Maria Callas: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Four

So I have to include some Maria Callas (1923-1977). Her singing truly changed my life when I was sixteen, almost forty-nine years ago. But many of you know many of her recordings, so what to give you this Christmas? 

It’s always good to be thunderstruck by something that none of the Callas discographers or critics even mention; I’ve always been thunderstruck by this very unthunderous quartet. The opera is I Vespri Siciliani (1855), a pretty terrible Italian translation (by Arnaldo Fusinato) of an opera Verdi composed to a French libretto (by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier) as Les Vêpres siciliennes (earlier in 1855) for the Paris Opéra. Dance people will know that the opera contains Verdi’s longest ballet, The Four Seasons. The original choreographer was Lucien Petipa (the important elder brother of the now more celebrated Marius Petipa); I’ve seen versions by Kenneth MacMillan (1975) and Jerome Robbins (1979) with no opera attached. This is a five-act opera, which I’ve also seen with no ballet attached: its plot is about quintessentially Verdian material, the struggle to liberate a nation from foreign occupants while two lovers are kept apart by politics. 

In 1951, two important revivals occurred in Italy, both featuring Callas while she was still in her late twenties. In May, she made a sensation in Florence at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (an important venue in her early Italian career), conducted by the great Erich Kleiber; the cast also included a Greek colleague of her, Giorgio Kokoliós-Bardi (1916-1964), as the tenor Arrigo; the Italian baritone Enzo Mascherini (1910-1981), and the Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff (1914-1993). (Christoff had the longest career of them all; I saw him in three roles between 1973 and 1977, and he was still singing in the early 1980s.) Then on December 7, La Scala, Milan, opened its 1951-1952 season with a new production of this opera, conducted by the superb Victor de Sabata; Callas, Mascherini, and Christoff were all in the cast. Callas had sung three performances of Aida there the year before, but stepping in as a replacement for Renata Tebaldi. Now she had the double honour of a new production and an opening night. December 7 is St Ambrose’s Day; each year, St Ambrose is the patron saint of Milan; La Scala opens its season on St Ambrose’s Day, usually with a new production of a lesser-known opera. (This year is different, of course.) Within a few years she was “queen of La Scala” (regina della Scala), singing five further St Ambrose Day season openings between 1952 and 1960; the five productions that Luchino Visconti mounted there with her as protagonist between 1954 and 1958 changed operatic history. 

Callas was like Baryshnikov in that she gave definitive performances of many roles to which she never returned. Between May 1951 and January 1952, she sang Duchess Elena in the complete Vespri sicilani eleven times, but never again thereafter (though she recorded two isolated arias). The role served as a brilliant introduction to her range of skills. Connoisseurs, rightly, speak about her amazing achievements in three other scenes (and covering three octaves, from top E above the stave to E sharp way below it): these are an electrically exciting address about political liberation in Act I, a tragic love duet in which at one (including a single chromatic scale covering two octaves and a half) earlier in Act IV, and a coloratura aria of joy in Act V before her wedding (which, you may be sure, never takes place).

Nobody, however, writes about her singing in the brief Act Four quartet. (It lasts 4'33"; she only enters at 1’45”.) So why do I select it? Well, the quartet itself - “Adieu mon pays,” “Addio, mia patria,”; “Farewell, my fatherland” - takes us to the heart of Verdi’s anguished Italian patriotism. Procida (the bass) and the Duchess Elena (Hélène in French, the soprano) have been sentenced to death by the French governor, Monfort (the baritone), but their thoughts are of Sicily, the fatherland they have failed to save. The young Arrigo (Henri; the tenor), profoundly in love with Hélène and loved by her, has discovered that Monfort (Monforte) is his (highly objectionable) father, but now thinks only of either saving her or dying with her. Procida sings first; Monforte and Arrigo then enter at cross-purposes; finally Elena is the last to add her voice to this dilemma, the most resigned – almost serene – of the four. 

Here’s a side of Callas that’s usually omitted from the legend: phenomenal line and phrasing, amazing delicacy, the ability to be the quietest voice in the group, and an exemplary colleague in ensemble. Her chief discographer, John Ardoin, writes that she excelled in emotional contrasts, whereas the sustained expression of “a single thought… was never a part of Callas’ makeup”; but that’s patent twaddle. Here, her first and third opening phrases hang high in the air like gossamer in the sunlight; amid them, the grace note on the words “patria” and “sconsolata” catch the heart. 

I can’t find even an inadequate English translation of the Italian (Christoff anyway changes “invendicato” to “invendicata” in his opening line, changing the sense considerably); I’ve instead provided a translation of the original French, which is far simpler and more eloquent. Amid her astonishing singing of this whole opera, this is where Callas most catches my breath. The kind of nostalgia she’s expressing here for the Sicily she’s losing is what this opera (and much of Verdi) is all about: she catches it not by histrionics but simply by luminous singing. 

Boris CHRISTOFF, Giorgio Kokoliós-Bardi, Enzo MASCHERINI, Maria CALLAS

Verdi, I Vespri siciliani

“Addio, mia patria”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvsXrGyFwTw

PROCIDA (bass)

Addio, mia patria, invendicato, 

ad altra sfera m’innalza a voi!

Per te io muoio, ma disperato

d’abbandonarti fra tanto duol!

Farewell, my country, I die,
without ending your captivity.
I die without revenge 
and your freedom dies with me. 

MONFORTE (baritone)
Si, col lor capo, sarà troncato

a quell’ ardire furente il vol,

e dai ribelli sarà sanato

gentil Sicilia, il tuo bel suol

Let this still rebellious people

Surrender or die beneath my hand. 

Let the grave of their leader
 be the tomb of their freedom.

ARRIGO (tenor)
Ah! Nella tua tomba, o sventurata,

per me cangiossi il patrio suol!

Ma non morrai, donna adorata.

o teco, il guiro, morrò di duol

Can I let her die? 

No, no! It is too cruel! 

I will follow her to the grave,
where I shall win her freedom.

ELENA (soprano)
Addio, mia patria amata,

Addio, fiorente suol!

Io sciolgo sconsolata

ad altra sfera il vol…

O mia patria, t’abbandono in duol!

O my sweet country! I die

Weeping at your captivity. 

I go to the grave, seeing no ray 
of hope or freedom 

O my fatherland, in grief, I leave you.

Please enjoy it; if you don’t, things will never be the same between us again.

Friday December 4, 2020