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Maria Callas (Greek: Μαρία Κάλλας) (December 2, 1923 – September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century. She combined an impressive bel canto technique, a wide-ranging voice, and great dramatic gifts. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini; further, to the works of Verdi and Puccini; and, in her early career, to the music dramas of Wagner. Her remarkable musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina. Born in New York City and raised by an overbearing mother, she received her musical education in Greece and established her career in Italy. Forced to deal with the exigencies of wartime poverty and with myopia that left her nearly blind on stage, she endured struggles and scandal over the course of her career. She turned herself from a heavy woman into a svelte and glamorous one after a mid career weight loss, which might have contributed to her vocal decline and the premature end of her career. The press exulted in publicizing Callas's allegedly temperamental behavior, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi, and her love affair with Aristotle Onassis. Her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press. However, her artistic achievements were such that Leonard Bernstein called her "The Bible of opera", and her influence so enduring that, in 2006, Opera News wrote of her: "Nearly thirty years after her death, she's still the definition of the diva as artist — and still one of classical music's best selling vocalists."
According
to
her
birth certificate, Maria Callas was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos at Flower Hospital (now the
Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center), at 1249 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,
on
December
2, 1923 to Greek parents George
Kalogeropoulos and Evangelia "Litsa" (sometimes "Litza") Dimitriadou,
though she was christened Anna
Maria
Sofia
Cecilia Kalogeropoulou –
the
genitive of the
patronymic Kalogeropoulos – (Greek: Μαρία
Άννα Σοφία Καικιλία Καλογεροπούλου).
Callas's father had shortened the surname Kalogeropoulos first to
"Kalos" and subsequently to "Callas" in order to make it more
manageable.
George
and Evangelia were an ill-matched couple from the beginning; he was
easy going and unambitious, with no interest in the arts, while his
wife was vivacious, socially ambitious, and had held dreams of a life
in the arts for herself. The
situation was aggravated by George's philandering and was improved
neither by the birth of a daughter named Yakinthi (later called Jackie)
in 1917 nor the birth of a son named Vassilis in 1920. Vassilis's death
from meningitis in
Summer
1922
dealt
another blow to the marriage. In 1923, after
realizing that Evangelia was pregnant again, George made the unilateral
decision to move his family to America, a decision which Yakinthi
recalled was greeted with Evangelia "shouting hysterically" followed by
George "slamming doors". The family left for America in
July 1923 and settled in the Astoria neighborhood
in
the borough of Queens. Evangelia
was convinced that her third child would be a boy; her disappointment
at the birth of another daughter was so great that she refused to even
look at her new baby for four days. Around
age three, Maria's musical talents began to manifest themselves, and
after Evangelia discovered that her youngest daughter also had a voice,
she began pressuring "Mary" to sing. Callas would later recall, "I was
made to sing when I was only five, and I hated it." George was unhappy with his wife favoring
their elder daughter as well as the pressure put upon young Mary to
sing and perform. The marriage continued to deteriorate and
in 1937 Evangelia decided to return to Athens with her two daughters. Callas's
relationship
with
Evangelia
continued to erode during the years in
Greece, and in the prime of her career, it became a matter of great
public interest, especially after a 1956 cover story in Time magazine which focused on
this relationship and later, by Evangelia's book My Daughter – Maria
Callas.
In public, Callas blamed the strained relationship with Evangelia on
her unhappy childhood spent singing and working at her mother's
insistence, saying, My
sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always
preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular.
It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted... I'll
never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I
should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money.
Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me
was mostly bad. In 1957, she told Norman Ross, "Children
should have a wonderful childhood. I have not had it – I wish I had." On
the other hand, biographer Petsalis - Diomidis asserts that it was
actually Evangelia's hateful treatment of George in front of their
young children which led to resentment and dislike on Callas's part. However, according to Callas' husband and
her close friend Giulietta
Simionato,
Callas related to them that her mother, who did not work, pressured her
to "go out with various men", mainly Italian and German soldiers, to
bring home money and food during the Axis
occupation
of
Greece during World War II.
Simionato
was convinced that Callas "managed to remain untouched", but
Callas never forgave Evangelia for what she perceived as a kind of
prostitution forced on her by her mother. In
an attempt to patch things up with her mother, Callas took Evangelia
along on her first visit to Mexico in 1950, but this only reawakened
the old frictions and resentments, and after leaving Mexico, the two
never met again. After
a series of angry and accusatory letters from Evangelia lambasting
Callas's father and husband, Callas ceased communication with her
mother altogether. Callas
received
her
musical education in Athens. Initially, her mother tried
to enroll her at the prestigious Athens
Conservatoire, without success. At the audition, her voice,
still untrained, failed to impress, while the conservatoire's director Filoktitis
Oikonomidis refused
to accept her without her satisfying the theoretic prerequisites (solfege).
In
the
summer of 1937, her mother visited Maria
Trivella at the
younger Greek National
Conservatoire,
asking her to take Mary as a student for a modest fee. In 1957,
Trivella recalled her impression of "Mary, a very plump young girl,
wearing big glasses for her myopia": The
tone of the voice was warm, lyrical, intense; it swirled and flared
like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations like a carillon.
It
was
by
any standards an amazing phenomenon, or rather it was a great
talent that needed control, technical training, and strict discipline
in order to shine with all its brilliance. Trivella
agreed
to
tutor
Callas completely, waiving her tuition fees, but no
sooner had Callas started her formal lessons and vocal exercises than
Trivella began to feel that Mary was not a contralto,
as
she
had been told, but a dramatic soprano.
Subsequently,
they
began working on raising the tessitura of Mary's voice and to
lighten its timbre. Trivella
recalled Mary as "A model student. Fanatical, uncompromising, dedicated
to her studies heart and soul. Her progress was phenomenal. She studied
five or six hours a day. ... Within six months, she was singing the
most
difficult arias in the international opera repertoire with the utmost
musicality". On April 11,
1938, in her public debut, Callas ended the recital of Trivella's class
at the Parnassos music hall with a duet from Tosca. Callas
recalled that Trivella "had a French method, which was placing the
voice in the nose, rather nasal... and I had the problem of not having
low chest tones,
which
is
essential in bel canto...
And
that's
where I learned my chest tones." However,
when interviewed by
Pierre Desgraupes on the French program L'Invitee Du Dimanche,
Callas attributed the development of her chest voice not to Trivella,
but to her next teacher, the well-known Spanish coloratura
soprano Elvira de
Hidalgo. Callas
studied
with
Trivella
for two years before her mother secured another
audition at the Athens Conservatoire with de Hidalgo. Callas auditioned
with "Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster." De Hidalgo recalled hearing
"tempestuous, extravagant cascades of sounds, as yet uncontrolled but
full of drama and emotion". She
agreed to take her as a pupil immediately, but Callas's mother asked de
Hidalgo to wait for a year, as Callas would be graduating from the
National Conservatoire and could begin working. On April 2, 1939,
Callas undertook the part of Santuzza in a student production of Mascagni's Cavalleria
rusticana at
the Olympia Theater, and in the fall of the same year she enrolled at
the Athens Conservatoire in Elvira de Hidalgo's class. In
1968,
Callas
told Lord Harewood, De
Hildalgo had the real great training, maybe even the last real training
of the real bel canto.
As
a
young
girl — thirteen years old — I was immediately thrown into her
arms, meaning that I learned the secrets, the ways of this bel canto,
which of course as you well know, is not just beautiful singing. It is
a very hard training; it is a sort of a straight jacket that you're
supposed to put on, whether you like it or not. You have to learn to
read, to write, to form your sentences, how far you can go, fall, hurt
yourself, put yourself back on your feet continuously. De Hidalgo had
one method, which was the real bel
canto way,
where no matter how heavy a voice, it should always be kept light, it
should always be worked on in a flexible way, never to weigh it down.
