Callas in Ballo III

At Verdi Duecento, I posted some very interesting comments by Gabriele Baldini about Un ballo in maschera.

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.

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.)

Not much Callas, mostly admin

Re-visioning Callas got a shout-out from Alex Ross of The New Yorker. I am humbled and grateful.

Thanks to a contact in Greece, I have more accurate information about the Omero Lengrini story. Look for a revised post (or a new entry) next week.

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.