Callas in New York

The Italian Cultural Institute in New York has announced a Maria Callas exhibit, “A Woman, A Voice, A Myth.” The exhibit is scheduled to open on 2 December, Maria Callas’s birthday. Right now, eight days before 2 December, the ICI offers no information on the time or venue.

Quoting from the ICI’s website:

On exhibit shall be the original stage costumes, outfits, jewelry, photographs, and unpublished documents belonging to the unforgettable soprano Maria Callas. The exhibit will be accompanied by archival footage and music.

I will keep you posted as I learn more. I imagine that this is an iteration of one of the travelling exhibits that have been making the rounds in recent years. In some cases, as Nina Foresti has observed, costumes that seem to have little or nothing to do with ones that Callas actually wore have been exhibited as “Callas costumes” (select the link and keep scrolling down). I don’t know whether they will be part of this exhibit.

Maria Callas ailleurs

My learnèd and elegant friend Paolo Bullo wrote a beautiful post to honor the anniversary of Maria Callas’s birth into eternal life.

Se leggete l’italiano, andate direttamente al blog di Paolo. (Attenzione, però: Paolo è una persona squisita ma, a quanto pare, alquanto sàdica in materia di tipografia, almeno nei confronti delle persone, come la sottoscritta, di età veneranda. ☺)

If English is easier for you, my quick-and-dirty translation follows.

For a poor soul like me, it is hard to find the right words to recall Maria Callas today, on the thirty-third anniversary of her death.

Who knows, too, whether poor Callas would have wanted to be recalled by me. I rather doubt it.

On the grounds of manifest incompetence, then, I willingly abstain from swelling the river of words that always overflows on these occasions. Instead, I shall quote her teacher, Elvira de Hidalgo, who described her first meeting with the 15-year-old Sofia Anna Maria Cecilia Kalageropoulos, not yet Maria Callas.

Without a word of warning, Maria began to sing. To speak of this now may bring a smile, because we know now who Maria Callas is, but I discovered it then, at that moment.

I suddenly found myself alert, tense.

For years, in secret, I had been waiting for that voice—no, I had been seeking it.

It was a meeting destined to happen. I closed my eyes. I heard a violent, riotous cascade of sounds, uncontrolled, but dramatic and moving.

And I close with beautiful remarks by Leonardo Bragaglia from the preface of the most recent edition of his book on Maria Callas, L’arte dello stupore.

Maria Callas’s destiny was unique. Audiences showered praise upon her. She was put on a pedestal by critics both qualified and censorious. The greatest conductors and stage directors respected her, but she was insulted by the charlatans of the illustrated magazines, by pens-for-hire!

All of us, music lovers and musicologists, performers and spectators, remain bewildered and embittered by this. We, too, are insulted.

I adore this photo, because I see in it so much humanity and so little rhetoric.

A reader by the very interesting name of Nina Foresti kindly brought to my attention the Official Maria Callas International Archive.

In terms of look and feel, the site is a real blast from the past (party like it’s 1999, kids!), but it contains much interesting material. I commend it to you warmly, though I have barely begun exploring it myself.

Maria Callas in Madama Butterfly

Maria Callas recorded excerpts from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly under Tullio Serafin in 1954 and the complete opera under Herbert van Karajan in 1955, shortly before she undertook the rôle in Chicago.

If you believe that “Nina Foresti” was Maria Callas, she sang a truncated version of “Un bel dì” on the Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour radio show in 1935.

Callas biographers are divided on this point. Some report that she owned up to being Nina, while others cite her saying that she never sang under an assumed name. Nina’s speaking voice does sound vaguely like Callas’s, albeit mature for an 11-year-old girl. Her singing voice, though, is utterly unlike Callas’s. (And when did Callas ever work in the toy department of a large department store?)

In a 1957 interview, Callas described her young voice as “dark, almost black—when I think of it, I think of thick molasses,” a description that does not match Nina’s timbre at all.

Callas also sang music from Butterfly at the Italian Embassy in Athens during World War II. She returned to this excerpt, Cio-Cio San’s death scene, in her 1963 concert tour and taught it at Juilliard and Osaka master classes.

It was after Callas’s last Chicago performance as Cio-Cio San that the infamous incident with the process server took place.

This performance of Butterfly’s death scene seems to me markedly different from the one she gave a year before, something that happens rarely in the Callas discography. Nicolai Gedda sings the rôle of Pinkerton.

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Puccini, and view a snippet of film from her Chicago rehearsals.