It is a method of keeping the voice light and flexible and pushing the
instrument into a certain zone where it might not be too large in
sound, but penetrating. And teaching the scales, trills, all the bel canto embellishments, which is a
whole vast language of its own. De
Hidalgo would later recall Callas as "a phenomenon... She would listen
to all my students, sopranos, mezzos, tenors... She could do it all." Callas herself said that she would go to
"the conservatoire at
10 in the morning and leave with the last pupil ... devouring music"
for 10 hours a day. When asked by her teacher why she did this, her
answer was that even "with the least talented pupil, he can teach you something that you, the
most talented, might not be able to do." After
several
appearances
as a student, Callas began appearing in secondary
roles at the Greek
National Opera.
De Hidalgo was instrumental in securing roles for her, allowing Callas
to earn a small salary, which would help her and her family get through
the difficult war years. Callas
made
her
professional debut in February 1942 in the small role of
Beatrice in Franz von
Suppé's Boccaccio. Soprano
Galatea Amaxopoulous, who sang in the chorus, later recalled, "Even in
rehearsal, Mary's fantastic performing ability had been obvious, and
from then on, the others started trying to find ways of preventing her
from appearing." Fellow
singer Maria Alkeou similarly recalled that the established sopranos
Nafiska Galanou and Anna (Zozó) Remmoundou "used to stand in the
wings while Mary was singing and make remarks about her, muttering,
laughing, and point their fingers at her". Despite
these hostilities, Callas managed to continue and made her debut in a
leading role in August 1942 as Tosca, going on to sing the role of
Marta in Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland at the Olympia Theater.
Callas's performance as Marta received glowing
reviews. Critic Spanoudi declared Callas "an extremely dynamic artist
possessing the rarest dramatic and musical gifts", and Vangelis
Mangliveras evaluated Callas's performance for the weekly To
Radiophonon: The
singer who took the part of Marta, that new star in the Greek
firmament, with a matchless depth of feeling, gave a theatrical
interpretation well up to the standard of a tragic actress. About her
exceptional voice with its astonishing natural fluency, I do not wish
to add anything to the words of Alexandra Lalaouni: 'Kaloyeropoulou is
one of those God given talents that one can only marvel at.' Following
these
performances,
even Callas's detractors began to refer to her as "The God-Given". Some time later, watching
Callas rehearse Beethoven's Fidelio,
rival
soprano
Remoundou asked a colleague, "Could it be that there is something divine and we
haven't realized it?" Following Tiefland, Callas
sang the role of Santuzza in Cavalleria
rusticana again
and
followed
it with O
Protomastoras at
the
ancient Odeon of
Herodes Atticus theater
at
the
foot of the Acropolis.
During
August
and September 1944, Callas performed the role of Leonore in a
Greek language production of Fidelio,
again
at
the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. German critic Friedrich
Herzog, who witnessed the performances, declared Leonore Callas's
"greatest triumph": When
Maria Kaloyeropoulou's Leonore let her soprano soar out radiantly in
the untrammeled jubilation of the duet, she rose to the most sublime
heights.... Here she gave bud, blossom, and fruit to that harmony of
sound that also ennobled the art of the prima donne. After
the liberation of Greece, de Hidalgo advised Callas to establish
herself in Italy. Callas proceeded to give a series of concerts around
Greece, and then, against her teacher's advice, she returned to America
to see her father and to further pursue her career. When she left
Greece on September 14, 1945, two months short of her 22nd birthday,
Callas had given 56 performances in seven operas and had appeared in
around 20 recitals. Callas
considered her Greek career as the foundation of her musical and
dramatic upbringing, saying, "When I got to the big career, there were
no surprises for me."
After
returning
to
the United States and reuniting with her father in
September 1945, Callas made the round of auditions. In December of that year,
she auditioned for Edward Johnson,
general
manager
of the Metropolitan
Opera, and was favorably received: "Exceptional voice — ought to
be heard very soon on stage". Callas maintained that the
Met offered her Madama Butterfly and Fidelio,
to
be
performed in Philadelphia and sung in English, both of which she
declined, feeling she was too fat for Butterfly and did not like the idea
of opera in English. Although
no
written
evidence of this offer exists in the Met's records, in a 1958 interview with The New York Post,
Johnson corroborated Callas's story: "We offered her a contract, but
she didn't like it — because of the contract, not because of the roles.
She was right in turning it down — it was frankly a beginner's
contract." In
1946,
Callas
was engaged to re-open the opera house in Chicago as Turandot,
but
the
company folded before opening. Basso
Nicola Rossi -
Lemeni, who also was to star in this opera, was aware that Tullio Serafin was looking for a dramatic
soprano to cast as La Gioconda
at
the Arena di Verona.
He
would
later
recall the young Callas as being "amazing — so strong
physically and spiritually; so certain of her future. I knew in a big
outdoor theater like Verona's, this girl, with her courage and huge
voice, would make a tremendous impact." Subsequently he recommended
Callas to retired tenor and impresario Giovanni
Zenatello. During her audition, Zenatello became so excited that
he jumped up and joined Callas in the Act 4 duet. It was in this role that
Callas made her Italian debut. Upon
her
arrival
in Verona,
Callas met Giovanni
Battista
Meneghini,
an older, wealthy industrialist, who began courting her. They married
in 1949, and he assumed control of her career until 1959, when the
marriage dissolved. It was Meneghini's love and support that gave
Callas the time needed to establish herself in Italy, and throughout the prime of
her career, she went by the name Maria
Meneghini
Callas. After La Gioconda,
Callas
had
no further offers, and when Serafin, looking for someone to
sing Isolde,
called on her, she told him that she already knew the score, even
though she had looked at only the first act out of curiosity while at
the conservatory. She
sight-read the opera's second act for Serafin, who praised her for
knowing the role so well, whereupon she admitted to having bluffed and
having sight-read the music. Even more impressed,
Serafin immediately cast her in the role. Serafin thereafter served
as Callas's mentor and supporter.
