Callas and Armgart

Oh, I am happy! The great masters write
For women’s voices, and great Music wants me!
I need not crush myself within a mould
Of theory called Nature: I have room
To breathe and grow unstunted.
George Eliot, Armgart (1871)

Armgart is a dramatic poem by Mary Anne Evans, in art George Eliot. The protagonist speaks these words after her triumphant operatic début when, as one critic puts it, “the cage-door of Victorian domesticity was at last flung wide and a seemingly limitless horizon of possibilities lay before her.”

Maria Callas had a fraught relationship with domesticity and the possibilities open to her as a woman in the mid-twentieth century. She described herself as “Victorian” and, if biographers are to be believed, she was very much a submissive, traditional partner to both her husband Meneghini and her lover Onassis.

On the other hand, it seems obvious to me that the hostility Callas has aroused in life and in death has much to do with her strength, will, and ambition. “Nature” made her a poor, obscure, fat woman with an intractable voice; Callas made herself a wealthy, celebrated, glamorous woman with a voice that (for a decade) could do almost anything. While she “breathed and grew unstunted” for a few years, she paid dearly for this relative freedom.

The audio excerpt, I believe, is from Maria Callas’s 1953 Cetra recording of Verdi’s La traviata.

Please see other posts about Maria Callas in La traviata.

Callas and the aural stare

What happens when we watch and hear a female performer? We are observing her, yet we are also doing something for which there’s no word: the aural version of staring… Visually, the character singing is the passive object of our gaze. But, aurally, she is resonant; her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive objects, battered by that voice. As a voice she slips into the “male/active/subject” position in other ways as well, since a singer, more than any other musical performer, enters into that Jacobine uprising inherent in the phenomenology of live performance and stands before us having wrested the composing voice away from the librettist and composer who wrote the score.
Carolyn Abbate, “Opera: or, the Envoicing of Women”

The image shows Maria Callas as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata at La Scala, c. 1955. The sound clip, instead, is from the Lisbon Traviata of 1958, with Alfredo Kraus as Alfredo.

Reminder: A snippet of video footage of Callas and Kraus in La traviata survives.

Giuseppe Taddei, 1916 – 2010

Giuseppe Taddei, one of opera’s most intelligent and masterful performers, has died in Rome. He was 93.

With Herbert von Karajan, Taddei gave two performances that I consider unsurpassed: In the title rôle of Verdi’s Falstaff, and as Tonio in Pagliacci. There are Tonios with more secure tone, but none that I’ve heard equals Taddei in soulfulness or in the natural, telling use of words. (I cannot listen to that performance of the Prologo without crying. That Pagliacci, to my mind, is one of the very greatest operatic performances preserved on disc.)

Taddei is also a splendid Scarpia to the Tosca of Leontyne Price, again under Karajan, and this is only scratching the surface of his discography.

Taddei sang a dozen times with Maria Callas between 1951 and 1958: as Amonastro in Aida, Enrico in Lucia, Gérard in Andrea Chénier, and Germont in La traviata. I find both Callas and Taddei in subpar form in this 1951 Mexico City Traviata, but perhaps that is to be expected given that the conductor was apparently on Quaaludes.

Riposa in pace, insigne Maestro, e grazie per la Sua arte sovrana.

Callas and death I

No one has ever been able to dialogue with death as she did, and her own death resembles a suicide, wrapped in a veil of uneasiness, like something unresolved. But when her time ended, it began again.
Marco Innocenti and Enrica Roddolo, Belle da morire

Belle da morire is a middlebrow book about great female beauties of the twentieth century who (allegedly) came to an unhappy end. The title is hard to translate: Fatal beauties or Beauties to die for, though neither is quite right.

The book trots out all the hoary, dim-witted clichés about female sexuality and its supposed nexus with shame, unhappiness, and death. Maria Callas is one of its subjects, along with a surprising number of women she knew or had met: Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and (yes) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

And yet… the snippet I quoted, from the end of the Callas chapter, struck me with its lyricism and stunning turnabout: Callas not as victim but as phoenix (Φοῖνιξ), immortal, triumphant. The Wiktionary entry on phoenix reads, in part:

from Ancient Egyptian Fnkhw (“Syrian people”). Signifies “mythical bird,” also “the date” (fruit and tree), also “Phoenician,” literally “purple-red,” perhaps a foreign word, or from phoinos (“blood-red”).

Splendor, nobility, sensuality, nourishment, life: Callas indeed shares much with the Φοῖνιξ.

Callas in La traviata II

Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata was among the rôles that Maria Callas performed most frequently (along with Norma and Lucia). On more than one occasion, she remarked that she felt a spiritual kinship with Verdi’s noble, self-sacrificing courtesan.

Callas’s 1958 Covent Garden run of La traviata was her next-to-last encounter with Violetta. She sang two more performances in Dallas and reportedly committed to recording the opera (with a young Luciano Pavarotti) as late as 1968 or 1969, though she ultimately backed out of the project.

The company for La traviata at Covent Garden was strong. Nicola Rescigno conducted, Cesare Valletti was Alfredo, and Mario Zanasi was Germont. Callas was in inspired form—and also exhausted and discouraged following the Rome Norma brouhaha, surgery, and her break with La Scala. A few months later, in fact, during a BBC interview, she raised the possibility of retiring.

The Act II duet with Germont was a high point of the Covent Garden Traviata. As many writers have observed, Callas somehow managed to stop time and distill all of Violetta’s anguish and sacrifice in that hushed, suspended note leading into “Dite alla giovine.” (To paraphrase one of the YouTube comments, we hear not a voice but a soul.)

(I apologize for your having to click through to hear the clip, but embedding is disabled.)

Callas in La traviata I

Video footage of Maria Callas in La traviata, shot in Lisbon in 1958.

Much of the video is unrevealing: Act IV is very dim indeed, and Callas barely moves, as befits a woman whose life and strength are ebbing away. However, at Flora’s party, take note of the moment when she sets eyes on Alfredo, starts, turns away, then composes herself to respond to Douphol—and the way she listens during the tense exchange between Alfredo and Douphol.

A word and a tear for Don Alfredo (Kraus), shown here at the beginning of his career. I was privileged to see and hear him in many of his greatest rôles, and I cannot imagine his ever being surpassed for grace, romance, and musicality. May he rest in peace in the bosom of Abraham.