My thoughts naturally turned to Maria Callas, and I decided to revisit one of her “late” (post-Meneghini) recordings: Amelia’s Act III aria, “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” from Ballo. Nicola Rescigno conducts, and the recording was made in April 1964.
I have two thoughts about this recording. First, if it is true, as some claim, that a “secret son” of Callas and Onassis died only three years before, then recording this aria must have been extremely trying for Callas.
I shall die, but first grant me the grace of pressing my only son to my breast. And if you deny this last favor to your wife, do not deny it to the pleas of my maternal heart. I shall die, but let his kisses console (the torment) inside me, now that the last of my fleeting hours has come. His hand will reach out over the eyes of his mother, killed by his father, whom he shall never see again!
Second, Callas is in splendid voice. Her tone is drenched in sadness, and her phrasing, while eloquent, seems so natural and inevitable.
I do have my doubts about the very last sovracuto. (Does anyone else find that it sounds spliced in?).
Still, what a pity that Callas would withdraw from the stage about a year later, and that her pride would not allow her to go on singing if she was no longer mistress of Norma, the most cruelly taxing of rôles.
Composers’ dependence on women is unique to opera. Beethoven piano sonatas can be played by men, and men are capable of playing the trombone or conducting an orchestra, but no boy soprano could ever sing operatic female roles. Women are thus critical in authoring the operatic work as an audible reality; they cannot be prohibited from the work’s production unless (as Britten did) the composer limits himself to an all-male cast. And once they start singing, these women—cozily envisaged as pleasurable objects—will begin creating sound instead. Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”
I think that Abbate’s point about boy sopranos may hold only for “modern” opera. Isn’t it true that in eighteenth-century Rome, for example, Papal censors did not allow women on stage, and female rôles were taken by boys?
(Let’s not even go near the issue of castrati, and of whether or not they be “boys,” “males,” or what have you.)
The image, I believe, shows Maria Callas as Medea, in the Margherita Wallmann production that opened the 1953–1954 La Scala season. (If you happen to know otherwise, please speak up.)
Michael Scott, the founder of the London Opera Society, has an acid tongue and, it seems, the constancy of a streetwalker.
In his liner note for the Naxos reissue of Rossini’s Il turco in Italia, Mr. Scott uses Maria Callas as a stick with which to beat Cecilia Bartoli. He cites the monumentally important Rossini scholarship undertaken by Philip Gossett and others, then remarks:
A recent recording, taking advantage of this scholarship,… suffers from a Fiorilla whose florid singing is full of aspirates [audible exhalations of breath]; so obviously is her voice caught in her throat, the analogy she conjures up is that of a turkey gobbling.
Now that he is in Naxos’s employ, Mr. Scott seems to have discovered heretofore unsuspected virtues in Maria Callas’s performance. In his bitchy, hateful Maria Meneghini Callas (1991), he had written of her Fiorilla:
From the time Callas has lost weight we note the element of contrivance beginning to obtrude in her characterizations. However, spontaneity is essential to Rossini’s style. Although Callas’s Fiorilla may be remarkably different from her Leonora, it lacks charm and does not engage the listener’s sympathy… Exaggerating was the nearest Callas could get to comedy.
Judge for yourself whether Callas’s Fiorilla “lacks charm” or, indeed, whether “in her attempts to refine her characterization she loses sight of the basis of secure vocal emission: a correctly supported voice.”
Her partner in this duet is Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, and Gianandrea Gavazzeni leads the La Scala orchestra.
The wind instruments have the vicious property that they emancipate themselves from the text, they are substitutes for the voice as the voice beyond words. No wonder that Dionysus has chosen the flute as his preferred instrument (cf. Pan’s pipes), while Apollo has decided on the lyre… not to mention the mythical connections of flute with Gorgon, and so on. Mladan Dolar on Plato in “The Object Voice”
The image shows Maria Callas rehearsing Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Dallas in 1959. The musical excerpt is from her 1953 EMI recording of Lucia.
The flute, of course, is all over the score of Lucia, particularly in the mad scene (where, in most modern performances, it takes the place of the glass harmonica). I recently learned from Wikipedia that the glass harmonica once was believed to cause madness in musicians and listeners. The plot thickens!
Since Maria Callas was greatly devoted to the Theotokos (and celebrated her name day on the Dormition of the Theotokos), it seems fitting to conclude this series of excerpts from her 1954 recording of Verdi’s La forza del destino with “La vergine degli angeli.”
Out of cattiveria, I intended to post Callas’s rendition of the aria side-by-side with Renata Tebaldi’s traversal from Naples (1958), widely considered a milestone. Upon revisiting the two versions, I was surprised at how generally similar they are—and also surprised to note that, on purely vocal terms, I much prefer Callas.
Tebaldi, to my ears, consistently sings just under the pitch (though this may have more to do with the recording than with her). She mewls or croons once or twice (something I cannot abide), and I think that Callas outclasses her in phrasing and dynamics.
