Callas and Italian politics, c. 2010

Italian politics makes the prose of Jacques Lacan seem pellucid by comparison, so readers better informed than I are welcome to correct this brief reportage.

Sandro Bondi is a former communist who is now a lackey to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. (Berlusconi’s ongoing attempts to suppress freedom of information in Italy have reached a fever pitch of late.) Even while nominally communist, Mr. Bondi was known as ravanello (“radish”)—red on the outside but white on the inside.

As culture minister for Berlusconi, Mr. Bondi nominated a former managing director of McDonald’s for a position of authority within the ministry. (I am not making this up, alas!) * He also proposed a reorganization of opera house administration that sparked widespread protests, and this is where Maria Callas comes in.

Non zittite l’arte, “Don’t silence art.” Cecil Beaton’s portrait of Maria Callas along with this slogan is the symbol of the group Salviamo i teatri lirici italiani (“Let’s save Italian opera houses”). All of the images in this post come from their Facebook page.

Why Callas? A few hypotheses:

• Because, given her greatness and enduring fame, she is the icon of opera.
• Because, after more than half a century, her work at La Scala with Visconti, Zeffirelli, Wallmann, and others still represents a high point of opera in Italy. (Let us not forget: That work was the result of “genius,” yes, and also of lavish spending.)
• Because, given their nauseous, knee-jerk esterofilia (“anything-but-Italy attitude”), Italians had to choose a foreigner rather than, say, Toscanini, Verdi, or Puccini. (For the record, I do not believe this, but the thought crossed my mind.) **
• Because, on the contrary, Italians in fact think of “la Maria” as Italian. (Callas, to my mind, was rootless, so why not? Let us pass over in silence the fact that the Italian media more or less destroyed her career after the Rome Norma incident.)
• Because no “Italian” singer surpasses her in greatness and notoriety. (The careers of Caruso and Pavarotti were more international than Italian; and, without wishing to seem unkind, how many people today would recognize Tebaldi on a banner or t-shirt?)

* By the way, Starbucks will soon open in Italy. I invite my Italian friends and readers to safeguard the art and livelihood of their local baristi and to boycott and protest by all means necessary this despicable, polluting, exploitative multinational.

** A propos of Verdi: Leghisti (racist Italian separatists of the north) have appropriated ”Va, pensiero” as an anthem of “Padania.” (Verdi, you will recall, played his rôle in the unification of Italy.) The maestro is surely turning in his grave at the Casa di riposo; G-d grant that he rise from that grave and scare those idiots to death!

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.

« La Callas du music-hall » II

Dalida, the singer and actress who was known in her day as la Callas du music-hall, died by her own hand on 3 May 1987. She was 54 years old.

I wrote about parallels between Callas and Dalida back in January. I had intended to publish this post on 3 May, but I have been drunk on allergy meds lo these many weeks now (sigh).

Dalida here gives what, to my mind, is her greatest performance, of Léo Ferré’s devastating “Avec le temps.”

Yolanda, passionale e generosa, non ti si scorderà mai.

The ghost of Maria Callas

“The Ghost of Maria Callas” by Matt Elliott is from his 2006 CD, Failing Songs. Wordless, it is unquiet and graceful.

Is it a song about failing? A song that is failing? A song failing (in the absence of) songs? (Now that is one sexy idea.)

What to make of the melody’s spin and tendency to fold in on itself? Of its quickening tempo and its dying out, hoarse, only to be taken up by that sad, sad piano?

Elliott evoked the spirit world earlier in his career. He said of his 1997 album, Ghost:

While I was making Ghost, I wasn’t really making it for humans. It seemed to me that there was like lots of people just hanging around. The whole experience was really strange.

Callas and Rufus Wainwright I

I think Callas sang a lovely Norma,
you prefer Robeson in “Deep River.”
I may not be so manly,
but still I know you love me…
Rufus Wainwright, “Beauty Mark”
Rufus Wainwright, whose opera Prima Donna was inspired in part by Maria Callas, addresses these lines to his folkie mother Kate McGarrigle. “Beauty Mark” is from his 1998 début album, Rufus Wainwright. McGarrigle died in January 2010, and Wainwright published a fierce and moving tribute to her.

Over the years, Wainwright alluded to differences of style and taste between himself and his crunchy, flower-child mom, exemplified here by Callas and Bellini (precious, foofy, arcane) versus Paul Robeson and spirituals (engagé, “of the people”). Well, the dichotomy, in some ways, is false—but I digress.

The avowed contrasts between McGarrigle and Wainwright made it all the more touching to see her performing with him (for example, during his Carnegie Hall Judy Garland program) and lustily cheering him on (at New York City Opera’s 2005 Opera-For-All Gala and elsewhere).

Maria Callas never knew a mother’s unconditional love. How lucky for Wainwright (and for those of us who admire him) that McGarrigle nurtured her son’s unique talents and empowered him to pursue his own path.

Rest in peace, Kate, and thank you for leaving us your own important body of work as well as two beautiful musicians (Rufus and sister Martha).

« La Callas du music-hall »

Dalida, born on 17 January 1933, was known in her time as La Callas du music-hall. Sprung from puffery, the epithet nonetheless points to interesting parallels between the two artists.

Both were “exotics,” at home nowhere, almost without a native tongue. (Dalida was born in Egypt to Italian parents and spent most of her life in France.) Both exemplified public glamour and private unhappiness—to the extent that either woman was granted privacy.

Both underwent striking physical transformations and mastered an astonishing variety of musical styles (ranging, in Dalida’s case, from bubblegum pop and yé-yé to disco and the chanson d’auteur). Both sang with arresting intensity and gave unsparingly of themselves to music and their public.

Both, too, enjoy a cult following among gays. (Dalida spoke out early and forcefully for gay rights.)

Both died in their early fifties—Dalida of an overdose of barbiturates in 1987.

Callas crossed paths with Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday, contemporaries of Dalida, but I do not know whether she ever met Dalida.

Callas went away

Enigma is an electronic musical collective born of mysteries and dreams.

Michael Cretu, the project’s founder, said that Enigma’s sound came to him while he was sleeping on a train. Early on, Cretu and his colleagues worked anonymously, but their use of audio samples led to high-profile copyright lawsuits.

Wikipedia indicates that “unsolved crimes“ and “philosophical themes such as life after death” inspired the group’s name and sound.

“Callas went away” is a cut from Enigma’s first CD, MCMXC a.D. (released in 1990). It samples phrases from Callas’s 1963 recording of Charlotte’s dark, foreboding Air des lettres from Massenet’s Werther: “I re-read them again and again. I should destroy them. Those letters, those letters!”
Callas went away,
but her voice forever stay.
Callas went away.
She went away.
(G-d bless you.)
Ah ! Je les relis sans cesse.
Je devrais les détruire !
Ces lettres, ces lettres !

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 ?