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.
Dear friends, I am sorry that it has been so quiet around here! I have been busy readying the launch of Verdi Duecento. My intent is for Verdi Duecento be the English-language online hub for Verdi’s two-hundredth birthday, which is coming up in 2013.
(Please visit the site, and let me know what you think! I worked so hard on adapting the code and the design that I made myself a zombie. That said, I think that Re-visioning Callas will migrate to WordPress later this year.)
I will be back later today with a post about Maria Callas! Thank you for your patience!
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.
Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida left Maria Callas’s stage repertoire in 1953, but it was an important opera for her during the early part of her career.
As a student and young professional in Athens, Callas frequently sang Aida’s arias, "Ritorna vincitor!" and "O patria mia." She offered music from Aida at her La Scala audition in 1947 and first sang in the house (albeit not as an official member of the company) in Aida in 1950. All told, she portrayed Aida some three dozen times and on three continents between 1948 and 1953 and also made a complete recording of the opera for EMI in 1955.
The opera’s final scene, today’s selection for Verdi’s birthday week, comes from a 1953 Covent Garden performance, part of Callas’s second-to-last run of Aida. While Kurt Baum is a coarse Radames, the rest of the company could hardly be bettered, with Sir John Barbirolli conducting and Giulietta Simionato as Amneris. (Incidentally, the sacerdotessa in this Aida run was the young Joan Sutherland.)
The recorded sound is dim and distorted, but Callas’s singing is ecstatically beautiful—dreamy, gentle, and death-besotted in the scene’s opening phrases, in which she makes exquisite use of portamento. To my mind, her performance here equals and, perhaps, surpasses the legendary Ponselle/Martinelli recording of this duet.
Maria Callas sang the rôle of Elisabeth in Verdi’s Don Carlos in a single run of performances at La Scala in 1954. Well, more precisely, she sang the rôle of Elisabetta in Don Carlo, though I have no information about the particular edition performed at La Scala beyond the fact that it was in Italian.
She had been scheduled to portray Elisabetta on two other occasions in the early 1950s but cancelled because of illness. (In those years, a Callas cancellation was not automatically a “scandal.”)
“Tu che le vanità” remained a staple in her concert repertoire. She sang it frequently in her 1959 tour and also in her sad “comeback” tour with di Stefano in 1973–74. She also recorded it for EMI under Nicola Rescigno in 1958, the performance I offer you today.
Verdi’s music is at its darkest and most brooding in Don Carlo, now recognized as a supreme masterpiece, but still something of a rarity in the 1950s. Callas’s tone occasionally turns watery (EMI’s brutally close miking doesn’t help), but she makes a grandiose whole of this varied and episodic scena. For all of Elisabetta’s nobility, Callas allows us to hear the young, once hopeful woman now crushed beneath the weight of court intrigues and dynastic politics.
At “la pace dell’avel,” Callas’s Elisabetta looks deep into the abyss, and we along with her.
On Saturday, 9 October, Giuseppe Verdi turns 197 years young. (Actually, it seems that he was born on 10 October but, as Marcello Conati reports, Verdi himself always celebrated his birthday on 9 October.) This week’s posts, then, will be devoted to music by Verdi.
Maria Callas scored an historic triumph in Verdi’s Macbeth at La Scala in 1952 but never again sang the rôle of Lady Macbeth. About two years earlier, she had sung an audition for Toscanini for a Macbeth that was to have been staged in Busseto, but because of the maestro’s great age and fragile health, that production never came to be. (Some say, though, that Toscanini’s admiration for Callas finally led Antonio Ghiringhelli to offer her a proper contract at La Scala.)
Macbeth was also at the center of two Callas “scandals” of the late 1950s: The dispute with Rudolf Bing that eventually led to his firing her from the Met; and her troubles with Kurt Herbert Adler and the San Francisco Opera. The supposed Macbeth curse does seem to have pursued Callas!
Maria Callas recorded Lady Macbeth’s three great scenes under Nicola Rescigno in 1958, and they are among her finest recordings. Lady Macbeth’s entry in 1958 is less monumental in terms of vocal tone, perhaps, than the 1952 Scala pirate, but it is fiercer, with lashing attacks and a more propulsive quality than Callas had mustered earlier.
Some of the credit for this must go to Nicola Rescigno. I’ve said it before: He was a much underrated maestro, not at the level of a Muti or a Toscanini (who is?), but a sensitive and honorable musician.
