“Maria, by Callas”

<written in November 2018>

Over forty years after her death in 1977, the Maria Callas industry keeps growing. To those of us who became obsessed with her art - chiefly on record - before her death, this is gratifying but also at times frustrating: we’re seeing Callas reinvented and sometimes distorted, though we have to admit she began the distortion herself. I suppose I will see the new “Callas in Concert” hologram film if it comes my way; the excerpt on line, showing “Callas” singing the Card Scene from “Carmen” in concert - as she never did, but using her deeply flawed 1964 studio recording - is bizarre https://basehologram.com/productions/maria-callas .

But the new Tom Wolf documentary of her, “Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words,” is something else. Even though I have multiple reservations about it, I recommend it to everyone for what it says about the conflict between a woman’s private life and her public career. It has fabulous footage, plenty of it previously unknown, much of it very skilfully coloured from black-and-white film. It emphasises Callas the woman, who repeatedly says she wishes she had had children rather than a career - but also that she recognises her career has been a privilege and that music is an art she has always served. It uses rare/unknown letters (I hope more of these now get published), and all kinds of home-made films. I find it utterly compelling and fascinating. At times, it’s so dense with information that I need to see it again.

“Maria by Callas” is, nevertheless, more partial and less complete than the impression it gives. It includes very little of her singing the pre-1850 repertory by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti that she repeatedly said she loved most (but which became increasingly hard for her to execute after 1959, once she, living with Onassis, began to stop practising every day and as her voice began to vanish), whereas there are many clips of her singing post-1890 music by Puccini and other post-Verdi Italian composers she actually didn’t much like. (The well-known footage of her singing the Mad Scene of “Il Pirata” in concert https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dYlaeeJrf7Q is not included here. No account of Callas can be complete without at least one Mad Scene ). There is nothing about her weight-loss (she remarked that you need a visible jawline to sing Medea, a role she acquired months after she began to lose weight), too little about her 1951-58 peak years, nothing about the masterclasses she gave at Juilliard. There’s lots about her long affair with Aristotle Onassis (which began in 1959). This is a film that stresses her rivalry with Jackie Kennedy Onassis (whom he married in 1968) but doesn’t mention her famous rivalry with the diva Renata Tebaldi.

It is too seldom realised that Callas was ferociously, thrillingly, dangerously, ambitious. She took the world of Italian opera by storm in 1949 when, already singing Wagner’s Brünnhilde (“Die Walküre”), she then sang Bellini’s Elvira (“I Puritani”), one of the most celebrated coloratura roles, in the same week. (Imagine Martha Graham dancing “Divertimento no 15”.) She recorded the “Puritani” mad scene that year: its evidence of both her coloratura skill and her immensely eloquent musicianship astounded everybody. This kind of stylistic diversity was part of her very being: in concerts, she would combine Verdi’s Lady Macbeth with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Between 1951 and 1956, up and down the opera houses of Italy, she competed with Tebaldi in repertory such as Violetta, Aida, Maddalena, Tosca - Tebaldi’s central roles - and tackled other Tebaldi roles on record (Mimì, Butterfly), while performing any number of roles far beyond Tebaldi’s range. Tebaldi became the soprano of the Decca/ London label; Callas of the HMV/ Angel one. In 1954, she recorded her first two LP recitals: one was all-Puccini - not her favourite composer, but prime Tebaldi terrain - and included the arias sung in “Turandot” both by Liù (a Tebaldi role) and Turandot’s own “In questa reggia” (precisely the kind of role Tebaldi could never tackle); the other was a “Lyric-Coloratura” album with other Tebaldi repertory on one side (“Mefistofele”, “Andrea Chenier”, “La Wally” “Adriana Lecouvreur”) and high coloratura roles on the other (none of which Tebaldi could consider). Nobody forced her to give the 1956 autobiographical interview in which she said that, until her “dear friend” Renata Tebaldi acquired a repertory from Lucia to Medea, to compare the two was like “comparing champagne to cognac - no, champagne to coca-cola”. And she made a number of other bitch-diva remarks about other singers over the years. She always needed to be the best and to show herself to be the best: in a famous 1959 TV conversation with Thomas Beecham and Edward Murrow, she and Beecham agreed that one must only tackle music where one knew would surpass all others. (Actually it’s very possible still to prefer Tebaldi’s Puccini recordings to Callas’s. It’s also possible to hear that the two had, stylistically, much more in common that their supposed rivalry encourages us to notice.)

