Callas in Ballo II

Some months ago I posted an excerpt from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, the opera in which Maria Callas opened the 1957-58 La Scala season. As I indicated then, this triumphant Ballo came at a time when Callas’s career was beginning to unravel, though she was in superlative form during the Ballo run.

Today, as part of Verdi’s birthday week, I offer you a trio from that same Ballo, which was conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni. In truth, this particular moment in the performance is a bit shambolic, with a few false entries and the like, but it is white-hot and very exciting.

Along with Maria Callas as Amelia, the selection features Giuseppe di Stefano as Riccardo and Ettore Bastianini as Renato.

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Verdi.

Callas in Manon Lescaut

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.

Callas: The Dregs

Maria Callas’s 1972 Philips recording of duets with Giuseppe di Stefano has never been commercially released (in The Callas Legacy, John Ardoin deemed the prospect “ghoulish”) but some, maybe all, of the material can be found on YouTube.

I listened to the Otello duet, which I found ghastly. I will say nothing of di Stefano—even in his prime, he is, for me, an unacceptably coarse vocalist—but Callas sounds tentative and adrift. Ardoin wrote of another selection that she “is forced to chop up phrases into small expressive units to breathe and survive.” The same is true of her pitiful work in Desdemona’s Act I music.

In the Forza duet, muscle memory seems to take over, because here and there Callas shapes a phrase or colors a word with some of her old magic. (She recorded Forza for EMI and sang Leonora onstage during her early years in Italy.)

For the record: Ardoin assesses the Forza duet very harshly and judges the selection from Vespri to be the disc’s highlight, relatively speaking. Myself, I don’t know whether I will listen to any more than the Otello and Forza duets.