Maria Callas in the news

• Francesco Renga, a past winner of the Sanremo Music Festival, recently recorded a popular song in duet with Daniela Dessì and had this to say about a concert in which he will mix musical genres (emphasis added): “An audience that has never seen an opera, fascinated by the evening’s other guests—Lucio Dalla, Gianni Morandi, Riccardo Cocciante—will be able to understand what’s behind this opera that seems so distant, but in reality is a popular [means of] expression from a few decades ago. Opera was a kind of television ante litteram or like concerts by rock stars that we see now. Maria Callas was a diva just like U2 today.”
• Old news: In 2007, the Poste Italiane issued a Maria Callas stamp.
• Giuseppina Grassi, a singer who taught Giuditta Pasta and was reportedly one of Napoléon’s lovers, is now remembered as la Callas delle Prealpi. There is a proposal to name a music library in Varese after Grassi.
• The Maria Callas rubbish bins that you read about earlier are now a reality. Franco Zeffirelli, to his credit, deems “blasphemous” the juxtaposition of a pop-art image of Callas with “cigarette butts, dirty tissues, banana peels, and chewing gum.”
• To stay on the subject of trash, Alfonso Signorini, the eminent gossipparo and author of a “novel” about Maria Callas, presided over an evening dedicated to her memory in Sirmione, during which excerpts from his magnum opus were declaimed by the actress Serena Autieri. MilanoWeb.com draws an unkind but telling contrast between José Saramago’s work and Signorini’s “festival of nullity.” (In Italian, this is called a stroncatura, and it’s a beautiful thing.)
• I have read Signorini’s “novel” and consider it noteworthy only insofar as it may inspire a revival of book burning. From time to time, rumors fly that it will be adapted as a film. (Please, G-d, NO.)
• Maria Callas’s “mysterious death” was examined on the Italian television show Top Secret, whose producers are apparently unfamiliar with the language of Dante and Michelangelo.
• A young poet by the name of Alessio Esposito Langella has published a collection of poems, Granelli di sabbia, which includes a poem and/or a drawing (the article is unclear) inspired by Maria Callas.
• A play about Aristotle Onassis is to open on London’s West End.
• A costume that Maria Callas wore in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Norma is on exhibit in France. (The image above shows Callas with Simionato during the Norma run.)
• With thanks to the friend who sent the link: In La Ville-aux-Dames, near Tours, there is a statue of Maria Callas by the sculptor Michel Audiard (scroll down to see it).
• Maria Callas is one of Rufus Wainwright’s icons, but we knew this.
• The film adaptation of Terrence McNally’s Master Class directed by Faye Dunaway is in post-production, slated to be released later this year.

Callas: Fragile theatrical trailer

Copied and pasted from YouTube: “A monologue with voice off written and directed by Stefano Masi. Francesca Caratozzolo plays the role of Maria Callas and the voice of Jackie O.” (Strange, no, that Jackie, famously silent for decades, should be a vocal presence in this work?)

The YouTube description concludes enigmatically:

Finally they can meet each other in real. But does that theatre a real one? What’s behind the curtain?

What indeed?

The clip seems to be promoting a theatrical monologue about Callas, Marilyn Monroe, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The portentious text contains one possible error: Wayne Koestenbaum and others report that Callas and Jackie did meet, for a handshake and pleasantries, following one of Callas’s 1965 Tosca performances at the Met.

Stefano Masi apparently has created films or videos commissioned by La Scala about Luchino Visconti (available on YouTube).

Does anyone have further information about Fragile? Is it a film, a play, or both?

Once again, I invite you to read Catherine Clément on Callas and Monroe.

Callas as commodity

Maria Callas has been a commodity at least since her Italian début, or perhaps since her mother reportedly urged her to “befriend” occupying soldiers in wartime Athens, or perhaps since her childhood grind of talent contests and the like.

The following links are offered almost without comment. (Horrible as they are, they’re no worse than rubbish bins, I think.)

• Bella armchairs in Maria Callas fabric
• The “Callas bungalow” on Greece’s Halkidiki peninsula
  
• The Maria Callas Experience on board the Christina O (with new, excruciating details since the last time I posted about it)
• …

Callas and assonance

A Swedish imp, armed with Photoshop and a nose for the absurd, offers irreverent looks at Baudelaire, Dante, Zarah Leander, Medea, and many others, including (yes) Maria Callas.

(Thank you, darling Ulrika!)

Callas on rubbish bins

A friend in Brazil brought my attention to articles from Il Corriere del Veneto and L’Arena: The municipality of Zevio, the ancestral home of Callas’s husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini, now displays images of Maria Callas and the slogan “Zevio, the city of Callas” on benches, flower pots, and rubbish bins.