On her way up (listen to the Mexico City performances of 1950-1952), Callas thought nothing about holding onto high notes longer than those singing beside her. Once she was widely perceived to have arrived at the top, she changed tack. When a baritone (Enzo Sordello) did so to her at the New York Met in 1956, she got him fired. When Fiorenza Cossotto did so to her in “Norma” in 1964, Callas made sure everyone knew she was deeply wounded by Cossotto’s discourtesy.

True, that’s only one side of Callas: this film makes clear that she would call it her “Callas” side. Her “Maria” side was, she says in a brilliant 1970 TV interview with David Frost extensively quoted here, the woman who loved, trusted, and suffered. It’s fascinating how she needs to say publicly that she thinks a woman’s first duty and chief fulfilment comes from being a wife and mother: she who never had children, speaking in her late forties. But actually this Maria side was also often a superb colleague and a consummate professional. She rehearsed harder than anyone else; and - both live and in the studio - she was often an ideal duet singer, absolutely giving and taking with such co-singers as Tito Gobbi, Cesare Valletti, Ebe Stignani, Giulietta Simionato, and Jon Vickers, truly listening as well as delivering.

Callas’s voice came with flaws, which she addressed until 1958 with fierce discipline. It was hard for her to sustain long notes with perfect steadiness, and her top notes were often problematic (top C even more than the two notes immediately above it). Discipline brought her to the top; the voice grew steadily more responsive, phenomenal in its range of colour and stylistic versatility. Her coloratura, still breathtaking in many recordings and often at its best in live performance, was underpinned by an unparalleled grasp of legato - of the cantilena principle that underlies bel canto - and by an uncanny ability to search a score and reveal the point of apparently tiny dynamic markings. Still, she forced herself in 1953-1954 to lose a vast amount of weight. To some extent, her voice was never the same - it lost both its very highest and lowest notes, and lost a good deal of its sheer size and heft. But she knew how to make this smaller voice even more responsive to her demands: it’s possible to find some of her technical achievements (Amina in the 1955 Bernstein-Visconti La Scala “La Sonnambula”) even more brilliant.

It’s hard to say whether it was Callas or Maria whose collaborations with Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli transformed opera to new levels of high drama. Her work with Walter Legge in the recording studio revolutionised opera on LP. She worked with the conductors Tullio Serafin, Vittorio Gui, Victor de Sabata, Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Carlo Maria Giulini, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Georges Prêtre, to superlative effect. But she certainly needed to keep showing that she was the prima donna assoluta. When she moved to Paris after her 1959 separation from her husband, she, the known queen of Italian opera, in 1960 threw down the gauntlet to the world by recording an all-French LP, in which she sang music ranging from high coloratura (the Polonaise from Ambroise Thomas’s “Mignon”) to dramatic contralto/mezzo (Gluck’s Orphée, and Dalila’s arias from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila”); few had ever heard her sing French before. In 1964, she recorded three LPs to show again her unparalleled versatility - one of Rossini and Donizetti (her home composers), one of Verdi (in which she tackled several arias new to her), and one of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, all in arias for which she was not known. Yet some of these 1964 recordings are sad, as if her inner light has gone out. And all these 1960s recordings needed far more time to make than before, with multiple takes and careful editing: up to 1957, she had been able to record recitals and complete operas remarkably fast.

“Maria by Callas” shows that her very cultivated diva personality is quite an act, a façade - but a façade for what? The film suggests she is always telling the truth to the camera or journalists, which at times she surely knows she isn’t. Callas in the years 1956-1958, before Onassis entered her life, had a quick series of career scandals that may have been deliberate. She would not appear at the New York Met until it broke its pay ceiling for her, in 1956. When La Scala was presenting the Visconti “Sonnambula” at the Edinburgh Festival, in 1957, and announced an extra performance at short notice, she was entitled not to sing (the young Renata Scotto stood in), claiming her voice could not cope with more, but she didn’t need instead to go to a prestigious party in Venice that night, which she did. In September that year, she failed to turn up on time for rehearsals in San Francisco, where she was due to make her debut (in the title role of “Lucia di Lammermoor”); impresario Kurt Adler fired her and began to encourage a lockout whereby other American opera houses would stop employing her. In 1958, before her third year at the Met, she and general manager Rudolf Bing grew confrontational, until he fired (“severed”) her. It’s said that she observed “A prima donna needs seven triumphs and seven scandals”. One can believe she meant it.

