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 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 and Fiorilla II

1950 was an epic year in Maria Callas’s career. According to Frank Hamilton's invaluable chronologies, at one point, in the space of six days (between February 23 and 28), she sang two performances each of Norma and Tristan und Isolde. She was twenty-six years old.

In October, shortly after singing Tosca two evenings in a row and a month before she undertook Kundry in Parsifal, Callas sang the florid comic rôle of Fiorilla in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia in Rome, an excerpt from which appears above. In 1949, of course, she had won fame for singing Brünnhilde in Die Walküre and Elvira in I puritani in quick succession.

In her ghostwritten 1957 memoirs, Callas recalled the 1950 Turco performances:

While I was preparing myself under the direction of Maestro [Gianandrea] Gavazzeni in Rome to interpret this difficult opera, I had the opportunity to know better Luchino Visconti, who had previously complimented me. I remember my surprise at seeing a man of his distinction sit in attentively at almost all of the rehearsals, which lasted a minimum of three or four hours—and we rehearsed twice a day.

We will never know for sure whether the exploits of Callas’s early years in Italy hastened her vocal decline, but one thing is certain: Her unrelenting activities in 1950 (including a strenuous Mexican season) took their toll on her health. She was forced to withdraw from several high-profile engagements at the end of the year because of an attack of jaundice.

Earlier posts include music from Parsifal and an excerpt from Callas’s 1954 EMI recording of Il Turco in Italia.

Callas in Parsifal

Maria Callas sang the rôle of Kundry in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal five times in 1949 and 1950. It was in this opera that she first caught the attention of Luchino Visconti. He recalled:

The first time I saw Maria was when she was still enormous. She was half naked in the second act, covered with yards and yards of transparent chiffon—a marvellous temptress, like an odalisque… Every night she sang I secured a certain box and shouted like a mad fanatic when she took her bows. I sent her flowers. She was beautiful but fat on stage, commanding—her gestures thrilled you.

Renata Scotto laughed at the fat, graceless Callas before attending Parsifal but then, à la Kundry, was thunderstruck. “Little by little this voice had all the nature in it—the forest and the magic castle and hatred that is love. And little by little she not fat with bad skin and rich-husband-asleep-in-the-corner; she witch who burn you by standing there.”

As you can hear, Kundry was an extraordinarily congenial rôle for Callas. By some accounts, she was scheduled to sing it at La Scala in 1956 instead of Giordano’s Fedora.

As it happens, Marianne Brandt, who sang Kundry in the second performance of Parsifal in 1882, studied under Pauline Viardot. Brandt’s repertoire included Le Prophète, Lucrezia Borgia, La Favorite, Il trovatore, and other operas requiring a superb command of florid music.

Wagner is supremely ill-served by barkers, shouters, and vocalists lacking the musical polish (and elemental sensuality) of a Callas. She observed, correctly, “Wagner could never hurt your voice, if you know how to sing well.”