Meneghini’s family and various personalities (including Franco Zeffirelli) have objected, but a local bureaucrat defends the undertaking: “Its purpose is to remind everyone that this great artist lived in Zevio.”

A bit from the Corriere article:

Why not leave the benches and flower pots and simply remove the singer’s image from the rubbish bins? According to the mayor, it cannot be done: “Urban fixtures must be uniform in appearance.”*

[Another official] came up with a new proposal: “Music lovers and philanthropists, if they so desire, can donate a fixture to the city. A plaque will record their name alongside Callas’s countenance.” In effect, a “crumb” of immortality for those who contribute to re-equipping the streets with a bench or a flower pot. The question remains, though: Who would want to give their name to a rubbish bin?

*Translator’s note: Remember what Dr. McCoy said in Star Trek IV? “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.”

The issue, predictably, is further tangled up with electoral politics and perennial buffoneria. The mayor: “We were voted into office, in part, because our platform called for promoting the city in the name of Callas. I am even willing to print the singer’s image on signs welcoming drivers to Zevio to publicize the fact that the only house still standing in which Maria and Battista lived is here in Zevio.”

In the meantime, Giancarlo Tanzi, a collector of Callas memorabilia who lives in Munich, complains that Zevio has failed to make good on its promise to open a Callas museum to display the material he donated. “The city told me that the museum would open in June or September, without however specifying the year.” According to Tanzi, part of his collection (“photos and precious films”) was destroyed while stored in a garage.

The mayor’s reply: “We’ll open the museum in June or September. Well, as soon as the engineer submits the plans. In fact, if the plans don’t arrive in time, we’ll set up the museum on a provisional basis, just to get it open at last.”

Callas in advertising

In the virtuoso effusions of [advertising’s] highest form, the television commercial—which Jean Baudrillard calls the simulation of a communication which seems more real than reality—cultural signifiers of every kind are pulled loose and float around in a suspended space, which Baudrillard calls hyper-reality, where they sometimes attach themselves to commodities and sometimes to buzzwords… The commercial creates a subject in its own image, a dependent spectator, pure consumer, whose every desire is catered for on one condition: the price to be paid… Here traditional cultural values are not so much subverted as simply vaporized.
Michael Chanan, Musica Practica

Callas and Omero Lengrini II

Before coming down with the plague, I had promised an update to my first Omero Lengrini post.

Some of this information comes to me from a Callas scholar based in Europe, to whom I express my sincere gratitude.

Omero Lengrini’s complete birth certificate has been published, and a scan is available here. According to my source, the certificate indicates that the baby’s mother was “a woman who does not consent to be identified,” as Nicholas Gage reports. “Mario” (whose family name is illegible) is listed as a witness, not as the baby’s father.

I find the scan difficult to read and will not comment further on the birth certificate until I have had a chance to examine it directly.

The article in which the birth certificate is published was written by a Mr. Karl H. van Zoggel, who accepts Gage’s story of Callas’s “secret son,” albeit with so many changes, qualifications, and fishy sources (clinic staff who vouch for Callas’s undocumented presence some forty years after the fact) as to strain credulity.

Mr. van Zoggel also cites “very reliable” sources (unwilling to go on the record, it seems) who indicate that Omero Lengrini was buried in the Civico Cimitero of Bresso—while admitting, “Nevertheless, the burial register and documents at the cemetery do not state any inclusion of a baby in April 1960.”

I suspect that these “very reliable” sources are the same ones who have plastered the supposed fact of the Bresso burial all over the Italian press in recent years. (Some mention a cemetery in Bruzzano; Bresso, as I understand it, is part of Bruzzano, so this may be a case of two names for the same place.) What no one so far has explained is: Why, if Omero was her son, did Callas not have his remains moved when she sold her villa on via Buonarroti and took up residence in Paris in the early 1960s?

All this said, going back through the Callas literature, I note two mentions of a possible miscarriage, both of which predate Nicholas Gage’s Greek Fire (2001). Franco Zeffirelli in his autobiography (1986) mentions a rumor that Callas suffered a miscarriage, though the timeframe is not specified. Renzo and Roberto Allegri in Callas by Callas (I have the Italian edition, from 1997) state that she miscarried a child by Onassis in her fourth month of pregnancy, again giving no indication of when this might have occurred.

Neither Zeffirelli nor the Allegri duo is an unimpeachable source, but a miscarriage seems at least plausible to me. A full- or nearly full-term pregnancy that never showed, ending in an elective (!) Caesarean for reasons of vanity, resulting in the baby’s death, and followed closely by high-profile social and artistic appearances—all this seems not at all plausible to me.