The live recordings of her La Scala performances - she was its assoluta from 1951 to 1958 - show that she was often riding a tiger. In an inspired 1955 “Norma”, she hits a questionable high note, whereupon you hear the whole house audibly react with intakes of breath; she holds the note, rides the storm, and brings the audience around to her side, building in courage as she does. On the day Rudolf Bing fired her from the Met, she replied stingingly in a press conference and then that very night sang one of her most taxing roles, Cherubini’s Medea, in acid, blazing form: there’s no question that the vengeance she takes on Jason is directed at Bing. Even relatively late in her career (1964), she recorded an electrifyingly passionate account of Aida’s “Ritorna vincitor!” It seems that she taped it in one take - out of sheer annoyance. During a break at an HMV recording session, the engineers played the “Ritorna vincitor!” that Régine Crespin had recorded the previous day for a Verdi recital; Callas, infuriated by how sleepy Crespin’s performance was, exclaimed that Maestro Serafin had remarked that Aida should begin this as if “shot from a cannon”; “Come on, maestro, let’s record it,” she told Nicola Rescigno. Out they went and delivered it there and then.

That’s La Callas for you. Yet as early as 1956, aged only thirty-two, she had begun speaking of her desire to retire, her need to step down from all the pressure. In February 1959, she attended the dress rehearsal of Covent Garden’s new “Lucia di Lammermoor” and was photographed with the new Lucia, Joan Sutherland; Callas behaved perfectly (when she had made her Covent Garden debut in 1952 as Norma, Sutherland had sung the comprimaria role of Clotilde; and they had been co-stars at a 1958 Royal gala at Covent Garden, at which Callas observed how much Sutherland had learnt from her). But the sheer luminous health of Sutherland’s voice, with its steadily glowing top, was the opposite of what Callas’s voice was becoming; Callas was in London to make her own second voice HMV recording of “Lucia” that week (this one on stereo). Despite her characteristic intelligence and musical sensitivity, it’s one of those rare recordings of hers in which she has lost her spark.

That summer, she began her great affair with Aristotle Onassis. Everything about her life and career show that she was more than ready for him. They were the two more famous Greeks alive; her Italian husband, Meneghini, had been managing her career and increasing the pressure on her to become the best paid and most sensational diva in the world; her husband was a plain man whereas the svelte new La Callas had become one of the most stunningly well dressed and fabulously jewelled women in the world. Onassis was her escape route; he also knew how to make her feel ecstatic away from music.

From then on, she went through long periods of neither singing in public nor even practising in private. At times, she could still rise to the occasion: the “La Gioconda” she recorded in summer 1959 (just when she had announced her separation from her husband) is incandescent. The 1960 French LP, though it has her most raucous and parlous top notes to date, is an amazement, with definitive accounts of a wide range of material. Some of her returns to old material - such as her 1963 recording of “O malheureuse Iphigénie” from Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride” (on her second French LP) - are even more profound in their way of lodging the music in your head forever, showing at every moment why the music is written as it is. Some of her discoveries of new repertory, such as (on the same 1963 second LP of French arias) her account of Marguérite’s “D’amour l’ardente flamme” from Berlioz’s “Le Damnation de Faust” and Charlotte’s “Air des lettres” from Massenet’s “Werther” are immediately definitive, even when compared to those by the greatest French singers. The 1964 Zeffirelli Covent Garden “Tosca” was a sensation of music drama and visual beauty - the production (by all reports subtler than Zeffirelli’s later New York Met one) lasted there for decades - in which Callas again seemed in great form. From 1959 on, however, she started to show a new tendency to sing sharp (an especial problem in her 1961 performance of Donizetti’s “Poliuto” at La Scala). When she returned to Norma, the role dearest to her heart, in a new Zeffirelli production later in 1964 at the Paris Opera, her voice began to fail her. And, though she managed some Toscas at the New York Met in March 1965 (“Maria by Callas” strongly suggests that she and Gobbi brought their costumes from Covent Garden), she could not complete her quota of Toscas at Covent Garden that July. She was forty-one; she never performed a complete role again.

The years that followed show Callas sometimes trying to get back on the opera circuit, sometimes incapable of trying. She tried some studio recordings, she conducted a series of masterclasses at New York’s Juilliard School, she made a series of comeback concerts in 1973-74 (riveting to the eye, miserable to the ear). Callas fanatics have recordings of her singing scales to her poodles, and of her rehearsing a relatively impressive but incomplete performance of Beethoven’s concert aria “Ah perfido!” in a Paris concert hall.

Onassis had behaved shockingly when suddenly he married Jackie Kennedy in 1968; it’s not much comfort to hear that he came to regret it. “Maria by Callas” omits the way Callas had an affair with her old colleague Giuseppe de Stefano, with whom she performed her 1973-1974 concert tour; their accompanist Robert Sutherland’s memoir of that tour distressingly narrates how di Stefano kept bullying Callas to adopt his (bad) way of singing rather than her own.