According to Lord
Harewood, "Very few Italian
conductors have had a more distinguished career than Tullio
Serafin, and perhaps none,
apart from Toscanini, more influence". In
1968, Callas would recall that working with Serafin was the "really
lucky" opportunity of her career, because "he taught me that there must
be an expression; that there must be a justification. He taught me the
depth of music, the justification of music. That's where I really
really drank all I could from this man". The
great
turning
point in Callas's career occurred in Venice in 1949. She was engaged to sing the
role of Brünnhilde in Die Walküre at the Teatro la Fenice,
when Margherita
Carosio, who was engaged to sing Elvira in I puritani in
the same theater, fell ill. Unable to find a replacement for Carosio,
Maestro Serafin told Callas that she would be singing Elvira in six
days; when Callas protested that she not only did not know the role,
but also had three more Brünnhildes to sing, he told her "I
guarantee that you can." In Michael Scott's
words,
"the
notion of any one singer embracing music as divergent in
its vocal demands as Wagner's Brünnhilde and Bellini's Elvira in
the same career would have been cause enough for surprise; but to
attempt to essay them both in the same season seemed like folie de grandeur". Before the performance
actually took place, one incredulous critic would snort, "We hear that
Serafin has agreed to conduct I
puritani with a
dramatic soprano... When can we expect a new edition of La traviata with [baritone] Gino Bechi's
Violetta?" After
the performance, critics would write, "Even the most skeptical had to
acknowledge the miracle that Maria Callas accomplished... the
flexibility of her limpid, beautifully poised voice, and her splendid
high notes. Her interpretation also has a humanity, warmth, and
expressiveness that one would search for in vain in the fragile,
pellucid coldness of other Elviras." Franco
Zeffirelli recalled,
"What
she did in Venice was really incredible. You need to be familiar
with opera to realize the enormity of her achievement. It was as if
someone asked Birgit Nilsson,
who
is
famous for her great Wagnerian voice, to substitute
overnight for Beverly Sills,
who
is
one of the great coloratura sopranos of our time." Scott asserts that "Of all the
many roles Callas undertook it is doubtful if any had a more
far-reaching effect." This initial foray into the bel canto repertoire changed the
course of Callas's career and set her on a path leading to Lucia di
Lammermoor, La traviata, Armida, La sonnambula, Il pirata, Il turco in
Italia, Medea,
and Anna Bolena and reawakened interest in
the long neglected operas of Cherubini, Bellini, Donizetti,
and Rossini. In the words of soprano Montserrat
Caballé, She
opened a new door for us, for all the singers in the world, a door that
had been closed. Behind it was sleeping not only great music but great
idea of interpretation. She has given us the chance, those who follow
her, to do things that were hardly possible before her. That I am
compared with Callas is something I never dared to dream. It is not
right. I am much smaller than Callas. As with I puritani, Callas also learned and performed
Cherubini's Medea, Giordano's Andrea
Chénier, and
Rossini's Armida on a few days' notice. Throughout
her career, Callas displayed her vocal versatility in recitals that
combined dramatic soprano arias alongside coloratura pieces, including
in a 1952 RAI recital in which she opened with Lady Macbeth's "letter
scene", followed by the "Mad
Scene" from Lucia di Lammermoor, then by Abigaile's treacherous
recitative and aria from Nabucco, finishing with the "Bell Song" from Lakmé capped by a ringing high E in alt (E6). Although
by
1951,
Callas
had sung at all the major theaters in Italy, she had
not yet made her official debut at Italy's most prestigious opera house, Teatro alla
Scala in Milan.
According to composer Gian-Carlo
Menotti, Callas had substituted for Renata Tebaldi in the role of Aida in 1950, and La Scala's
general manager, Antonio Ghiringhelli, had taken an immediate dislike
to Callas. Menotti recalls that
Ghiringhelli had promised him any singer he wanted for the premier of The Consul,
but
when
he
suggested Callas, Ghiringhelli said that he would never
have Callas at La Scala except as a guest artist. However, as Callas's
fame grew, and especially after her great success in I vespri
siciliani in Florence,
Ghiringhelli
had
to relent: Callas made her official debut at La Scala in Verdi's I vespri
siciliani on
opening night in December 1951, and this theater became her artistic
home throughout the 1950s. La Scala mounted many new
productions specially for Callas by directors such as Herbert von
Karajan, Margherita
Wallmann, Franco
Zeffirelli, and most importantly, Luchino Visconti. Visconti stated later that
he began directing opera only because of Callas, and he directed her in
lavish new productions of La vestale, La traviata, La sonnambula, Anna Bolena,
and Iphigénie
en
Tauride. Callas was notably instrumental in arranging Franco Corelli's
debut
at
La Scala in 1954, where he sang Licinio in Spontini's La vestale opposite Callas's Julia.
The two had sung together for the first time the year previously in
Rome in a production of Norma. Anthony
Tommasini wrote
that Corelli had "earned great respect from the fearsomely demanding
Callas, who in Mr. Corelli finally had someone with whom she could act." The two collaborated
several more times at La Scala, singing opposite each other in
productions of Fedora (1956), Il pirata (1958) and Poliuto (1960). Their partnership
continued throughout the rest of Callas's career. Callas
made
her
American debut in Chicago in 1954, and "with the Callas Norma, Lyric Opera of
Chicago was
born." Her Metropolitan
Opera debut,
opening the Met's seventy-second season on October 29, 1956 was again
with Norma, but was preceded with an
unflattering cover story in Time magazine which rehashed all
of the Callas clichés, including her temper, her supposed
rivalry with Renata Tebaldi,
and
especially
her difficult relationship with her mother. As
she had done with Lyric Opera of Chicago, on November 21, 1958, Callas
gave a concert to inaugurate what then was billed as the Dallas Civic
Opera, and helped establish that company with her friends from
Chicago, Lawrence
Kelly and Maestro Nicola Rescigno. She further solidified this
company's standing when, in 1958, she gave "a towering performance as
Violetta in La
Traviata and that
same year, in her only American performances of Medea,
gave
an
interpretation of the title role worthy of Euripides." In
1958
a
feud with Rudolf Bing led to Callas's
Metropolitan Opera contract being cancelled. Impresario Allen Oxenburg realised that this
situation provided him with an opportunity to hire Callas for his own
company, the American Opera
Society, and he accordingly approached Callas with a contract to
perform Imogene in Il
pirata. She accepted and sang the role in a January 1959
performance that according to opera critic Allan Kozinn "quickly became legendary
in operatic circles". Bing
and Callas later reconciled their differences and she returned to the
house in 1965 to sing the title role in two performances as Tosca
opposite Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi for one
performance (March 19, 1965) and Richard Tucker (March 25, 1965) with Tito Gobbi as Scarpia for her final
performances at the Met. In 1952, she made her London debut at the Royal
Opera
House in Norma with veteran mezzo
soprano Ebe
Stignani as Adalgisa, a performance which survives
on record and also features the young Joan
Sutherland in the small role of Clotilde. Callas and the London public had what she
herself called "a love affair", and she returned to the Royal
Opera
House in 1953, 1957, 1958, 1959, and 1964 to
1965. It was at the Royal Opera House where, on
July 5, 1965, Callas ended her stage career in the role of Tosca, in a production designed and mounted
for her by Franco
Zeffirelli and featuring her friend and colleague Tito
Gobbi. In
the
early
years
of her career, Callas was a heavy and full-figured
woman; in her own words, " Heavy — one can say — yes I was; but I'm
also a
tall woman, 5' 8½", and I used to weigh no more than
200 pounds." Tito Gobbi relates that during a lunch
break while recording Lucia in Florence, Serafin commented
to Callas that she was eating too much and allowing her weight to
become a problem. When she protested that she wasn't so heavy,
Gobbi suggested she should "put the matter to test" by stepping on the
weighing machine outside the restaurant. The result was "somewhat
dismaying, and she became rather silent." In 1968, Callas told Edward
Downes that during her initial performances in Cherubini's Medea in
May 1953, she realized that she needed a leaner face and figure to do
dramatic justice to this as well as the other roles she was
undertaking. She adds, I
was getting so heavy that even my vocalizing was getting heavy. I was
tiring myself, I was perspiring too much, and I was really working too
hard. And I wasn't really well, as in health; I couldn't move freely.