A 2007 interview of Giovanna Lomazzi (PDF), a friend who travelled with Callas during the months when Gage says that Callas was expecting, makes no mention of a pregnancy. I find it surprising that the Repubblica journalist did not even raise the issue, given that the pregnancy by 2007 was treated as fact in the Italian press and always good for cheap thrills.

This is the last time that I intend to post about Omero Lengrini until I have examined the crucial documents myself and spoken at length with surviving Callas intimates in a position to know about a supposed pregnancy. (Needless to say, very few of them remain.)

Callas tourism

Pilgrimage: A journey (usually of a long distance) made to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion; the action or practice of making such a journey.

Jared Paul Stern (oh dear) invites us to book passage for “a special Maria Callas Experience charter” this spring and summer on board the Christina O.

The yacht Christina, a floating palace of its day, belonged to Aristotle Onassis. Callas and Onassis reportedly became lovers on board in 1959. The boat changed hands several times after the tycoon’s death in 1975 and was renamed Christina O—eliding the name of Onassis’s daughter and the jaunty (scandalized?) nickname of his second wife—about ten years ago.

According to Wikipedia, she can be chartered for €45,000 to €65,000 a day.

Sean “Diddy” Combs recently cruised on the Christina O.

The more impecunious among us may prefer a tour of locations associated with Maria Callas in Verona (where she made her Italian début) and possibly also Zevio (where her husband had a family home) and Sirmione (where Callas and her husband owned a vacation home).

The site mentions a museum in Zevio displaying Callas memorabilia, “thousands of pictures, old records, magazines, dresses of the great singer.” As of late 2009, it was not yet open, though I may not have the latest information.

I offer you, as well, an article about Maria Callas and her dogs, with more than sixty photos, including the image you see here of Callas with her poodle Tea in Verona, c. 1954.

Callas de cire, Callas de son

The Musée Grévin in Paris opened in 1882. According to Wikipedia, its mirrored mirage room is “based on the principle of a catoptric cistula.” I was heretofore unfamiliar with the structure, which appears in both The Phantom of the Opera and Borges. (Note to self: Must read and watch more closely.)

Maria Callas is one of the wax figures in the Musée Grévin. Bejewelled, she is shown (anachronistically) with the designer Jean-Paul Gaultier as she delightedly applauds a couture sketch. He seems pleased, perhaps a bit embarrassed, by her approbation.

Does Callas stand in for Madonna c. 1989 (Blond Ambition)? (Gaultier as Biki really makes no sense.)

In the early 1970s, Gaultier worked in Paris. In 1976, a year or so before Callas died, he showed his first collection for women. Perhaps their paths crossed.

The time seems ripe to meditate on Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Poupée de cire, poupée de son,” made famous by France Gall. The lyrics teem with puns and doubles entendres. My quick-and-dirty translation offers a small, tendentious selection of them.

I’m a wax doll, a sound doll.
My heart is recorded in my songs.
Wax doll, sound doll,
Am I better, am I worse, than a fashion doll?
I see life through candy-pink glasses.

My records are a mirror
In which everyone can see me.
I’m everywhere at once,
Smashed into a thousand pieces of voice.

Around me, I hear the rag dolls laughing,
Those who dance to my songs…
They surrender to a yes, to a name.
Love isn’t only in songs.

Alone, sometimes I sigh.
I say, “What good is it,
To sing of love without reason,
Knowing nothing of boys?”
I’m nothing but a wax doll, a sound doll,
Beneath the sun of my blonde hair…

But one day, I will live my songs…
Without fear of boys’ heat…

Callas and Omero Lengrini

In recent years, the most sensational trouvaille in the realm of Callas biographies—one now widely accepted as true—has come from Nicholas Gage.

In Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis (2000), Gage claims that on March 30, 1960, Callas gave birth to a “secret son” by Onassis, Omero Lengrini. (For Gage, “Lengrini” is the pseudonym under which Callas registered at hospital, while the name “Omero” commemorates an uncle of Onassis.) This child was supposedly conceived in August 1959, at the start of Callas’s relationship with Onassis.

According to Gage, Callas insisted that the child be delivered a month early by caesarean section to present Onassis (away on a cruise but due back in early April) “with a fait accompli.” The premature infant died within hours.

I’ve not arrived at a final conclusion, but Gage’s story has never made sense to me. He accepts Meneghini’s claim that Callas was in the early stages of menopause in 1957 and received a year-long series of injections to stave it off.

