Today, 22 November, is the feast of Saint Cecilia, the patroness of music in several Christian churches. “Cecilia” was one of Maria Callas’s names. By one account, “Sophia Cecilia” were the names on her birth certificate, and “Maria Anna” or “Anna Maria” were added when she was baptized. In her childhood in New York, Callas was known mostly as “Mary.”
“Ombre légère” from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah, which Callas always sung in Italian, was part of her concert repertoire from 1949 to 1957. She often programmed it in conjunction with dramatic arias, to showcase her versatility. It’s silly music, but Callas sings it with her customary fierce exactitude, and its intricacy and sparkle somehow seem appropriate for a feast day. This version is from Callas’s 1954 Lyric and Coloratura Arias recital for EMI. Tullio Serafin leads the Philharmonia Orchestra.
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.
“Una voce poco fa,” Rosina’s cavatina from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, was a Callas favorite. It was part of her repertoire during her Greek years, and she sang it some twenty times in concert during the late 1950s—including the night of the 1958 Paris gala during which Aristotle Onassis reportedly resolved to win her.
While her staged performances as Rosina constituted the biggest flop of her career, Callas’s complete EMI set of Barbiere and this 1954 “Una voce poco fa,” recorded under the baton of Tullio Serafin, are among her very finest recordings, brimming with merriment and sparkling vocalism.
Today, her name day, we remember Maria Callas with this joyous performance.
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.
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.
Maria Callas may have had ulterior motives in September 1954 when she recorded “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” from Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally.
According to Frank Hamilton’s superb performance annals and indices, this 1954 session marked the only time that Callas sang this aria. Why then? Perhaps because, in December 1953, Renata Tebaldi had opened the La Scala season in… La Wally. By including “Ebben?” and other late Ottocento selections alongside florid arias by Verdi, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Delibes, Callas may have wished to show that her voice embraced Tebaldi’s repertoire and so much more.
This is mere speculation on my part. It is entirely possible that EMI wished to cash in on the recent Scala opening by including this aria, or that Tullio Serafin commended this chestnut to his protégée. In any event, Callas gives a performance of exquisite melancholy. Her haunting interpretation supposedly inspired, in part, Diva, the 1981 film by Jean-Jacques Beineix.
(Incidentally, while researching this post, I learned that Diva was issued on DVD in the United States in faux stereo, without Beineix’s knowledge or aproval.)
The photo is from late 1954, showing Callas rehearsing Spontini’s La vestale at La Scala.
Dr. Robert Seletsky, a distinguished musical scholar, questions the attribution to Maria Callas of a “revival of forgotten repertoire and the performance traditions that accompanied it.”
He notes that many of the works cited to bolster this assertion (including Il Turco in Italia, Il pirata, and Anna Bolena) had been produced in the twentieth century before Callas took them up. He also takes issue with Callas’s “inauthentic” (modernist) approach to early Ottocento opera, entailing cuts, minimal ornamentation, and the interpolation of harmonically disfiguring tonic and dominant high notes.
In Seletsky’s view, Rossini’s Armida, which Callas sang under Tullio Serafin at the 1952 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, can be deemed “the only true Callas ‘revival.’” This YouTube clip, in wretched sound, brings us from that 1952 revival the opera’s most celebrated number,“D’amore al dolce impero.” Callas sings with staggering verve and audacity, and many critics believe that the recording documents one of the greatest nights in her career.
Callas returned to “D’amore al dolce impero” in a 1954 RAI concert and reportedly attempted a studio recording of it in 1960, though to the best of my knowledge no trace of it survives. In recent years, the aria has been taken up by Renée Fleming, Joyce di Donato (on disc only, for now), and others.
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.
Maria Callas sang Verdi’s La forza del destino on stage only six times, though she performed Donna Leonora’s great arias from the time of her student days in Greece until 1976 or 1977, shortly before her death.
This “Pace, pace, mio Dio!” is a familiar rendition, from her 1954 EMI set under Tullio Serafin. Still, I find that I almost always learn something new each time I revisit one of Callas’s recordings.
What struck me most today is Serafin’s prodigiously slow tempo. Many a singer would take that, along with Verdi’s mostly spare, simple accompaniment, as an invitation to luxuriate in sound for its own sake.
Yet what variety of expression Callas brings to this music. She infuses Serafin’s (seemingly) placid whole with fire and grandezza. Her very intakes of breath tell. Her tone ranges from massive and cutting to the most exquisitely tapered pianissimo. She uses portamento and rubato with taste and imagination. What scorching heat she brings to “Che l’amo ancor” and “Alvaro, io t’amo!” How she colors the different iterations of “fatalità” with rage, awe, resignation, acceptance.
Some claim that the Forza Leonora is a passive, uninteresting character. Yet in this aria, a prayer, Callas conveys so clearly what Massimo Mila described as the distinctive qualities of Verdi’s heroes and heroines:
Defeated, battered by fate, they nonetheless fight to the last with savage energy. They are not elegiac; they are ferocious… They are great souls, of proud and terrible resolution.
When Callas recorded Forza in 1954, she had almost finished slimming. Many believe that her weight loss caused her vocal decline. (Listen to that flap at “invan la pace”—the producer Walter Legge threatened to give away a seasickness pill with each LP side!)
I for one don’t believe that Callas’s weight loss and vocal problems are related. If Petsalis-Diomidis and his many sources in The Unknown Callas can be trusted, Callas had a wobble even as a student in Athens. Nor was her weight loss extremely rapid: According to Meneghini and to Callas herself, she lost 60 or 70 pounds over the course of roughly two years, a healthy and prudent rate.
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