Callas in Norma III

This is (for now?) the earliest known footage of Maria Callas on stage. It shows her with Franco Corelli, Elena Nicolai, and Boris Christoff in Bellini’s Norma, which opened the season at Trieste’s Teatro Giuseppe Verdi in November 1953. Antonino Votto conducted.

What does the video tell us? First, that production values in provincial, post-war Italy were primitive and, by some feat of anachronistic legerdemain, utterly Monty Python-esque. (Christoff looks very much like the “It’s” man; Flavio and his companions would be right at home in Monty Phython and the Holy Grail; and some of the acting seems to have been inspired by “The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights“.)

Second, it confirms that Callas, as Augusta Oltrabella famously observed, “was an actress in the expression of the music, and not vice versa.” On its own, as pantomime, Callas’s acting was compelling, yes, but not overwhelming. Compare today’s clip with the rehearsal footage from her 1964 Paris Norma. In both, her gestures and expressions are strong and spare—calculated, of course, for the opera house and not for video or film. I do not see a significant difference in her acting from her “fat,” pre-Visconti days and what came later, though I do hear greater refinement in her singing.

What do you think?

See and hear Maria Callas in other selections from Bellini’s Norma.

Not Callas but Verdi

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.

Not Callas but Puccini

This is off-topic, I suppose, but too good to miss: Courtesy of Aprile Millo, here is about a minute of Giacomo Puccini in his study, in town, and at sea near Torre del Lago.

Callas in La vestale

The production of Spontini’s La vestale that opened La Scala’s 1954–55 season marked the first collaboration between Maria Callas and Luchino Visconti.

According to Callas by John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald:

During his research, Visconti took inspiration from the paintings of Appiani, whose imperial, neoclassic style corresponded exactly with Spontini’s music. Colors were cold—“like white marble, moon-struck marble.” Because Vestale is an early nineteenth-century opera and at that time singers came to the proscenium to perform, Visconti had the stage floor built forward…

Many of the gestures Visconti had Callas and [the tenor Franco] Corelli perform were derived from poses found in the paintings of Canova, Ingres, and David.

The clip includes many photographs from the rehearsals, some familiar, others less so. (And, see, Callas and I have two things in common: We are Sagittarians, and we favor poodle pins!)

As it happens, I am engaged in a learnèd and cordial dialogue about Callas’s weight loss and whether it contributed to her vocal decline. In this, the first Scala performance by the “definitively slim” Callas, one hears no sign of vocal distress—though, admittedly, the challenges of “O numi tutelar” concern style and command of legato rather than range and power. (Callas was never “definitively slim”; her weight fluctuated, and she dieted and used diuretics, until the end of her life.)

Her EMI recordings in the months leading up to this performance are inconclusive. Some show a nasty wobble (Forza and the Puccini heroines recital, especially “Senza mamma”), while others find her in utterly secure form.

My interlocutor, like many (e.g. Michael Scott), believes that Callas never had a significant wobble before the weight loss. Colleagues from Callas’s Greek years disagree, and Will Crutchfield wrote that her technique was not quite right even when her voice and figure were at their plummiest. The mystery endures!

Here is an additional video: Silent footage from the Vestale rehearsals and premiere. I love this clip because it is one of the few to capture Callas radiantly, unguardedly happy; and also because it shows a Sikh gentleman entering La Scala (about ten minutes into the footage). In the racist, rabid, ignorant United States of the twenty-first century, that elegant, distinguished man would probably be lynched for being a “Muslim terrorist.” But I digress…

Callas: Fragile theatrical trailer

Copied and pasted from YouTube: “A monologue with voice off written and directed by Stefano Masi. Francesca Caratozzolo plays the role of Maria Callas and the voice of Jackie O.” (Strange, no, that Jackie, famously silent for decades, should be a vocal presence in this work?)

The YouTube description concludes enigmatically:

Finally they can meet each other in real. But does that theatre a real one? What’s behind the curtain?

What indeed?

The clip seems to be promoting a theatrical monologue about Callas, Marilyn Monroe, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The portentious text contains one possible error: Wayne Koestenbaum and others report that Callas and Jackie did meet, for a handshake and pleasantries, following one of Callas’s 1965 Tosca performances at the Met.