And then I was tired of playing a game, for instance playing this
beautiful young woman, and I was heavy and uncomfortable to move
around. In any case, it was uncomfortable and I didn't like it. So I
felt now if I'm going to do things right — I've studied all my life to
put things right musically, so why don't I diet and put myself into a
certain condition where I'm presentable. During
1953
and
early 1954, she lost almost 80 pounds (36 kg),
turning herself into what Maestro Rescigno called "possibly the most
beautiful lady on the stage". Sir Rudolf Bing,
who
remembered
Callas
as being "monstrously fat" in 1951, stated that
after the weight loss, Callas was an "astonishing, svelte, striking
woman" who "showed none of the signs one usually finds in a fat woman
who has lost weight: she looked as though she had been born to that
slender and graceful figure, and had always moved with that elegance." Various rumors spread
regarding her weight loss method; one had her swallowing a tapeworm,
while
Rome's
Pantanella
Mills pasta company claimed she lost weight by
eating their "physiologic pasta", prompting Callas to file a lawsuit. Callas stated that she lost
the weight by eating a sensible low-calorie diet of mainly salads and
chicken. Some
believe that the loss of body mass made it more difficult for her to
support her voice, triggering the vocal strain that became apparent
later in the decade,
while others believed the weight loss effected a newfound softness and
femininity in her voice, as well as a greater confidence as a person
and performer. Tito
Gobbi said,
"Now she was not only supremely gifted both musically and
dramatically — she was a beauty too. And her awareness of this invested
with fresh magic every role she undertook. What it eventually did to
her vocal and nervous stamina I am not prepared to say. I only assert
that she blossomed into an artist unique in her generation and
outstanding in the whole range of vocal history." Callas's
voice was and remains controversial; it bothered and disturbed as many
as it thrilled and inspired. Walter Legge stated that Callas
possessed that most essential ingredient for a great singer: an
instantly recognizable voice. During "The Callas Debate",
Italian critic Rodolfo Celletti stated, "The timbre of
Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it
was a thin sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It
lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as
velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was
precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of
varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive
colours and timbres as to be unforgettable." However, in his review of
Callas's 1951 live recording of I vespri
siciliani,
Ira Siff writes, "Accepted wisdom tells us that Callas possessed, even
early on, a flawed voice, unattractive by conventional standards — an
instrument that signaled from the beginning vocal problems to come. Yet
listen to her entrance in this performance and one encounters a rich,
spinning sound, ravishing by any standard, capable of delicate dynamic
nuance. High notes are free of wobble, chest tones unforced, and the
middle register displays none of the "bottled" quality that became more
and more pronounced as Callas matured." Nicola
Rossi-Lemeni relates
that
Callas's
mentor Tullio Serafin used to refer to her as "Una grande vociaccia";
he
continues,
"Vociaccia is
a
little bit pejorative — it means an ugly voice — but grande means a big voice, a great
voice. A great ugly voice, in a way." Callas
herself did not like the sound of her own voice; in one of her last
interviews, answering whether or not she was able to listen to her own
voice, she replies, Yes,
but I don't like it. I have to do it, but I don't like it at all
because I don't like the kind of voice I have. I really hate listening
to myself! The first time I listened to a recording of my singing was
when we were recording San
Giovanni
Battista by Stradella in a church in Perugia in
1949. They made me listen to the tape and I cried my eyes out. I wanted
to stop everything, to give up singing... Also now even though I don't
like my voice, I've become able to accept it and to be detached and
objective about it so I can say, "Oh, that was really well sung," or
"It was nearly perfect." Maestro Carlo Maria
Giulini has
described the appeal of Callas's voice: It
is very difficult to speak of the voice of Callas. Her voice was a very
special instrument. Something happens sometimes with string
instruments — violin, viola, cello — where the first moment you listen
to
the sound of this instrument, the first feeling is a bit strange
sometimes. But after just a few minutes, when you get used to, when you
become friends with this kind of sound, then the sound becomes a
magical quality. This was Callas.
Callas's
voice has been difficult to place in the modern vocal classification or fach system, especially since in
her prime, her repertoire contained the heaviest dramatic soprano roles
as well as roles usually undertaken by the highest, lightest and most
agile coloratura sopranos. Regarding this versatility, Maestro Tullio Serafin said, "This woman can sing
anything written for the female voice". Michael Scott argues that Callas's voice
was a natural high soprano, and going by evidence of
Callas's early recordings, Rosa Ponselle likewise felt that "At that
stage of its development, her voice was a pure but sizable dramatic
coloratura –– that is to say, a sizable coloratura voice with
dramatic capabilities, not the other way around." On the other hand, music
critic John Ardoin has argued that Callas was
the reincarnation of the Nineteenth Century soprano sfogato or "unlimited soprano", a
throwback to Maria Malibran and Giuditta Pasta,
for
whom
many of the famous bel canto operas were written. He
avers that like Pasta and Malibran, Callas was a natural mezzo-soprano whose
range
was
extended
through training and willpower, resulting in a voice
which "lacked the homogeneous color and evenness of scale once so
prized in singing. There were unruly sections of their voices never
fully under control. Many who heard Pasta, for example, remarked that
her uppermost notes seemed produced by ventriloquism,
a
charge
which would later be made against Callas". Ardoin points to the
writings of Henry
Fothergill Chorley about
Pasta
which
bear an uncanny resemblance to descriptions of Callas: "There
was a portion of the scale which differed from the rest in quality and
remained to the last 'under a veil.' ... out of these uncouth materials
she had to compose her instrument and then to give it flexibility. Her
studies to acquire execution must have been tremendous; but the
volubility and brilliancy, when acquired, gained a character of their
own... There were a breadth, an expressiveness in her roulades, an
evenness and solidity in her shake,
which imparted to every passage a significance totally beyond the reach
of lighter and more spontaneous singers... The best of her audience
were held in thrall, without being able to analyze what made up the
spell, what produced the effect -- as soon as she opened her lips". Callas
herself appears to have been in agreement not only with Ardoin's
assertions that she started as a natural mezzo-soprano,
but
also
saw the similarities between herself and Pasta and Malibran.
In
1957,
she
described her early voice as: "The timbre was dark, almost black — when
I think of it, I think of thick molasses", and in 1968 she
added, "They say I was not a true soprano, I was rather toward a mezzo". Regarding her ability to
sing the heaviest as well as the lightest roles, she told James
Fleetwood, "It's
study; it's Nature. I’m doing nothing special, you know. Even Lucia, Anna Bolena, Puritani,
all
these
operas were created for one type of soprano, the type that
sang Norma, Fidelio,
which
was Malibran of course. And a funny
coincidence last year, I was singing Anna Bolena and Sonnambula,
same
months
and the same distance of time as Giuditta Pasta had sung in the Nineteenth
Century... So I’m really not doing anything extraordinary. You wouldn’t
ask a pianist not to be able to play
everything; he has to.
This is Nature and also because I had a wonderful teacher, the old kind
of teaching methods... I was a very heavy voice, that is my nature, a
dark voice shall we call it, and I was always kept on the light side.
She always trained me to keep my voice limber".
Regarding
the
sheer
size of Callas's instrument, Celletti says,
"Her voice was penetrating. The volume as such was average: neither
small nor powerful. But the penetration, allied to this incisive
quality (which bordered on the ugly because it frequently contained an
element of harshness) ensured that her voice could be clearly heard
anywhere in the auditorium." However, after her first
performance of Medea in 1953, the critic for Musical Courier would write, "she displayed
a vocal generosity that was scarecely believable for its amplitude and
resilience." In a 1982 Opera News interview with Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge,
Bonynge
stated,
"But before she slimmed down, I mean this was such a
colossal voice. It just poured out of her, the way Flagstad's
did...
Callas
had a huge voice. When she and Stignani sang
Norma, at the bottom of the range you could barely tell who was who...
Oh it was colossal. And she took the big sound right up to the top." In
his book, Michael Scott makes the distinction that whereas Callas's
pre-1954 voice was a "dramatic soprano with an exceptional top", after
the weight loss, it became, as one Chicago critic described the voice in Lucia, a "huge suprano leggiero". In performance, Callas's range was just
short of three octaves, from F-sharp (F♯3) below middle C (C4) heard in "Arrigo!
