Joan Sutherland, 1926 – 2010

With all due respect for her as a human being and as a singer who, in one way or another, contributed to the so-called “bel canto revival,” the late Dame Joan Sutherland has never been an artist dear to my heart—this despite the fact that she was a knitter.

I own only two recordings by Joan Sutherland: The Decca Turandot conducted by Zubin Mehta, and the EMI Don Giovanni led by Carlo Maria Giulini. That neither is conducted by Sutherland’s husband, Sir Richard Bonynge, is not a coincidence.

Sutherland’s studio-only Turandot is a staggering achievement. No one—not Nilsson, not Turner, certainly not Callas—sings this music with greater ease. In fact, no one else sings Turandot with ease, period. Sutherland, instead, seems to possess limitless reserves of power. The pearly brightness of her sound is that of the moon, with which Turandot is so strongly identified, and it gives her principessa an otherworldly mystique. Her capitulation to Calaf, too, is beautifully and movingly sung.



(Oh, Alfano! And poor Puccini! But I digress.)

In his recollection (more precisely, character assassination) of Maria Callas, the EMI producer Walter Legge recalled:

[S]he flew into London for the dress rehearsal of Sutherland’s Lucia, insisted we sit with her, had herself photographed with the new prima donna, and then took us off to lunch. Seated, she stated: “She will have a great success tomorrow and make a big career if she can keep it up. But only we know how much greater I am.”

I think that Callas was correct.

As a young singer, Joan Sutherland undertook small rôles in operas starring Maria Callas: Clotilde to Callas’s Norma and the sacerdotessa to Callas’s Aida. When Joan Sutherland sang alongside Maria Callas as part of the 1958 centenary gala of Covent Garden, it was as an emerging star. She was only three years younger than Maria Callas.

Maria Callas in Madama Butterfly

Maria Callas recorded excerpts from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly under Tullio Serafin in 1954 and the complete opera under Herbert van Karajan in 1955, shortly before she undertook the rôle in Chicago.

If you believe that “Nina Foresti” was Maria Callas, she sang a truncated version of “Un bel dì” on the Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour radio show in 1935.

Callas biographers are divided on this point. Some report that she owned up to being Nina, while others cite her saying that she never sang under an assumed name. Nina’s speaking voice does sound vaguely like Callas’s, albeit mature for an 11-year-old girl. Her singing voice, though, is utterly unlike Callas’s. (And when did Callas ever work in the toy department of a large department store?)

In a 1957 interview, Callas described her young voice as “dark, almost black—when I think of it, I think of thick molasses,” a description that does not match Nina’s timbre at all.

Callas also sang music from Butterfly at the Italian Embassy in Athens during World War II. She returned to this excerpt, Cio-Cio San’s death scene, in her 1963 concert tour and taught it at Juilliard and Osaka master classes.

It was after Callas’s last Chicago performance as Cio-Cio San that the infamous incident with the process server took place.

This performance of Butterfly’s death scene seems to me markedly different from the one she gave a year before, something that happens rarely in the Callas discography. Nicolai Gedda sings the rôle of Pinkerton.

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Puccini, and view a snippet of film from her Chicago rehearsals.

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.

Not Callas but Carlo Bergonzi

Carlo Bergonzi, a great tenor and a great musician, was born on July 13, 1924, making him about half a year younger than Maria Callas.

Bergonzi sang only three times with Callas, twice in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, and in the 1964 EMI recording of Puccini’s Tosca.

With his manly and effulgent timbre, aristocratic phrasing, and heartfelt warmth, Bergonzi was one of the very greatest singers of the twentieth century. Among tenors, only Aureliano Pertile matches him as an interpreter of Verdi.

This performance of “Che gelida manina” is from the complete 1958 recording of Puccini’s La bohème led by Tullio Serafin. Years ago, I heard a program on French radio during which panelists compared performances of this aria. Following this rendition, there was a long silence, after which someone remarked, awestruck, C’est Rodolphe. The hosts played this recording twice more, marvelling at its magical beauty.

Buon compleanno, carissimo Maestro, e grazie per le infinite bellezze che Lei ci ha regalato.

Callas and the voice

The voice, by being so ephemeral, transient, incorporeal, ethereal, presents for that very reason the body at its quintessential, the hidden bodily treasure beyond the visible envelope, the interior “real” body, unique and intimate, and at the same time it seems to present more than the mere body…

The voice is the flesh of the soul, its ineradicable materiality, by which the soul can never be rid of the body.
Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Callas in The Venice Adriana

Ethan Mordden writes with insight and panache about opera and the performing arts. Perhaps best known for his study Demented: The World of the Opera Diva, Mordden has also published essays, fiction, and guides to recordings.

Mordden’s novel The Venice Adriana (1998) is a roman à clef depicting Maria Callas. Its narrator is a young, closeted gay man who is sent to Venice in the early 1960s to help write the memoirs of Adriana Grafanas, a much loved and much hated diva in premature decline.

A prized, elusive tape of Grafanas in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur is one plot element (shades of McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata). Others include a love triangle that parallels the story of Cilea’s opera, and the narrator’s sexual coming-of-age. Characters based on Elsa Maxwell and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others, weave in and out of the story.

I expected to enjoy The Venice Adriana, and I wish that I had something nice to say about it, but it seems to me utter tripe. Its flaws are both small and large, ranging from laughably inaccurate Italian to a deeply misogynistic depiction of Grafanas/Callas, who is vain, superficial, capricious, and cynical (for starters).