Stefano Masi apparently has created films or videos commissioned by La Scala about Luchino Visconti (available on YouTube).

Does anyone have further information about Fragile? Is it a film, a play, or both?

Once again, I invite you to read Catherine Clément on Callas and Monroe.

Callas in Bellini’s La sonnambula

This clip of the final scene from Bellini’s La sonnambula is valuable for several reasons—because it features lovely, evocative stills, including lesser-known ones, from Luchino Visconti’s incomparable production of the opera; because it captures Maria Callas in magical form; and because it gives some sense of what her voice sounded like in the theatre, with “air” around it. (Her EMI recordings were close-miked and most unflattering.)

And, yes indeed, she makes a diminuendo on a high E-flat. I believe that this, and the performance as a whole, are what Ethan Mordden would call “demented.”

Rumors persist that video of a complete Cologne Sonnambula survives, surely the saint graal of pirates. Let us pray that it comes to light!

Callas in Carmen

The video shows Maria Callas singing music from Bizet’s Carmen at the May 1962 gala held at New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the birthday of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Callas seems to have been in indifferent voice, though it’s hard to be sure given the poor audio quality.

Marilyn Monroe also took part in the gala, at which she famously sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”.

At my re-visioning callas site, there is a photo of Monroe and Callas together along with keen and biting observations by the great Catherine Clément. Please take a moment to view the entire re-visioning callas slideshow.

Callas in advertising

In the virtuoso effusions of [advertising’s] highest form, the television commercial—which Jean Baudrillard calls the simulation of a communication which seems more real than reality—cultural signifiers of every kind are pulled loose and float around in a suspended space, which Baudrillard calls hyper-reality, where they sometimes attach themselves to commodities and sometimes to buzzwords… The commercial creates a subject in its own image, a dependent spectator, pure consumer, whose every desire is catered for on one condition: the price to be paid… Here traditional cultural values are not so much subverted as simply vaporized.
Michael Chanan, Musica Practica

Silent Callas

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.

Callas sings Bellini and Puccini

Update: As I suspected when I first posted this video, it was removed from YouTube. Dommage !


With thanks to Aprile Millo, who shared this link on Facebook, here are previously unknown-to-me snippets of Callas singing “Casta diva” from Norma and “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” from La bohème.

The second clip is from 1959 or later, but I do not know the precise occasion on which these were filmed. I will continue my investigation, and reader comments are most welcome!

Callas interviewed by Mike Wallace

These clips (a 1973 interview rebroadcast after Callas’s death) have been making the rounds. They are interesting for a number of reasons:

• Callas’s archness in her heyday versus her poise in 1973
• Her responses to Edward R. Murrow (“I have never thrown anything at anyone, though sometimes…”) and to Sir Thomas Beecham (“I never threw anything at anyone—unfortunately…”)
• Mike Wallace’s gotcha journalism
• Small inaccuracies in the reporting (e.g. she did not leave Meneghini in 1958)
• Callas’s calm and dignified response to Wallace’s invasive questioning
• Her eloquence. One reads repeatedly that Callas was inarticulate, but in the 1973 interview, one hears the calm, reflective tone of the quotations in Maria Callas: Sacred Monster by Stelios Galatopoulos—quotations, truth be told, that to me have always been suspect, a little too tidy and polished.

Callas in Gianni Schicchi

Maria Callas’s 1954 recording of Lauretta’s aria from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, part of her Puccini Heroines recital under Tullio Serafin, is a marvel. She never sang the rôle of Lauretta on stage. While Schicchi’s daughter has the opera’s hit tune, the baritone is the star of this intricate ensemble piece. It is hard to imagine Callas, who sang Santuzza in her teens and Fidelio at twenty-one, settling for such a small and relatively undemanding part.

There are several videos of Callas singing “O mio babbino caro” from her farewell tour. Her tone is raw and hollow, and her expression conveys barely suppressed desperation. The clips give no pleasure at all.