From there, Gage spins a long string of suppositions, starting with the notion that the injections “almost certainly” were estrogen hormones. Then, all emphasis added:

If Maria had been receiving these injections regularly for at least a year (and perhaps two) beginning in May 1957, then by the time she slept with Onassis in August of 1959, she might have been superfertile.

Gage asserts that a French journalist who interviewed Callas in person in what would have been her seventh month of pregnancy failed to notice her condition. He also claims, inaccurately, that after December 1959, Callas “would not appear in public for the next several months.” In fact, she was photographed on several high-profile occasions in both Milan and Paris as late as mid-February.

A certain “Nina Foresti,” whose site I commend to all, has the photos to demolish Gage’s tale. Nina also publishes Omero Lengrini’s complete birth certificate, which indicates that he was the son of one Mario Lengrini and spouse. (I’ve not yet verified the full birth certificate; Gage offers only partial documentation and claims that Omero’s parents were not identified.)

Nina’s site also includes embedded video of Callas, radiant and glamorous, arriving at the 1960 Cannes Festival, some six weeks after allegedly losing a nearly full-term baby.

Other evidence that argues against Gage’s account:

• Photographs from the sixth or seventh month of Callas’s supposed pregnancy show her as slim and wasp-waisted as ever—and the idea, put forth by Gage, that a singer’s strong abdominal muscles could hide an advanced pregnancy is ludicrous.
• In Gage’s book, Onassis’s former masseuse reports that Callas had a scar in the lower part of her abdomen. Gage presents this as evidence of a caesarean birth, but Callas’s 1948 appendectomy could have left such a scar.
• Gage surmises that Callas rushed the delivery because she “feared having [Onassis] see her swollen and nine months pregnant.” Yet the scar from a c. 1960 caesarean delivery itself would have been quite disfiguring.
• Many authors (Stassinopoulos, Petsalis-Diomidis, Gage himself) reproduce photographs of Callas wearing a bikini, long after the supposed birth, with no evidence of a caesarean scar.
• If Callas were intent on concealing a pregnancy, why on earth would she have chosen to give birth in Milan, where paparazzi followed her every move and camped out on her doorstep?
• Nina Foresti lists engagements for late 1960 that Callas negotiated during her supposed pregnancy and notes that she was back in the recording studio months after Omero Lengrini died. Nina concludes, and I concur: “If this woman gave birth to a son who died shortly thereafter… in light of what she undertook in those months [of 1960], she is not a courageous woman: She is a monster.”
• Finally, by all accounts, Callas wanted nothing more than a child. The idea that she would endanger her baby’s life for reasons of vanity is grotesque. (And what does it mean, to present Onassis “with a fait accompli”? That he might have pressured her to abort a nearly full-term fetus? That idea is both grotesque and hateful.)

I am not prepared to say that Callas never fell pregnant or never gave birth, only that Gage’s tale has more holes in it than Emmentaler. The one longtime Callas friend with whom I have discussed this subject mused that Callas, at some point, hypothetically, could have given birth, but knew nothing of the events related by Gage.

You can learn more about the Omero Lengrini controversy at the Divina Records site, where two articles by Brigitte Pantis argue strongly against the hypothesis that Omero Legrini was Callas’s son.

Callas and D&G

Dolce&Gabbana are stockists to those who mistake flash for elegance and vulgarity for style, to provincials not of place but of soul. (Luca Turin notes of their swill, Light Blue: “If you hate fragrance, you’re probably on your fourth bottle.”)

Their fall 2009 ready-to-wear collection included Maria Callas t-shirts and other frippery for which, they claimed, she was somehow to blame. (Their show took place in Milano’s Cinema Metropol, where Callas recorded Norma for EMI in 1954.)

WWMD? Petition for redress of grievances, no doubt!

JRD, ever acute, wrote of Dolce&Gabbana:

These men have always struck me as the Kevin Costner and Anna Netrebko of the fashion world. Their talent as a team is neither here nor there.

Indeed, they did their best work undressing the Azzurri. (And, yeah, thanks for nothing with those uniforms for Euro 2008.)

Callas à l’enfer

Old news (link NSFH–not safe for humanity), it nonetheless freezes the blood.

“I had a vision. I was in the front row at the Academy Awards with my mother, husband and son, and I won an Oscar for my role as Maria Callas,” says [Céline] Dion, 39, conjuring up the ill-fated Greek opera diva whose story haunts the Canadian siren.

“First, I speak English to thank the academy. Then I speak grec, Greek. Then some French to thank the people at home.” She pauses… “The faces of my mom, my husband, my son. Priceless. It is my best achievement as an artist.”

Bon, que dites-vous là au Québec ? Se retourner dans la tombe ? A retourner l’estomac ?