The misogyny, alas, makes appearances elsewhere in Mordden’s work. Demented, for example, draws contrasts between performances that are, yes, “demented” (spellbinding, of overwhelming power) and “filth” (bungling, subpar). “Demented” deprives the diva of agency (she is out of her mind, not in control), while “filth” associates her with obscenity, rot, and putrefaction. (Mordden does not claim to have coined these terms, but he did help to fix and institutionalize them.)

Maria Callas recorded the two big arias from Adriana Lecouvreur in 1954. Since I already posted them, I offer you instead “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” from her 1956 recording of Puccini’s La bohème—neither “demented” nor “filthy,” I think, but a thing of sweetness and shy ardor. (Again, those portamenti!)

By the way, this recording was made sixty years (and not fifty, as some sources suggest) after the premiere of Bohème. I learned from Wikipedia that Toscanini’s recording of Bohème is the only recording of a Puccini opera by its original conductor; and also that Sir Thomas Beecham, who led the marvelous de los Angeles/Björling set, worked closely with Puccini on a 1920 production of Bohème.

Not Callas but Puccini

This is off-topic, I suppose, but too good to miss: Courtesy of Aprile Millo, here is about a minute of Giacomo Puccini in his study, in town, and at sea near Torre del Lago.

Callas and mortality

Many recording artists are dead, and all eventually will be. Even when they are alive, their submission to waxing (to use the old term) or to entombment in vinyl or polyvinyl chloride is an intimation of immortality, and therefore of mortality… The record listener and the musician—like the stargazer and the star, like a man and his familiar ghost—do not inhabit the same world.
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel

Callas in Manon Lescaut

Maria Callas recorded Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in July 1957, though she did not approve the set for release until 1959, apparently because of concerns about her vocal form. Manon Lescaut is one of four rôles—along with Carmen, Mimì in La bohème, and Nedda in I pagliacci—that Callas recorded but never undertook on stage.

Years later, Callas wrote to her friend Cristina Gastel Chiarelli that she had been “irremediably tired” from the time of her La Scala Anna Bolena, which premiered in April 1957.

The first decade of Callas’s Italian career, which totalled only fifteen years, from 1947 to 1962, had proceeded at a scorching pace. It brought her triumphs, wealth, and also the crushing weight of celebrity.

A month after recording Manon Lescaut, Callas was caught up in the “scandal” of her withdrawal from a performance of La sonnambula in Edinburgh that she may or may not have agreed to give. Shortly thereafter she was dismissed by the San Francisco Opera upon asking to postpone performances on medical grounds. January 1958 brought the Rome Norma “walkout,” a situation in which Callas was blameless but savaged by the gutter press (in Italy, the press tout court). Later that year, she broke with both the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala.

Though “irremediably tired,” Callas managed to give some of her greatest performances in 1957, including Bolena and the Cologne Sonnambula. The Act I duet from Manon Lescaut presents no great vocal challenges (in contrast to the Act IV aria), and Callas fills Puccini’s music with grace, sensuality, and the dewy glow of youth. The recorded sound, alas, is harsh, and Giuseppe di Stefano bellows, but we would be poorer without this Manon Lescaut.

Callas and the self

In a sense, a self resembles a wardrobe: we pick up bits and pieces of identity along the way and, as long as these elements fit and are suitably stylish, we will wear them for the time being.
James J. Dowd, “Aporias of the Self”

Silent Callas

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.

Callas sings Bellini and Puccini

Update: As I suspected when I first posted this video, it was removed from YouTube. Dommage !


With thanks to Aprile Millo, who shared this link on Facebook, here are previously unknown-to-me snippets of Callas singing “Casta diva” from Norma and “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” from La bohème.

The second clip is from 1959 or later, but I do not know the precise occasion on which these were filmed. I will continue my investigation, and reader comments are most welcome!

Callas in Gianni Schicchi

Maria Callas’s 1954 recording of Lauretta’s aria from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, part of her Puccini Heroines recital under Tullio Serafin, is a marvel. She never sang the rôle of Lauretta on stage. While Schicchi’s daughter has the opera’s hit tune, the baritone is the star of this intricate ensemble piece. It is hard to imagine Callas, who sang Santuzza in her teens and Fidelio at twenty-one, settling for such a small and relatively undemanding part.

There are several videos of Callas singing “O mio babbino caro” from her farewell tour. Her tone is raw and hollow, and her expression conveys barely suppressed desperation. The clips give no pleasure at all.

This 1965 version, recorded some six weeks before her farewell to the operatic stage, finds her in luminous form. Her use of portamento in the final phrases is pure enchantment, and something in her graceful, gentle way with the music surrounds the aria with the fragrance and glow of spring.

Watch her eyes, and see if any Schicchi could resist such a Lauretta.

Callas in Madama Butterfly

The video shows Maria Callas in rehearsal for her only performances in the title rôle of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which took place in Chicago in 1955.

(After her third Butterfly, on 17 November, she was served with a summons on behalf of her former associate Eddie Bagarozy, resulting in the infamous photo of her with “her mouth in a hyena-like snarl,” as Michael Scott wrote. It marked a turning point in her public image.)

Following you will find the end of Act I of Madama Butterfly sung by Callas and Nicolai Gedda under the direction of Herbert von Karajan, a recording also from 1955.