Ah parli ad un core" from I vespri
siciliani to
E-natural (E6) above high C (C6), heard in the aria "Mercè,
dilette amiche" in the final act of the same opera, as well as in Rossini's Armida and Lakmés
Bell Song. Whether or not Callas ever sang a high F-natural in
performance has been open to debate. After her June 11, 1951 concert in
Florence, Rock Ferris of Musical Courier said, "Her high E's and F's are taken
full voice." Although no
definite recording of Callas
singing high F's have surfaced, the presumed E-natural at the end of
Rossini's Armida — a poor quality bootleg recording of
uncertain pitch — has been referred to as a high F by Italian
musicologists and critics Eugenio
Gara and Rodolfo
Celletti. Callas expert Dr. Robert Seletsky,
however, stated that since the finale of Armida is
in the key of E, the final note could not have been an F, as it would
dissonant. Author Eve Ruggieri has referred to the penultimate note in
"Mercè, dilette amiche" from the 1951 Florence performances of I vespri
siciliani as a high F; however, this claim is refuted by John
Ardoin's review of the live
recording of the performance as well as by the review of the recording
in Opera News, both of which refer to the note as a
high E-natural. In a 1969 French television interview
with Pierre Desgraupes on the program L'invitée du dimanche, maestro Francesco
Siciliani speaks of Callas's voice going to a high
F, but within the same program, Callas's teacher, Elvira
de
Hidalgo,
speaks of the voice soaring to a high E-natural, but does not mention a
high F; meanwhile, Callas herself remains silent on the subject,
neither agreeing nor disagreeing with either claim. Callas's
voice
was
noted
for its three distinct registers: Her low or chest
register was extremely dark and almost baritonal in power, and she used
this part of her voice for dramatic effect, often going into this
register much higher on the scale than most sopranos. Her middle register had a
peculiar and highly personal sound — "part oboe, part clarinet", as Claudia Cassidy described it — and
was
noted for its veiled or "bottled" sound, as if she were singing
into a jug. Walter Legge attributed
this sound to the "extraordinary formation of her upper palate, shaped
like a Gothic arch, not the Romanesque arch of the normal mouth". The
upper register was ample and bright, with an impressive extension above
high C, which — in contrast to the light flute-like sound of the
typical
coloratura, "she would attack these notes with more vehemence and
power — quite differently therefore, from the very delicate, cautious,
'white' approach of the light sopranos." Legge adds, "Even in the
most difficult fioriture there
were no musical or technical difficulties in this part of the voice
which she could not execute with astonishing, unostentatious ease. Her chromatic runs, particularly
downwards, were beautifully smooth and staccatos almost
unfailingly accurate, even in the trickiest intervals. There is hardly
a bar in the whole range of nineteenth century music for high soprano
that seriously tested her powers." And as she demonstrated in
the finale of La sonnambula on the commercial EMI set
and the live recording from Cologne, she was able to execute a diminuendo on the stratospheric high
E-flat, which Scott describes as "a feat
unrivaled in the history of the gramophone." Regarding
Callas's
soft
singing, Celletti says,
"In these soft passages, Callas seemed to use another voice altogether,
because it acquired a great sweetness. Whether in her florid singing or
in her canto spianato,
that
is,
in long held notes without ornamentation, her mezza-voce could
achieve such moving sweetness that the sound seemed to come from on
high. . . I don't know, it seemed to come from the skylight of La
Scala." This
combination
of
size,
weight, range and agility was a source of
amazement to Callas's own contemporaries. One of the choristers present
at her La Scala debut in I vespri
siciliani recalled,
"My
God!
She came on stage sounding like our deepest contralto, Cloe Elmo.
And
before the evening was over, she took a high E-flat. And it was
twice as strong as Toti Dal Monte's!" In the same vein,
mezzo-soprano Giulietta
Simionato said:
"The first time we sang together was in Mexico in 1950, where she sang
the top E-flat in the second act finale of Aida. I can still
remember the effect of that note in the opera house — it was like a
star!" For Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi,
"the
most
fantastic thing was the possibility for her to sing the
soprano coloratura with this big voice! This was something
really special. Fantastic absolutely!" Callas's
vocal
registers,
however, were not seamlessly joined; Walter Legge writes,
"Unfortunately, it was only in quick music, particularly descending
scales, that she completely mastered the art of joining the three
almost incompatible voices into one unified whole, but until about
1960, she disguised those audible gear changes with cunning skill." Rodolfo Celletti states, In
certain areas of her range her voice also possessed a guttural quality.
This would occur in the most delicate and troublesome areas of a
soprano's voice — for instance where the lower and middle registers
merge, between G and A. I would go so far as to say that here her voice
had such resonances as to make one think at times of a ventriloquist. .
.or else the voice could sound as though it were resonating in a rubber
tube. There was another troublesome spot. . . between the middle and
upper registers. Here, too, around the treble F and G, there was often
something in the sound itself which was not quite right, as though the
voice were not functioning properly. As
to
whether
these
troublesome spots were due to the nature of the voice
itself or to technical deficiencies, Celletti says: "Even if, when
passing from one register to another, Callas produced an unpleasant
sound, the technique she used for these transitions was perfect." Musicologist
and
critic Fedele
D'Amico adds,
"Callas's 'faults' were in the voice and not in the singer; they are so
to speak, faults of departure but not of arrival. This is precisely
Celletti's distinction between the natural quality of the voice and the
technique." In 2005, Ewa Podles said
of Callas, "Maybe she had three voices, maybe she had three ranges, I
don’t know — I am professional singer. Nothing disturbed me, nothing! I
bought everything that she offered me. Why? Because all of her voices,
her registers, she used how they should be used — just to tell us
something!" Eugenio
Gara states,
"Much has been said about her voice, and no doubt the discussion will
continue. Certainly no one could in honesty deny the harsh or
"squashed" sounds, nor the wobble on the very high notes. These and
others were precisely the accusations made at the time against Pasta and Malibran,
two geniuses of song (as they were then called), sublime, yet
imperfect. Both were brought to trial in their day. . . Yet few singers
have made history in the annals of opera as these two did." Though
adored by many opera enthusiasts, Callas was a controversial artist.
While Callas was the great singer often dismissed simply as an actress she considered herself
first and foremost "a musician, that is, the first instrument of the
orchestra." Grace Bumbry states,
"If I followed the musical score when she was singing, I would see
every tempo marking, every dynamic marking, everything being adhered
to, and at the same time, it was not antiseptic; it was something that
was very beautiful and moving." Maestro Victor de
Sabata confided
to Walter Legge,
"If
the
public could understand, as we do, how deeply and utterly
musical Callas is, they would be stunned", and
Maestro Tullio Serafin assessed Callas's
musicality as "extraordinary, almost frightening." Callas possessed an innate
architectural sense of line proportion and an uncanny feel for
timing and for what one of her colleagues described as "a sense of the
rhythm within the rhythm". Regarding
Callas's technical prowess, Celletti says, "We must not forget that she
could tackle the whole gamut of ornamentation: staccato, trills,
half-tills, gruppetti, scales,
etc." D'Amico
adds, "The essential virtue of Callas's technique consists of supreme
mastery of an extraordinarily rich range of tone colour (that is, the
fusion of dynamic range and timbre). And such mastery means total
freedom of choice in its use: not being a slave to one's abilities, but
rather, being able to use them at will as a means to an end." While reviewing the many
recorded versions of "perhaps Verdi's ultimate challenge", the aria
"D'amor sull'ali rosee" from Il Trovatore,
Richard
Dyer
writes, "Callas
articulates all of the trills,
and she binds them into the line more expressively than anyone else;
they are not an ornament but a form of intensification. Part of the
wonder in this performance is the chiaroscuro through
her tone -- the other side of not singing full-out all the way through.
