archaic: She thought that women should receive rather than analyze, love rather than reason.

As a result, she was very humble and fearful with Pier Paolo. Sometimes he would reproach her, very sweetly, for certain trite, even racist remarks that she had made unawares—like when we were in Africa, and she made certain less-than-anthropoligical observations. At his reprimand, she would shrink back like a snail into her shell and say, “You’re right, forgive me.”

She was also very worried about her body, which she considered malformed. She didn’t consider herself beautiful and tended to hide. Yet she was utterly beautiful. Still, she thought that she looked good on stage, not on a movie set. In fact, she wasn’t very natural during a shoot or with the cameras rolling. She had a natural understanding of acting, yet on the set she was simply someone doing her duty. She lacked spontaneity because she was ill at ease in front of the camera, which bore down upon her mercilessly.

I recently saw [Pasolini’s] Medea again, and I must say that one can sense her rigidity, her fear. In cinema, actors must know how to let themselves go, otherwise they become statues. And she was something of a statue in Medea, in both negative and positive ways. What I mean is, when she was only acting, she couldn’t recapture the freedom, the marvelous abandon she had when she was singing.

Further installments to follow.

Callas and the sublime

Her voice was one of a kind—powerful but delicate, sensual and spiritual at the same time. It was a voice you could pick out from a thousand, one that made you think of grandiose landscapes, mountains and high Alpine lakes, with an echo of the deepest sea.
Dacia Maraini

I am translating a beautiful interview about Maria Callas with the writer Dacia Maraini. Maraini is a person of intelligence and integrity, in contrast to many people who have written about Callas. But I digress.

It struck me when I was typing the bit above that Maraini is describing the sublime—a Romantic or proto-Romantic notion of the sublime rather than a classical one, but the sublime nonetheless.

Read what the author of On the Sublime wrote about “sublime” versus “faultless” writers, and see if her or his words do not bring to mind Callas.

It is true that Bacchylides and Ion are faultless and entirely elegant writers of the polished school, while Pindar and Sophocles, although at times they burn everything before them as it were in their swift career, are often extinguished unaccountably and fail most lamentably. But would anyone in his senses regard all the compositions of Ion put together as an equivalent for the single play of the Oedipus?
On the Sublime (Περὶ ὕψους)

Eventually, I will offer you Maraini’s interview in several installments.

Callas and Dacia Maraini

In the early 1970s, Callas travelled to Africa with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and Dacia Maraini. (Wow, wouldn’t you like to have gone on that trip?)

Maraini interviewed Callas, and I offer you a translation of part of the interview.

Which operatic character did you most enjoy interpreting?
Norma. That scold who understands everything but can do nothing. Perhaps she resembles me.

What rôle has religion played in your life?
I believe in a divine power, even if I don’t know its name. The stagecraft, the coups de théâtre of organized religion don’t appeal to me at all. But I wouldn’t be an atheist, because that would be a negative outlook. My only sanctimonious gesture is making the sign of the cross before I go on stage. It’s a habit, a superstition.

You were born Orthodox, yes?
Yes, and I’m still Orthodox, though not in a traditional way.

If you had to define your moral in a few words, what would it be?
I don’t hurt others, though it might be easy for me to do so. First, because I don’t want to—vengeance depresses me—and second, because I fear that the hurt would fall back on me. Sooner or later the ugly things that we do come back to haunt us. I love good manners; I hate hypocrisy. I’m kind with those who respect me. I don’t easily forgive those who lash out at me.