Truth be told, I think that for vocal splendor the finest version of “La vergine degli angeli” is the one by Ezio Pinza and Rosa Ponselle. Indeed, that recording of Pinza and Ponselle singing Verdi seems to me to reach some ultimate human limit of beauty, nobility, and genius. Maria Callas herself is supposed to have said, “I think we all know that Ponselle is simply the greatest singer of us all.”
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”
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.
This film shows a 1901 funeral cortège of Giuseppe Verdi. I write “a” cortège, because I don’t know whether this is Verdi’s coffin being borne to temporary interment at Milan’s Cimitero monumentale in January 1901, or the coffins of Verdi and his wife Giuseppina en route a month later to the Casa di riposo per musicisti, where they can be visited today.
I think that the film shows the latter, because Verdi’s January funeral, in accordance with his wishes, was austere. He had asked for “one priest, one candle, one cross,” and the New York Times report indicated that his coffin was placed on “a very modest funeral car.” The February cortège, in contrast, was an elaborate state affair.
On both occasions, the chorus “Va, pensiero” was sung—in February, by a chorus of some 800 people led by Arturo Toscanini; and in January, spontaneously, by the assembled throngs.
Maria Callas’s Milan home was not far from the Casa di riposo, but I do not know whether she ever visited the tombs of Verdi and Giuseppina.
If I could choose “old” operas to dust off and revive, I might put Weber’s Oberon and Der Freischütz at the top of the list. Through the middle of last century, they were well represented on disc and occasionally staged, and then… nothing. A shame, for they are grand, roiling works that give us a taste of German Romantic opera before Wagner.
Maria Callas sang “Ocean! thou mighty monster” as a young girl and again in the early 1960s. For a developing voice or a worn instrument, this strenuous aria seems a foolhardy choice but, again, Weber’s music was part of the mainstream repertoire in those years.
Callas sang a Freischütz aria in 1938, at her first public concert in Greece. She returned to Weber’s music throughout her Greek years and in 1950 and 1951 concerts in Italy. She took up “Ocean!” for a London appearance in 1962 and for EMI sessions in 1962, 1963, and 1964.
The text to “Ocean!” can be found here. Some have praised Callas for her fine English enunciation in this aria, but as far as I’m concerned, she may as well be singing in Etruscan. (Incidentally, did you know that Callas, in her Greek years, sang Dido’s lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas as well as “On Wenlock Edge” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, both in English?)
I do not know the precise date of this recording (1962–64). Callas is in portentous form, though her high notes are a trial, more or less screams. Still, to quote Bruce Burroughs, a writer sometimes hostile to Callas: “By some mysterious alchemy she was even able to demonstrate how music she could not sing well should ideally be sung.”
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.
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.
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
1950 was an epic year in Maria Callas’s career. According to Frank Hamilton's invaluable chronologies, at one point, in the space of six days (between February 23 and 28), she sang two performances each of Norma and Tristan und Isolde. She was twenty-six years old.
In October, shortly after singing Tosca two evenings in a row and a month before she undertook Kundry in Parsifal, Callas sang the florid comic rôle of Fiorilla in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia in Rome, an excerpt from which appears above. In 1949, of course, she had won fame for singing Brünnhilde in Die Walküre and Elvira in I puritani in quick succession.
In her ghostwritten 1957 memoirs, Callas recalled the 1950 Turco performances:
While I was preparing myself under the direction of Maestro [Gianandrea] Gavazzeni in Rome to interpret this difficult opera, I had the opportunity to know better Luchino Visconti, who had previously complimented me. I remember my surprise at seeing a man of his distinction sit in attentively at almost all of the rehearsals, which lasted a minimum of three or four hours—and we rehearsed twice a day.
We will never know for sure whether the exploits of Callas’s early years in Italy hastened her vocal decline, but one thing is certain: Her unrelenting activities in 1950 (including a strenuous Mexican season) took their toll on her health. She was forced to withdraw from several high-profile engagements at the end of the year because of an attack of jaundice.
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.
Maria Callas sang the rôle of Kundry in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal five times in 1949 and 1950. It was in this opera that she first caught the attention of Luchino Visconti. He recalled:
The first time I saw Maria was when she was still enormous. She was half naked in the second act, covered with yards and yards of transparent chiffon—a marvellous temptress, like an odalisque… Every night she sang I secured a certain box and shouted like a mad fanatic when she took her bows. I sent her flowers. She was beautiful but fat on stage, commanding—her gestures thrilled you.
Renata Scotto laughed at the fat, graceless Callas before attending Parsifal but then, à la Kundry, was thunderstruck. “Little by little this voice had all the nature in it—the forest and the magic castle and hatred that is love. And little by little she not fat with bad skin and rich-husband-asleep-in-the-corner; she witch who burn you by standing there.”
As you can hear, Kundry was an extraordinarily congenial rôle for Callas. By some accounts, she was scheduled to sing it at La Scala in 1956 instead of Giordano’s Fedora.
As it happens, Marianne Brandt, who sang Kundry in the second performance of Parsifal in 1882, studied under Pauline Viardot. Brandt’s repertoire included Le Prophète, Lucrezia Borgia, La Favorite, Il trovatore, and other operas requiring a superb command of florid music.