One of the vocal devices that create that chiaroscuro is a varying rate
of vibrato;
another
is
her portamento,
the
way
she
connects the voice from note to note, phrase to phrase,
lifting and gliding. This is never a sloppy swoop, because its
intention is as musically precise as it is in great string playing. In
this aria, Callas uses more portamento, and in greater variety, than
any other singer. . . Callas is not creating "effects", as even her
greatest rivals do. She sees the aria as a whole, "as if in an aerial
view", as Sviatoslav
Richter's
teacher observed of his most famous pupil; simultaneously, she is on
earth, standing in the courtyard of the palace of Aliaferia, floating
her voice to the tower where her lover lies imprisoned." In
addition to her musical skills, Callas had a particular gift for
language and the use of language in music. In recitatives, she always
knew which word to emphasize and which syllable in that word to bring
out. Michael Scott notes, "If we
listen attentively, we note how her perfect legato enables her to suggest by
musical means even the exclamation marks and commas of the text." Technically,
not only did she have the capacity to perform the most difficult florid
music effortlessly, but also she had the ability to use each ornament
as an expressive device rather than for mere fireworks. Soprano Martina Arroyo states, "What interested me
most was how she gave the runs and the cadenzas words. That always
floored me. I always felt I heard her saying something – it was never
just singing notes. That alone is an art." Walter Legge states that, Most
admirable of all her qualities, however, were her taste, elegance and
deeply musical use of ornamentation in all its forms and complications,
the weighting and length of every appoggiatura,
the
smooth
incorporation of the turn in melodic lines, the accuracy and
pacing of her trills,
the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos,
varying
their
curve
with enchanting grace and meaning. There were
innumerable exquisite felicities – minuscule portamentos from one note
to its nearest neighbor, or over widespread intervals – and changes of
color that were pure magic. In these aspects of bel canto she was
supreme mistress of that art.
Regarding
Callas's acting ability, vocal coach Ira Siff remarked, "When I saw the
final two Toscas
she
did
in the old [Met], I felt like I was watching the actual story
on which the opera had later been based." Callas was not, however, a
realistic or verismo style actress: her physical acting was
merely "subsidiary to the heavy Kunst of developing the
psychology of the roles under the supervision of the music, of
singing the
acting... Suffering, delight, humility, hubris, despair, rhapsody — all
this was musically appointed, through her use of the voice flying the
text upon the notes." Seconding this opinion, verismo specialist soprano Augusta
Oltrabella said,
"Despite what everyone says, [Callas] was an actress in the expression
of the music, and not vice versa." Mathew
Gurewitsch adds, In
fact the essence of her art was refinement. The term seems odd for a
performer whose imagination and means of expression were so prodigious.
She was eminently capable of the grand gesture; still, judging strictly
from the evidence of her recordings, we know (and her few existing film
clips confirm) that her power flowed not from excess but from unbroken
concentration, unfaltering truth in the moment. It flowed also from
irreproachable musicianship. People say that Callas would not hesitate
to distort a vocal line for dramatic effect. In the throes of operatic
passion plenty of singers snarl, growl, whine, and shriek. Callas was
not one of them. She found all she needed in the notes. Ewa Podles likewise
stated that "It's enough to hear her, I’m positive! Because she could
say everything only with her voice! I can imagine everything, I can see
everything in front of my eye." Opera
director Sandro
Sequi,
who
witnessed
many Callas performances close-up, states, "For me, she
was extremely stylized and classic, yet at the same time, human — but
humanity on a higher plane of existence, almost sublime. Realism was
foreign to her, and that is why she was the greatest of opera singers.
After all, opera is the least realistic of theater forms... She was
wasted in verismo roles, even Tosca,
no
matter
how brilliantly she could act such roles." Scott adds, "Early nineteenth
century opera... is not merely the antithesis
of reality, it also requires highly stylized acting. Callas had the
perfect face for it. Her big features matched its grandiloquence and
spoke volumes from a distance." In regard
to Callas's physical acting style, Nicola Rescigno states, "Maria had a way of
even transforming her body for the exigencies of a role, which is a
great triumph. In La
traviata,
everything would slope down; everything indicated sickness, fatigue,
softness. Her arms would move as if they had no bones, like the great
ballerinas. In Medea,
everything
was
angular. She’d never make a soft gesture; even the walk
she used was like a tiger’s walk." Sandro
Sequi recalls, "She was never in a hurry. Everything was very paced,
proportioned, classical, precise... She was extremely powerful but
extremely stylized. Her gestures were not many... I don't think she did
more than 20 gestures in a performance. But she was capable of standing
10 minutes without moving a hand or finger, compelling everyone to look
at her." Edward Downes recalled
Callas watching and observing her colleagues with such intensity and
concentration as to make it seem that the drama was all unfolding in
her head. Sir Rudolf Bing similarly recalled that in Il trovatore in Chicago, "it was Callas'
quiet listening, rather than Björling's
singing
that
made the dramatic impact... He didn't know what he was
singing, but she knew."
Callas
herself stated that, in Opera, Acting must be based on the Music, quoting
Maestro Tullio Serafin's
advice
to
her: "When
one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act onstage,
all you have to do is listen to
the music. The composer has already seen to that. If you take the
trouble to really listen with your Soul and with your Ears – and I say
'Soul' and 'Ears' because the Mind must work, but not too much also – you will find
every gesture there."
Callas's
most distinguishing quality was her ability to breathe life into the
characters she portrayed, or
in
the words of Matthew Gurewitsch, "Most mysterious among her many
gifts, Callas had the genius to translate the minute particulars of a
life into tone of voice." Italian critic Eugenio Gara adds: Her
secret is in her ability to transfer to the musical plane the suffering
of the character she plays, the nostalgic longing for lost happiness,
the anxious fluctuation between hope and despair, between pride and
supplication, between irony and generosity, which in the end dissolve
into a superhuman inner pain. The most diverse and opposite of
sentiments, cruel deceptions, ambitious desires, burning tenderness,
grievous sacrifices, all the torments of the heart, acquire in her
singing that mysterious truth, I would like to say, that psychological
sonority, which is the primary attraction of opera. Ethan Mordden writes,
"It was a flawed voice. But then Callas sought to capture in her
singing not just beauty but a whole humanity, and within her system,
the flaws feed the feeling, the sour plangency and the strident
defiance becoming aspects of the canto. They were literally defects of
her voice; she bent them into advantages of her singing." Maestro Giulini believes,
"If melodrama is the ideal unity of the trilogy of words, music, and
action, it is impossible to imagine an artist in whom these three
elements were more together than Callas." He recalls that during
Callas's performances of La traviata,
"reality
was
onstage. What stood behind me, the audience, auditorium, La Scala itself, seemed artifice.
Only that which transpired on stage was truth, life itself." Sir Rudolf Bing expressed similar
sentiments: Once
one heard and saw Maria Callas — one can't really distinguish it — in a
part, it was very hard to enjoy any other artist, no matter how great,
afterwards, because she imbued every part she sang and acted with such
incredible personality and life. One move of her hand was more than
another artist could do in a whole act. To Maestro Antonino Votto,
Callas
was The
last great artist. When you think this woman was nearly blind, and
often sang standing a good 150 feet from the podium. But her
sensitivity! Even if she could not see, she sensed the music and always
came in exactly with my downbeat. When we rehearsed, she was so
precise, already note-perfect... She was not just a singer, but a
complete artist. It's foolish to discuss her as a voice. She must be
viewed totally — as a complex of music, drama, movement. There is no
one
like her today. She was an esthetic phenomenon.