This 1965 version, recorded some six weeks before her farewell to the operatic stage, finds her in luminous form. Her use of portamento in the final phrases is pure enchantment, and something in her graceful, gentle way with the music surrounds the aria with the fragrance and glow of spring.

Watch her eyes, and see if any Schicchi could resist such a Lauretta.

Callas in Madama Butterfly

The video shows Maria Callas in rehearsal for her only performances in the title rôle of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which took place in Chicago in 1955.

(After her third Butterfly, on 17 November, she was served with a summons on behalf of her former associate Eddie Bagarozy, resulting in the infamous photo of her with “her mouth in a hyena-like snarl,” as Michael Scott wrote. It marked a turning point in her public image.)

Following you will find the end of Act I of Madama Butterfly sung by Callas and Nicolai Gedda under the direction of Herbert von Karajan, a recording also from 1955.

Callas in La traviata I

Video footage of Maria Callas in La traviata, shot in Lisbon in 1958.

Much of the video is unrevealing: Act IV is very dim indeed, and Callas barely moves, as befits a woman whose life and strength are ebbing away. However, at Flora’s party, take note of the moment when she sets eyes on Alfredo, starts, turns away, then composes herself to respond to Douphol—and the way she listens during the tense exchange between Alfredo and Douphol.

A word and a tear for Don Alfredo (Kraus), shown here at the beginning of his career. I was privileged to see and hear him in many of his greatest rôles, and I cannot imagine his ever being surpassed for grace, romance, and musicality. May he rest in peace in the bosom of Abraham.

Callas in Norma II

Towards the end of this reportage, at c. 7:30, you will find what is probably the most important footage of Callas in staged opera apart from the two versions of Tosca Act II.

The director Sandro Sequi, who studied dancing with Clotilde and Alexandre Sakharoff (himself a student of Isadora Duncan), saw Sakharoff’s methods reflected in Callas’s movements on stage.

This alternation of tension and relaxation can exert an incredible hold over the public. I believe this was the key to Callas’s magnetism, why her singing and acting were so compelling. Think of the movements of her arms in the Mad Scene of Lucia. They were like the wings of a great eagle, a marvelous bird. When they went up, and she often moved them very slowly, they seemed heavy—not heavy like a dancer’s arms, but weighted. Then, she reached the climax of a musical phrase, her arms relaxed and flowed into the next gesture, until she reached a new musical peak, and then again calm. There was a continuous line to her singing and movements, which were really very simple.

Callas in Medea I

The clip shows a 1969 NBC report on Callas in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea, including many outtakes.

As was her wont, Callas affects a posh accent, and her dismissive remarks about music and opera are humbug. Still, I am not aware of an interview in which she appears more serene and fulfilled. Her trust and admiration for Pasolini, her cinematic taskmaster, seem wholehearted.

He feels my mind the way I feel. He’s like an eagle that looks straight into the mind and soul. This is his great quality… I call it quicksilver. I’m quicksilver, and he is the same kind.

Contrast this with footage shot from the orchestra pit of Callas in the title rôle of Luigi Cherubini’s Medea, during one of her last performances at La Scala (in 1961 or 1962).

To quote one of the YouTube comments: “Seeing her performing is like watching a goddess blessing us.”

Callas in Tosca I

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

Callas in Norma I

With thanks to the reader who brought this clip to my attention, here is what purports to be video of Callas in Norma at the Opéra de Paris in 1965.

I cannot determine to what extent, if at all, the audio and the footage are synchronized; nor is it clear to me that, excepting the curtain call (at c. 6:51), the video actually depicts Callas or conveys any meaningful information about her.

Let’s be honest: These ghostly images have the pathos and the credibility of a séance, shaped less by the agency of the departed than by the needs and desires of those in attendance, we orfanelli callasiani.

In 1949, Callas was a more vocally secure and less fully formed Norma.

Callas in Macbeth

Her second selection is her opening scene in Macbeth. It begins superbly, but when the line rises to a high C that had rung out steely-sure at La Scala, her voice cracks, and for an instant she breaks character with an oddly coquettish, apologetic smile. Blink and you would miss it, but if you don’t blink it takes several moments before Lady Macbeth is back in focus.
Will Crutchfield, “The Story of a Voice”