Maria Callas never sang the rôle of Elvira in Verdi’s Ernani on stage, though there was chatter in the 1950s of a possible La Scala production. More’s the pity, because she had everything needed by the heroines of Verdi’s youthful operas: Agility, fire in the belly, rhythmic flair, and that feeling of almost devilish energy that separates the true Verdians from the impostors.
(By the way, Verdi, in his letters, wrote admiringly of singers who had il diavolo addosso, “the devil on their backs.”)
Maria Callas recorded Elvira’s cavatina “Ernani, Ernani involami!” in 1958 with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Nicola Rescigno. Some consider the late Maestro Rescigno a hack or a mere time-beater, but I have always admired his conducting. Listen, for example, to the sultry, gorgeous thing he and the Philharmonia make of the brief orchestral introduction to this aria.
I would point out, too, that Callas, never one to suffer fools gladly, trusted and respected Rescigno and worked with him whenever she could. He also seems to have been a lovely human being.
Walter Legge, who had dreadful things to say about Callas’s character, recalled that she was an easy-going colleague, who approved this take of “Ernani, Ernani involami!” on the spot after Legge praised Rescigno’s buoyant, energetic tempi. She sang the aria frequently during her 1959 and 1962 concert tours.
Verdi’s Otello had little importance in Maria Callas’s career. She recorded the Willow Song and Ave Maria for EMI in Paris in 1963. She also taught these selections (along with Iago’s Credo) during her Juilliard master classes.
In 1972 and 1973, Callas set down for Philips a pitifully tentative rendition of the love duet from Act I of Otello with Giuseppe di Stefano. That recording was kicking around YouTube earlier this year and is best left unheard.
Maria Callas also sang music from Rossini’s Otello on at least one occasion, in Thessaloníki in 1943.
Her rendition of Verdi’s “Ave Maria” is simple and inward, as befits this beautiful aria. The orchestra is led by Nicola Rescigno.
In the Orthodox Church, 15 August is a Great Feast: The Dormition of the Theotokos (Κοίμησις της Θεοτόκου) or “The Falling-asleep of the G-d-bearer.”
According to Orthodox teaching, three days following the death of Mary, the mother of Jesus, her body was taken up into heaven to join her soul. To quote from the Wikipedia entry on the Feast:
Orthodox theology teaches that the Theotokos has already undergone the bodily resurrection, which all will experience at the Second Coming, and stands in heaven in that glorified state that the other righteous ones will enjoy only after the Last Judgment.
Maria Callas celebrated her name day on 15 August and all her life was devoted to the Theotokos. She wrote to her Roman Catholic husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, from Buenos Aires in 1949:
The other evening I went with a Greek journalist and a lady to the Greek Orthodox church to light a candle for us and my Norma. You see, I feel our Church more than yours. It’s strange, but it’s so. Perhaps because I’m more accustomed to it, or perhaps because the Orthodox Church is warmer and more festive. It’s not that I don’t like yours, which is also mine now, but I have a strong partiality for the Orthodox Church.
(Okay, that quotation, transcribed when I was insufficiently caffeinated, does not in fact mention the Theotokos, though it shows that Callas was a believer and attached to her religion, albeit not a church goer.)
Early in their relationship, Meneghini made a gift to Callas of a Cignaroli miniature of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that became a good-luck charm for her. (He refers to this painting as a “Madonnina.”) He reports that they hung a painting of the Madonna by Caroto in their bedroom, and that their favorite work of art was the painting you see above: Tiziano’s “Assunta” at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice (a basilica dedicated to the Assumption of Mary, as the Dormition of the Theotokos is known in the Roman church).
Meneghini also writes that he told Callas, after she took up with Aristotle Onassis:
Now go talk to all your patron saints and ask them for advice, ask them if you are in the right, but also pay a visit to your Madonna in the Cathedral in Milan, the Madonna you saw so very many times, before whom you genuflected and prayed.
The Madonnina (Madunina in the local dialect) who stands atop the Duomo is the symbol of Milan.
she appeared to be in the highest of spirits. Dressed simply in black and with a black chiffon scarf decorated with a few sequins over her head, Maria looked much younger than her years and the personification of Greek beauty.
Maria Callas reportedly died with a rosary (the gift of her sister-in-law Pia Meneghini) on her bedside table.
Since Maria Callas celebrated her name day on 15 August, I think that we should, too. I intend to post every day this week in her honor. The musical clip that follows is from Verdi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata and was recorded in 1964-65, when Callas was in fragile voice, with her “big” career winding down.