During
the early 1950s, controversy arose regarding a supposed rivalry between
Callas and Renata Tebaldi,
an
Italian
lyrico spinto soprano renowned for the
ravishing beauty of her voice. The
contrast
between Callas's often unconventional vocal qualities and
Tebaldi's classically beautiful sound resurrected an argument as old as
opera itself, namely, beauty of sound versus the expressive use of
sound.
This
"rivalry" reached a fever pitch in the mid-1950s, at times even
engulfing the two women themselves, who were said by their more
fanatical followers to have engaged in verbal barbs in each other's
direction. Tebaldi was quoted as saying, "I have one thing that Callas
doesn't have: a heart" while Callas was quoted in Time magazine as saying that
comparing her with Tebaldi was like "comparing champagne with cognac.
No, with Coca Cola." However,
witnesses
to the interview stated that Callas only said "champagne with
cognac", and it was a bystander who quipped, "No, with Coca-Cola", but
the Time reporter attributed the
latter comment to Callas. According
to John Ardoin,
however,
these
two singers should never have been compared. Tebaldi was trained by Carmen Melis,
a
notedverismo specialist,
and she was rooted in the early 20th century Italian school of singing
just as firmly as Callas was rooted in 19th century bel canto. Callas
was a dramatic soprano, whereas Tebaldi considered herself essentially
a lyric soprano. Callas and Tebaldi generally sang a different
repertoire: in the early years of her career, Callas concentrated on
the heavy dramatic soprano roles and later in her career on the bel canto repertoire, whereas Tebaldi
concentrated on late Verdi and verismo roles, where her limited
upper extension and
her
lack
of a florid technique were not issues. They shared a few roles,
including Tosca in Puccini's opera and La Gioconda,
which
Tebaldi performed only late in her career. The
alleged rivalry aside, Callas made remarks appreciative of Tebaldi, and
vice versa. During an interview with Norman Ross in Chicago, Callas
said, "I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful — also some beautiful
phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice." Francis Robinson
of the Met wrote of an incident in which Tebaldi asked him to recommend
a recording of La
Gioconda in order
to help her learn the role. Being fully aware of the alleged rivalry,
he recommended Zinka Milanov's
version.
A
few
days later, he went to visit Tebaldi, only to find her
sitting by the speakers, listening intently to Callas's recording. She
then looked up at him and asked, "Why didn't you tell me Maria's was
the best?"
Callas
visited Tebaldi after a performance of Adriana
Lecouvreur at
the
Met
in
the late 1960s, and the two were reunited. In 1978, Tebaldi
spoke warmly of her late colleague and summarized this rivalry: This
rivality was really building from the people of the newspapers and the
fans. But I think it was very good for both of us, because the
publicity was so big and it created a very big interest about me and
Maria and was very good in the end. But I don’t know why they put this
kind of rivality, because the voice was very different. She was really
something unusual. And I remember that I was very young artist too, and
I stayed near the radio every time that I know that there was something
on radio by Maria.
Several
singers
have
opined that the heavy roles undertaken in her early years
damaged Callas's voice. The mezzo-soprano Giulietta
Simionato, Callas's close friend and frequent colleague, stated
that she told
Callas that she felt that the early heavy roles led to a weakness in
the diaphragm and subsequent difficulty in controlling the upper
register. Louise
Caselotti,
who
worked
with Callas in 1946 and 1947, prior to her Italian debut,
felt that it was not the heavy roles that hurt Callas's voice, but the
lighter ones. Several
singers have
suggested that the heavy use of Callas's chest voice led to stridency and
unsteadiness with the high notes. In
his book, Callas's husband Meneghini wrote that Callas suffered an
unusually early onset of menopause, which could have affected her
voice. Soprano Carol Neblett once said, "A woman sings
with her ovaries – you're only as good as your hormones."
Critic Henry Pleasants has stated that it was a
loss of physical strength and breath support that led to Callas's vocal
problems, saying, Singing,
and
especially
opera
singing, requires physical strength. Without it,
the singer's respiratory functions can no longer support the steady
emissions of breath essential to sustaining the production of focused
tone. The breath escapes, but it is no longer the power behind the
tone, or is only partially and intermittently . The result is a breathy
sound — tolerable but hardly beautiful — when the singer sings lightly,
and
a voice spread and squally when under pressure. In
the
same
vein, Joan Sutherland,
who
heard
Callas throughout the 1950s, said in a BBC interview, [Hearing
Callas
in
Norma
in 1952] was a shock, a wonderful shock. You just got
shivers up and down the spine. It was a bigger sound in those earlier
performances, before she lost weight. I think she tried very hard to
recreate the sort of “fatness” of the sound which she had when she was
as fat as she was. But when she lost the weight, she couldn’t seem to
sustain the great sound that she had made, and the body seemed to be
too frail to support that sound that she was making. Oh, but it was oh
so exciting. It was thrilling. I don’t think that anyone who heard
Callas after 1955 really heard the Callas voice. Michael Scott has proposed that Callas's
loss of strength and breath support was directly caused by her rapid
and progressive weight-loss, something
that was noted even in her prime. Of her 1958 recital in Chicago,
Robert Detmer would write, "There were sounds fearfully uncontrolled,
forced beyond the too-slim singer's present capacity to support or
sustain." Photos
and
videos
of
Callas during her heavy era show a very upright posture
with the shoulders relaxed and held back. On all videos of Callas from
the period after her weight loss, "we watch... the constantly sinking,
depressed chest and hear the resulting deterioration". This
continual
change in posture has been cited as visual proof of a
progressive loss of breath support. Commercial
and bootleg recordings
of Callas from the late 1940s to 1953 — the period during which she
sang
the heaviest dramatic soprano roles — show no decline in the fabric of
the voice, no loss in volume and no unsteadiness or shrinkage in the
upper register. Of her
December 1952 Lady Macbeth — coming after five years of singing the
most strenuous dramatic soprano repertoire — Peter Dragadze would write
for Opera,
"Callas's voice since last season has improved a great deal, the second
passagio on the high B-Natural and C has now completely cleared, giving
her an equally colored scale from top to bottom." And of her performance of
Medea a year later, John Ardoin writes,
"The performance displays Callas in as secure and free a voice as she
will be found at any point in her career. The many top B's have a
brilliant ring, and she handles the treacherous tessitura like an eager thoroughbred." In
recordings
from
1954
(immediately after her 80-pound weight loss) and
thereafter, "not only would the instrument lose its warmth and become
thin and acidulous, but the altitudinous passages would to her no
longer come easily." It is
also at this time
that unsteady top notes first begin to appear. Walter Legge,
who
produced
nearly
all of Callas's EMI/Angel recordings, states that
Callas "ran into a patch of vocal difficulties as early as 1954":
during the recording of La forza del
destino,
done immediately after the weight loss, the "wobble had become so
pronounced" that he told Callas they "would have to give away
seasickness pills with every side". When asked whether he felt
the weight loss affected Callas's voice, Richard Bonynge stated, "I don't feel it, I know it
did. I heard her Norma in 1953, before she lost all that weight, and
then again afterward, and the difference was incredible. Even more
incredible was that the critics didn't write about it. When Callas was
at her best vocally, she was fat, but she got only a quarter of the
recognition that she got after she had become thin and was a great
star." There
were
others,
however, who felt that the voice had benefitted from the
weight loss. Of her performance of Norma in Chicago in 1954, Claudia Cassidy would
write, "there is a slight unsteadiness in some of the sustained upper
notes. but to me her voice is more beautiful in color, more even
through the range, than it used to be". And
at her performance of the same opera in London in 1957 (her first
performance at Covent Garden after the weight loss), critics again felt
her voice had changed for the better, that it had now supposedly become
a more precise instrument, with a new focus. Many of her most critically
acclaimed appearances are from the period 1954 – 1958 (Norma, La Traviata, Sonnambula and Lucia of 1955, Anna Bolena of 1957, Medea of 1958, to name a few). Callas's
close
friend
and colleague Tito Gobbi thought that her vocal
problems all stemmed from her state of mind: I
don’t think anything happened to her voice. I think she only lost
confidence. She was at the top of a career that a human being could
desire, and she felt enormous responsibility. She was obliged to give
her best every night, and maybe she felt she wasn't [able] any more,
and she lost confidence. I think this was the beginning of the end of
this career. In
support
of
Gobbi's assertion, a bootleg
recording of
Callas rehearsing Beethoven's
aria
"Ah!
