Many recording artists are dead, and all eventually will be. Even when they are alive, their submission to waxing (to use the old term) or to entombment in vinyl or polyvinyl chloride is an intimation of immortality, and therefore of mortality… The record listener and the musician—like the stargazer and the star, like a man and his familiar ghost—do not inhabit the same world. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel
These clips show Maria Callas’s curtain calls during and after Tosca and Norma, c. 1965. I suspect that they may be removed from YouTube before long, so view them while you can.
Update: The owner of this material has advised me that he has no intention of removing it from YouTube.
The first clip is silent, while the second has audio added.
There is a wonderful book by Paul Fryer, The Opera Singer and the Silent Film, which explores how Caruso, Chaliapin, and other singers, oddly, helped to establish silent cinema as a popular medium.
The silence in the first clip of Callas is an accident. Yet how much silent footage of Callas has survived—along with, yes, dozens of audio recordings shorn of visuals, which constitute, as Jürgen Kesting puts it, a “theatre of the imagination.”
Of course, these clips show us Callas as “Callas”—in some twilight world of identity, somewhere between “Callas” the public figure, Maria the woman, and the characters she was portraying.
This snippet purports to show Callas as Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in 1965—at her entrance, following which she freezes as the audience erupts into applause.
“A fine picture, Signorina; whatever it represents, it’s a pretty thing and should be treated carefully.” Then he turned to the relics: seventy-four of them, they completely covered the two walls on each side of the altar. Each was enclosed in a frame which also contained a card with information about it and a number referring to the documents of authentication. These documents themselves, often voluminous and hung with seals, were locked in a damask-covered chest in a corner of the chapel. There were frames of worked and smooth silver, frames of bronze and coral, frames of tortoiseshell; in filigree, in rare woods, in boxwood, in red and blue velvet; large, tiny, square, octagonal, round, oval; frames worth a fortune and frames bought at the Bocconi stores: all collected by those devoted souls in their religious exaltation as custodians of supernatural treasures. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
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