Opera blogs and Tweeps are reporting that Cesare Siepi has passed away. He was 87 years old (born in 1923, like Maria Callas).
Though Siepi was a regular at Rudolf Bing’s Metropolitan Opera, he sang with Maria Callas some two dozen times, starting in 1948, with four performances as Padre Guardiano in Verdi’s La forza del destino, through the 1958 revival of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at La Scala.
Like Callas, Siepi was a versatile musician: In 1949 alone, he sang Gurnemanz to her Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal and Erode to her Erodiade the younger in Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista.
A handsome man of noble bearing, Siepi was a gifted actor with a plush, ringing voice. His Salzburg Don Giovanni (under Wilhelm Furtwängler) is available on DVD. He was also a supreme Verdian, an arresting Mefistofele in Boito’s opera, and an admired recitalist and interpreter of popular songs in several languages.
What happens when we watch and hear a female performer? We are observing her, yet we are also doing something for which there’s no word: the aural version of staring… Visually, the character singing is the passive object of our gaze. But, aurally, she is resonant; her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive objects, battered by that voice. As a voice she slips into the “male/active/subject” position in other ways as well, since a singer, more than any other musical performer, enters into that Jacobine uprising inherent in the phenomenology of live performance and stands before us having wrested the composing voice away from the librettist and composer who wrote the score. Carolyn Abbate, “Opera: or, the Envoicing of Women”
The image shows Maria Callas as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata at La Scala, c. 1955. The sound clip, instead, is from the Lisbon Traviata of 1958, with Alfredo Kraus as Alfredo.
Since Maria Callas was greatly devoted to the Theotokos (and celebrated her name day on the Dormition of the Theotokos), it seems fitting to conclude this series of excerpts from her 1954 recording of Verdi’s La forza del destino with “La vergine degli angeli.”
Out of cattiveria, I intended to post Callas’s rendition of the aria side-by-side with Renata Tebaldi’s traversal from Naples (1958), widely considered a milestone. Upon revisiting the two versions, I was surprised at how generally similar they are—and also surprised to note that, on purely vocal terms, I much prefer Callas.
Tebaldi, to my ears, consistently sings just under the pitch (though this may have more to do with the recording than with her). She mewls or croons once or twice (something I cannot abide), and I think that Callas outclasses her in phrasing and dynamics.
Truth be told, I think that for vocal splendor the finest version of “La vergine degli angeli” is the one by Ezio Pinza and Rosa Ponselle. Indeed, that recording of Pinza and Ponselle singing Verdi seems to me to reach some ultimate human limit of beauty, nobility, and genius. Maria Callas herself is supposed to have said, “I think we all know that Ponselle is simply the greatest singer of us all.”
Donna Leonora’s cavatina from La forza del destino, “Me pellegrina ed orfana,” has an interesting history. There is evidence suggesting that it derives to some extent from the Re Lear opera that Verdi sketched but never completed.
Francesco Maria Piave’s Forza verses hew closely to an aria for Cordelia written by Antonio Somma for Lear, with some differences in meter.
It is tantalizing (and, alas, probably misleading) to think that “Me pellegrina” allows us to hear traces of Verdi’s Re Lear—surely opera’s most painful might-have-been. Whatever its ultimate source, the aria is moody and difficult, made even more challenging by its placement only moments after the curtain rises on Forza.
Maria Callas plumbed the musical and dramatic depths of “Me pellegrina” in her 1954 recording of Forza, capturing Donna Leonora’s tragic stature along with her youth and vulnerability.
Please excuse this personal excursus: A few days ago, I was feeling down about being unemployed. (By the way, I am a whiz in both old and new media, an expert communicator in three languages, an award-winning writer and blogger—and I have an ironclad work ethic. You or your company should hire me!)
Back to my tale: Down, unemployed. A tweep wrote and suggested that I get off the pity pot and listen to Maria Callas in “Madre, pietosa vergine from Verdi’s La forza del destino.
The tweep was right. Callas and Verdi healed me.
Ah, quei sublimi cantici, Dell’organo i concenti, Che come incenso ascendono A Dio sui firmamenti, Ispirano a quest’alma Fede, conforto e calma!
“Ah, those sublime hymns and organ harmonies, rising like incense to G-d in heaven, inspire my soul with faith, comfort, and peace!”
Now what does this have to do with you, gentle and patient readers? Listening to this scene reminded me just how great this 1954 recording of Forza is.
I confess that I tend to neglect the set first, because the cuts offend me; and second, because one of the principal singers grates on my nerves. Callas though, is in breathtaking form, as you can hear in this scene.
