Callas in Ballo I

My friend JRD is an arbiter elegantiarum, a beautiful writer, and a fierce prayer warrior. (He is also today’s birthday boy. Joyeux anniversaire, chéri ! I am so blessed to know you.)

His recent tribute to Maria Callas in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera inspired me to post an excerpt from her 1957 season-opening Ballo at La Scala.

Gianandrea Gavazzeni led this incandescent performance. Callas, as you can hear in “Ma dall’arido stelo divulsa,” was in inspired form. While her highest note is a touch unsteady, she phrases up to it and back down in a single breath. Her voice somehow tells of both shadows and moonlight, terror and faith.

1957, you will recall, marked something of a turning point in Callas’s career. In the months leading up to this Ballo, she made an emotional return to Greece and was involved in “scandalous” withdrawals from an Edinburgh Sonnambula and from a series of performances at the San Francisco Opera.

In both cases, she pleaded exhaustion, and the exhaustion can be heard in her two summer 1957 recordings, Puccini’s Turandot and Manon Lescaut. (As I’ve noted in the past, the latter was not released until 1959 because of Callas’s misgivings about her form.)

That said, after two months of rest, she returned in late 1957 to give some of the greatest performances of her career: her Dallas concert (in which she is rock-solid up to a high E-flat) and the Scala run of Ballo. Dark storm clouds were on the horizon, though: The Rome Norma “scandal” (in which Callas was blameless but hounded viciously in the Italian press) exploded weeks after this Ballo.

A very kind and very learnèd reader insists that Callas’s vocal deterioration was brought about by her weight loss, but that seems too simplistic an explanation to me. Three years after slimming, she could sing with volcanic power (as in this Ballo) and a mind-boggling range of color and dynamics (as in the Köln Sonnambula, from July 1957). Both performances, not coincidentally, came after periods of relative or complete rest.

It is clear that the punishing—nay, reckless pace of Callas’s early career took its toll. (Two Normas and two Brünnhildes in six days? In modern times, with a modern orchestra and diapason, who but Callas has attempted such folly? Twenty-hour days preparing the Scala Sonnambula? The list could go on!)

Callas herself wrote to her friend Cristina Gastel Chiarelli that she was “irremediably tired” from the time of the Scala Bolena, in 1956. Vocal unsteadiness might be explained by this organic fatigue, compounded by tension (brought about by snowballing “scandals,” which could have been averted by a manager more skilled and less conniving than Meneghini). Exhaustion seems to me a tidy explanation also because, following periods of rest, Callas’s late-1950s vocal form could be quite secure (e.g. the 1959 Gioconda).

What’s more, I believe with Will Crutchfield that Callas’s technique was never quite right—and with Tito Gobbi, who was no one’s fool, that Callas lost her confidence more than her voice. (If those purported 1976 and 1977 recordings are authentic, they, too, support the contention that Callas up to the end of her life could sing well without the pressure of an audience. I will post those recordings eventually, though I am not fully convinced that they are genuine.)

Finally, Petsalis-Diomidis quotes Giulietta Simionato as saying that Callas was aware of her wobble as early as 1950 (long before slimming).

The mystery continues! In the meantime, though, enjoy JRD’s prose and Callas’s stunning singing.

Callas in Mozart and Verdi

27 January is a day kissed by the angels, a vortex of musical space-time. It is the day on which Mozart began his earthly journey in 1756 and on which Verdi passed back into eternity in 1901.

Maria Callas sang only one Mozart heroine on stage: Kostanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1952, La Scala). Verdi was much more important in her career; her Verdi rôles comprised Gilda, Violetta, both Leonoras, Elisabeth de Valois, Lady Macbeth, Hélène, Aida, Amelia, and Abigaille.

A quote from Will Crutchfield’s masterful 1997 article “The bel canto connection”:

One of Maria Callas’ more eyebrow-raising comments in her 1971 – 72 Juilliard master classes was the assertion that Mozart “should be performed with the same frankness and bel canto approach one would use in Il trovatore, for instance. Mozart,” she went on, to make sure no one overlooked the point, “was a master of bel canto, and a necessity of bel canto is a full, sustained tone and good legato. So sing Mozart as though he were Verdi—there is no difference in the approach.”

Callas, Crutchfield concludes, was “dead right”—though, heaven knows, fascists and dorks of many stripes would howl in protest.

(For the record: I think that today’s “mainstream,” commonly accepted performance practices for both Mozart and Verdi are pathetic and wrongheaded.)

Judge Callas’s work for yourself. For this 27 January 2010, I make you two gifts: Her 1954 recording of “Marten aller Arten” and her 1956 recording of “Tu vedrai che amore in terra.”

Both Kostanze and the Trovatore Leonora are in love with death, and Callas imbues their music with a dark urgency.

Callas in Macbeth

Her second selection is her opening scene in Macbeth. It begins superbly, but when the line rises to a high C that had rung out steely-sure at La Scala, her voice cracks, and for an instant she breaks character with an oddly coquettish, apologetic smile. Blink and you would miss it, but if you don’t blink it takes several moments before Lady Macbeth is back in focus.
Will Crutchfield, “The Story of a Voice”