Wagner is supremely ill-served by barkers, shouters, and vocalists lacking the musical polish (and elemental sensuality) of a Callas. She observed, correctly, “Wagner could never hurt your voice, if you know how to sing well.”
This has been a week of words, not music, at re-visioning callas. To remedy this situation, I offer you Callas singing “Ebben, ne andrò lontana” from La Wally by Alfredo Catalani—the aria featured in the 1981 film Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix.
This 1954 recording is led by Tullio Serafin, and the photo shows Callas c. 1947.
Had Gilda remained an active part of [Callas’s] repertory, she might well have made the public revalue this role as it did Lucia. Again she uncovered an unsuspected dramatic dimension by making Gilda an innocent whom circumstance transforms into a woman. She fashioned the part at the outset as an ingénue, not a soubrette, using what has been termed her “little girl voice,” a sound frequently heard in her Sonnambula, Lucia, and even in parts of Traviata. This unmistakable sound was created by a brightening of her dark timbre with a very forward placement of vowels and with little of the covered mixture of vowels and consonants she used in weightier parts. John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald, Callas
For some reason I am fixated right now on Callas’s use of portamento. Even bitchy Walter Legge praises “the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos” and the way she “var[ied] their curve with enchanting grace and meaning.“
Yes. And doesn’t this 1955 “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto spoil you for all other versions?
The July 2009 premiere of Prima Donna, the opera by the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, called forth an unusual amount of snark, particularly among people who were not in attendance. I suppose it’s inevitable that Wainwright—gifted, productive, with admirers all over the world—would gall those whose life’s work is to bitch and cavil.
I happen to consider Wainwright a genius, a melodist with the potential to rival Irving Berlin and Verdi. That said, I’ve yet to form an opinion about Prima Donna as a whole because I have neither seen nor heard it. (The reviews tell little.) The opera will have its North American premiere later this year in Toronto and plays Sadler’s Wells next month.
Let’s clear up one thing right away: That photo, widely used by biographers to evoke the supposed misery and isolation of Callas’s last years, does not depict her at her apartment on avenue Georges-Mandel (at right) or at the end of her life. The ironwork and Callas’s blouse in the iconic image match those in the sepia-toned picture at left, which shows Callas at the Hôtel Ritz Paris. (See the Colonne Vendôme out the window?)
The two Ritz photos, interior and exterior shots, seem to have been taken at the same session, probably (this is a guess) around 1964, when Callas was recording, concertizing, still active on the operatic stage, and hardly a victim of futility and despair.
Still, as I read “Les feux d’artifice” out of context, Wainwright projects onto this image the sad, withdrawn, waiting-for-death Callas of legend: “Callas was imprisoned all alone in her apartment in the XVIe arrondissement” (Pierre-Jean Rémy). The plot of Prima Donna, set in Paris on Bastille Day in 1970, is convoluted and involves a diva’s lost voice, a comeback attempt, frustrated passion, and a gracious withdrawal à la the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. The fictional timeline (last performance in 1964 or 1965) and various details (e.g. the diva’s ability to reach high notes offstage but not in performance) pointedly recall Callas.
As the opera ends, Régine Saint-Laurent (oy) has decided not to attempt a comeback and abandoned her dreams of love. She steps out onto her balcony and sings:
The fireworks are calling you: Come down to the street! The colors in the sky Shine down upon the city, The heavenly fire that was... Come down to the street! And love is no longer awaited. Joy and happiness are everywhere. All over Paris people are partying. I stay. I watch. Young men, come down with your mistresses. Young women, make the most of the time that’s left. I stay here. I look out of my big window.
The fireworks are over. That didn’t last long.
For all its shimmering gorgeousness, “Les feux d’artifice” seems to me very dark. The overwhelming sensation is one of stasis—in the obsessive figure that underpins the aria; in Régine’s words (“Je reste. Je regarde… Je reste ici,” repeated and set at the aria’s climax); in the contrast between the singer, withdrawn, watching from her window, and the Parisians who heed the fireworks’ call and celebrate in the streets.
Even when Régine invites young people to seize the day, her words are hackneyed and faintly archaic (“vos maîtresses”) as if invoked without conviction—or, perhaps, quoted from one of her old rôles. What’s more, they are sandwiched between expressions of her immobility and implicitly call attention to her age and solitude. “Le feux du ciel qui fut” may be the sacred fire of music that once burned in Régine but now is spent.
When the fireworks end, all is silence. The music that accompanies Régine is shorn of its glitter and rhapsodic arpeggios. The aria’s last note is held an unusually long time—Wainwright consistently sings it thus in performance, suggesting that it is scored this way. It illustrates the word “longtemps” and, paradoxically, also the idea of finitude, sorely testing even a great singer’s breath and dying away in a whimper.
Am I hearing voices within the voice? But isn’t it the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? Isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one? Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”
My voice is mere breath that will die with the new day. Adriana Lecouvreur
The Barthes quote is taken from a beautiful article by Michal Grover-Friedlander, “The Afterlife of Maria Callas’s Voice,” Musical Quarterly 88 (1). I commend it to you warmly.
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