She somehow captures all of the grandezza of Verdi’s music while remaining human and vulnerable. Listening to her, one is always aware that Donna Leonora is a terrified girl, perhaps still in her teens. Callas sings “Deh, non m’abbandonar” in an inward, pleading pianissimo, builds gradually to an epic, impassioned climax, and returns to a note of humility and supplication at the scene’s end.
While not a church-goer, Maria Callas prayed and was devoted to the Theotokos. Her faith may explain in part for the immense fervor she brings to this scene.
This film shows a 1901 funeral cortège of Giuseppe Verdi. I write “a” cortège, because I don’t know whether this is Verdi’s coffin being borne to temporary interment at Milan’s Cimitero monumentale in January 1901, or the coffins of Verdi and his wife Giuseppina en route a month later to the Casa di riposo per musicisti, where they can be visited today.
I think that the film shows the latter, because Verdi’s January funeral, in accordance with his wishes, was austere. He had asked for “one priest, one candle, one cross,” and the New York Times report indicated that his coffin was placed on “a very modest funeral car.” The February cortège, in contrast, was an elaborate state affair.
On both occasions, the chorus “Va, pensiero” was sung—in February, by a chorus of some 800 people led by Arturo Toscanini; and in January, spontaneously, by the assembled throngs.
Maria Callas’s Milan home was not far from the Casa di riposo, but I do not know whether she ever visited the tombs of Verdi and Giuseppina.
My friend JRD is an arbiter elegantiarum, a beautiful writer, and a fierce prayer warrior. (He is also today’s birthday boy. Joyeux anniversaire, chéri ! I am so blessed to know you.)
Gianandrea Gavazzeni led this incandescent performance. Callas, as you can hear in “Ma dall’arido stelo divulsa,” was in inspired form. While her highest note is a touch unsteady, she phrases up to it and back down in a single breath. Her voice somehow tells of both shadows and moonlight, terror and faith.
1957, you will recall, marked something of a turning point in Callas’s career. In the months leading up to this Ballo, she made an emotional return to Greece and was involved in “scandalous” withdrawals from an Edinburgh Sonnambula and from a series of performances at the San Francisco Opera.
In both cases, she pleaded exhaustion, and the exhaustion can be heard in her two summer 1957 recordings, Puccini’s Turandot and Manon Lescaut. (As I’ve noted in the past, the latter was not released until 1959 because of Callas’s misgivings about her form.)
That said, after two months of rest, she returned in late 1957 to give some of the greatest performances of her career: her Dallas concert (in which she is rock-solid up to a high E-flat) and the Scala run of Ballo. Dark storm clouds were on the horizon, though: The Rome Norma “scandal” (in which Callas was blameless but hounded viciously in the Italian press) exploded weeks after this Ballo.
A very kind and very learnèd reader insists that Callas’s vocal deterioration was brought about by her weight loss, but that seems too simplistic an explanation to me. Three years after slimming, she could sing with volcanic power (as in this Ballo) and a mind-boggling range of color and dynamics (as in the Köln Sonnambula, from July 1957). Both performances, not coincidentally, came after periods of relative or complete rest.
It is clear that the punishing—nay, reckless pace of Callas’s early career took its toll. (Two Normas and two Brünnhildes in six days? In modern times, with a modern orchestra and diapason, who but Callas has attempted such folly? Twenty-hour days preparing the Scala Sonnambula? The list could go on!)
Callas herself wrote to her friend Cristina Gastel Chiarelli that she was “irremediably tired” from the time of the Scala Bolena, in 1956. Vocal unsteadiness might be explained by this organic fatigue, compounded by tension (brought about by snowballing “scandals,” which could have been averted by a manager more skilled and less conniving than Meneghini). Exhaustion seems to me a tidy explanation also because, following periods of rest, Callas’s late-1950s vocal form could be quite secure (e.g. the 1959 Gioconda).
What’s more, I believe with Will Crutchfield that Callas’s technique was never quite right—and with Tito Gobbi, who was no one’s fool, that Callas lost her confidence more than her voice. (If those purported 1976 and 1977 recordings are authentic, they, too, support the contention that Callas up to the end of her life could sing well without the pressure of an audience. I will post those recordings eventually, though I am not fully convinced that they are genuine.)
Finally, Petsalis-Diomidis quotes Giulietta Simionato as saying that Callas was aware of her wobble as early as 1950 (long before slimming).
The mystery continues! In the meantime, though, enjoy JRD’s prose and Callas’s stunning singing.
Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata was among the rôles that Maria Callas performed most frequently (along with Norma and Lucia). On more than one occasion, she remarked that she felt a spiritual kinship with Verdi’s noble, self-sacrificing courtesan.
Callas’s 1958 Covent Garden run of La traviata was her next-to-last encounter with Violetta. She sang two more performances in Dallas and reportedly committed to recording the opera (with a young Luciano Pavarotti) as late as 1968 or 1969, though she ultimately backed out of the project.
The company for La traviata at Covent Garden was strong. Nicola Rescigno conducted, Cesare Valletti was Alfredo, and Mario Zanasi was Germont. Callas was in inspired form—and also exhausted and discouraged following the Rome Norma brouhaha, surgery, and her break with La Scala. A few months later, in fact, during a BBC interview, she raised the possibility of retiring.
The Act II duet with Germont was a high point of the Covent Garden Traviata. As many writers have observed, Callas somehow managed to stop time and distill all of Violetta’s anguish and sacrifice in that hushed, suspended note leading into “Dite alla giovine.” (To paraphrase one of the YouTube comments, we hear not a voice but a soul.)
(I apologize for your having to click through to hear the clip, but embedding is disabled.)
Maria Callas sang Verdi’s La forza del destino on stage only six times, though she performed Donna Leonora’s great arias from the time of her student days in Greece until 1976 or 1977, shortly before her death.
This “Pace, pace, mio Dio!” is a familiar rendition, from her 1954 EMI set under Tullio Serafin. Still, I find that I almost always learn something new each time I revisit one of Callas’s recordings.
What struck me most today is Serafin’s prodigiously slow tempo. Many a singer would take that, along with Verdi’s mostly spare, simple accompaniment, as an invitation to luxuriate in sound for its own sake.
Yet what variety of expression Callas brings to this music. She infuses Serafin’s (seemingly) placid whole with fire and grandezza. Her very intakes of breath tell. Her tone ranges from massive and cutting to the most exquisitely tapered pianissimo. She uses portamento and rubato with taste and imagination. What scorching heat she brings to “Che l’amo ancor” and “Alvaro, io t’amo!” How she colors the different iterations of “fatalità” with rage, awe, resignation, acceptance.
Some claim that the Forza Leonora is a passive, uninteresting character. Yet in this aria, a prayer, Callas conveys so clearly what Massimo Mila described as the distinctive qualities of Verdi’s heroes and heroines:
Defeated, battered by fate, they nonetheless fight to the last with savage energy. They are not elegiac; they are ferocious… They are great souls, of proud and terrible resolution.
When Callas recorded Forza in 1954, she had almost finished slimming. Many believe that her weight loss caused her vocal decline. (Listen to that flap at “invan la pace”—the producer Walter Legge threatened to give away a seasickness pill with each LP side!)
I for one don’t believe that Callas’s weight loss and vocal problems are related. If Petsalis-Diomidis and his many sources in The Unknown Callas can be trusted, Callas had a wobble even as a student in Athens. Nor was her weight loss extremely rapid: According to Meneghini and to Callas herself, she lost 60 or 70 pounds over the course of roughly two years, a healthy and prudent rate.
Had Gilda remained an active part of [Callas’s] repertory, she might well have made the public revalue this role as it did Lucia. Again she uncovered an unsuspected dramatic dimension by making Gilda an innocent whom circumstance transforms into a woman. She fashioned the part at the outset as an ingénue, not a soubrette, using what has been termed her “little girl voice,” a sound frequently heard in her Sonnambula, Lucia, and even in parts of Traviata. This unmistakable sound was created by a brightening of her dark timbre with a very forward placement of vowels and with little of the covered mixture of vowels and consonants she used in weightier parts. John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald, Callas
For some reason I am fixated right now on Callas’s use of portamento. Even bitchy Walter Legge praises “the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos” and the way she “var[ied] their curve with enchanting grace and meaning.“
Yes. And doesn’t this 1955 “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto spoil you for all other versions?
Dear friends, the main Callas site has succumbed to who knows what, perhaps a winter virus.
In the Orthodox Church, 15 August is a Great Feast: The Dormition of the Theotokos (Κοίμησις της Θεοτόκου) or “The Falling-asleep of the G-d-bearer.”
Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata was among the rôles that Maria Callas performed most frequently (along with Norma and Lucia). On more than one occasion, she remarked that she felt a spiritual kinship with Verdi’s noble, self-sacrificing courtesan.
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