Robert Sutherland also makes an acute point about Callas’s character: she was an instinctive mimic, unconsciously adjusting her English accent to suit whoever she was speaking to. (He singles out the excellent long filmed interviews https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-8y8HjPcMBg she conducted with her old friend Lord Harewood, first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and grandson of George V: her accent becomes more and more English upper class as their conversation proceeds.) This touches on a deeper Callas mystery: she was both Greek and American, spending large parts of life in Italy and France, and perhaps was a stranger wherever she lived - a Greek to Americans and Italians, an American to Greeks, never quite a Frenchwoman. And she may have never had a secure sense of identity: which in turn may have helped her to be an instinctive actor. She was also myopic (how severely myopic is hard to understand): some argue that her relative inability to see explains why she learnt in childhood to focus on the world of music.

“Maria by Callas” doesn’t show all those aspects of her; and its emphasis on the love/career dichotomy of her life bypasses central features of her art. But it has rare footage of her Madama Butterfly (a role she only tackled in Chicago one season - more than this clip on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v-IME2SEft4 ) and of her singing “Voi lo sapete, o mamma” (from “Cavalleria Rusticana”) to an informal Greek audience and presiding over a circus event with great good spirits.

It does prompt a few questions. Why, when colouring the silent footage of her performing Violetta in “La Traviata” in Lisbon with the young Alfredo Kraus, does it not accompany the scene with the live recording (as happens on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MHRj8NhBnf4 ), but instead comes with music from elsewhere in “Traviata”? Why, when there is footage of her performing Cherubini’s Medea, one of her central roles, is this excluded? (It’s been shown in a recent Callas exhibition that began at La Scala last year.) Why is there so little of her in the bel canto repertory even though it includes her remark that that’s what she loves best?

Most of us who love Callas tend to think of her as the standard by which to judge all others. This is, of course, a mistake. Apart from the sheer flaws in her voice and occasional lapses of inspiration or judgment in her performances, there are larger points against her. Her diction, as Toscanini observed, is often flawed: the “a”s of “Casta diva” are not open (in “Caro nome”, they’re worse), several of her vowels are often compromised, and sometimes she does not enouce consonants clearly. (Tebaldi’s Italian diction is, on most occasions, exemplary.) Callas’s only recording in English, “Ocean thou mighty monster” from Weber’s “Oberon”, does not persuade you she grew up in an anglophone country; her French accent in song varies as much as her English accent in speech.

Her complete Carmen is an impressive interpretation - and yet, having lived with it for decades, I seldom need to return to it as I do to those of Conchita Supervia, Solange Michel, and Victoria de los Angeles: Callas tends to overpower the role, temperamentally if not vocally, and she lacks Carmen’s witty lightness of touch. (Nonetheless the Habañera in “Maria by Callas” is terrific. It’s a coloured version of this 1962 one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6fZRssq7UlM ) Her complete Butterfly is too studied, artful, contrived (the live Chicago “Butterfly” in “Maria by Callas” makes her look a more awkward Western impersonator of a Japanese woman than many less famous sopranos).

One of her greatest virtues, her control of breath, is connected to something for which she should more often be criticised: her judgment of tempo. She had phenomenal breath control, often singing lines longer than fifteen seconds (as few singers can). This enabled her to sing music slower than most other singers, even those you don’t expect. Listen with a stopwatch to Turandot’s biggest lines at the top of her voice as sung by both Callas and Birgit Nilsson: it’s Callas, though less secure, who takes slower tempi and needs to sing as expansively as she can. She observed that she liked to sing “slowly within a slow tempo”, by which I assume she meant that she could sustain a slow tempo technically but also expressively. But listen to the recorded history of “Depuis le jour” (from Charpentier’s “Louise”) and you find that this aria has had three main tempi (A, everyone in Charpentier’s day, not least Ninon Vallin in the 1935 recording he supervised; B, Callas, taking it much slower, followed by all other sopranos, none of whom reverted to the original tempo; C, Renee Fleming, who characteristically anaesthetises the aria with yet slower tempi and soupy portamenti and scoops). Callas can bring off the slower tempo because she makes it suspenseful; nobody else can, even though some of them have healthier voices and even longer breaths. When it comes to Lady Macbeth’s Sleepwalking Scene, Callas herself has two tempi: the one she took in 1952 with the great Victor de Sabata and the far slower one she established from 1958 with Nicola Rescigno: she’s so wonderful in both that she can kid you the slower tempo is better, but really it’s not - the music’s propulsive quality gets lost.

We can add other shortcomings when we’re in the mood. But, as Michael Scott (one of the most insightful Callas biographers) wrote of the faults of another soprano he revered and understood, Lotte Lehmann: “What of them? We may as well complain that the Venus de Milo has no arms.”

Saturday 24 November, 2018