Perfido" and parts of Verdi's La forza del
destino shortly
before
her
death
shows her voice to be in much better shape than much
of her 1960s recordings and far healthier than the 1970s concerts with Giuseppe Di
Stefano. Soprano Renée
Fleming has
stated that videos of Callas in the late 1950s and early 1960s reveal a
posture that betrays breath support problems: I
have a theory about what caused her vocal decline, but it's more from
watching her sing than from listening. I really think it was her weight
loss that was so dramatic and so quick. It's not the weight loss per se...
But if one uses the weight for support, and then it's suddenly gone and
one doesn't develop another musculature for support, it can be very
hard on the voice. And you can't estimate the toll that emotional
turmoil will take as well. I was told, by somebody who knew her well,
that the way Callas held her arms to her solar plexus [allowed her] to
push and create some kind of support. If she were a soubrette, it would
never have been an issue. But she was singing the most difficult
repertoire, the stuff that requires the most stamina, the most strength. Dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt,
who
lost
135 pounds after gastric bypass
surgery, expressed similar thoughts concerning her own voice and
body: Much
of what I did with my weight was very natural, vocally. Now I've got a
different body — there's not as much of me around. My diaphragm
function,
the way my throat feels, is not compromised in any way. But I do have
to think about it more now. I have to remind myself to keep my ribs
open. I have to remind myself, if my breath starts to stack. When I
took a breath before, the weight would kick in and give it that extra Whhoomf!
Now it doesn't do that. If I don’t remember to get rid of the old air
and re-engage the muscles, the breath starts stacking, and that's when
you can't get your phrase, you crack high notes. Callas
herself
attributed
her
problems to a loss of confidence brought about
by a loss of breath support, even though she does not make the
connection between her weight and her breath support. In an April 1977
interview with journalist Philippe Caloni, she stated, "My
best recordings were made when I was skinny. and I say skinny,
not slim, because I worked a lot and couldn't gain weight back; I
became even too skinny. . . I had my greatest successes -- Lucia,
Sonnambula, Medea, Anna Bolena -- when I was skinny as a nail. Even for
my first time here in Paris in 1958 when the show was broadcast through
Eurovision, I was skinny. Really skinny." And
shortly
before
her death, Callas confided her own thoughts on her vocal
problems to Peter Dragadze: I
never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. ... Because
of those organic complaints, I lost my courage and boldness. My vocal
cords were and still are in excellent condition, but my 'sound boxes'
have not been working well even though I have been to all the doctors.
The result was that I overstrained my voice, and that caused it to
wobble. (Gente, October 1, 1977) Whether
Callas's vocal decline was due to ill health, early menopause, over-use
and abuse of her voice, loss of breath-support, loss of confidence, or
weight loss will continue to be debated. Whatever the cause may have
been, her singing career was effectively over by age 40, and even at
the time of her death at age 53, according to Walter
Legge, "she ought still to
have been singing magnificently". The
latter
half
of Callas's career was marked by a number of scandals.
During performances of Madama
Butterfly in
Chicago, Callas was confronted by a process server who handed her
papers about a lawsuit brought by Eddy Bagarozi, who claimed he was her
agent. Callas was photographed with her mouth turned in a furious
snarl. The photo was sent around the world and gave rise to the myth of
Callas as a temperamental prima donna and a "Tigress". In 1956,
just before her debut at the Metropolitan
Opera, Time ran
a damaging cover story about Callas, with special attention paid to her
difficult relationship with her mother and some unpleasant exchanges
between the two. In
1957,
Callas
was starring as Amina in La sonnambula at the Edinburgh
International Festival with the forces of La Scala.
Her
contract
was for four performances, but due to the great success of
the series, La Scala decided to put on a fifth performance. Callas told
the La Scala officials that she was physically exhausted and that she
had already committed to a previous engagement, a party thrown for her
by her friend Elsa Maxwell in Venice. Despite this, La Scala announced
a
fifth
performance,
with Callas billed as Amina. Callas refused to
stay and went on to Venice. Despite the fact that she had fulfilled her
contract, she was accused of walking out on La Scala and the festival.
La Scala officials did not defend Callas or inform the press that the
additional performance was not approved by Callas. Renata Scotto took over the part, which
was the start of her international career. In
January
1958,
Callas was to open the Rome Opera House season with Norma,
with
Italy's
president
in attendance. The day before the opening night,
Callas alerted the management that she was not well and that they
should have a standby ready. She was told "No one can double Callas". After being treated by
doctors, she felt better on the day of performance and decided to go
ahead with the opera. A survived bootleg
recording of the first act reveals Callas sounding ill. Feeling
that her voice was slipping away, she felt that she could not complete
the performance, and consequently, she cancelled after the first act.
She was accused of walking out on the president of Italy in a fit of
temperament, and pandemonium broke out. Press coverage aggravated the
situation. A newsreel included
file footage of Callas from 1955 sounding well, intimating the footage
was of rehearsals for the Rome Norma, with the voiceover narration,
"Here she is in rehearsal, sounding perfectly healthy", followed by "If
you want to hear Callas, don't get all dressed up. Just go to a
rehearsal; she usually stays to the end of those." The
scandal became notorious as the "Rome Walkout". Callas brought a
lawsuit against the Rome Opera House, but by the time the case was
settled thirteen years later and the Rome Opera was found to be at
fault for having refused to provide an understudy, Callas's career was already
over. Callas's
relationship
with
La
Scala had also started to become strained after
the Edinburgh incident, and this effectively severed her major ties
with her artistic home. Later in 1958, Callas and Rudolf Bing were in discussion about
her season at the Met. She was scheduled to perform in Verdi's La traviata and in Macbeth,
two
very
different
operas which almost require totally different
singers. Callas and the Met could not reach an agreement, and before
the opening of Medea in
Dallas, Bing sent a telegram to Callas terminating her contract.
Headlines of "Bing Fires Callas" appeared in newspapers around the
world. Maestro Nicola Rescigno later
recalled, "That night, she came to the theater, looking like an
empress: she wore an ermine thing that draped to the floor, and she had
every piece of jewellery she ever owned. And she said, 'You all know
what's happened. Tonight, for me, is a very difficult night, and I will
need the help of every one of you.' Well, she
proceeded to give a performance [of Medea]
that
was
historical." Bing
would
later
say
that Callas was the most difficult artist he ever
worked with, "because she was so much more intelligent. Other artists,
you could get around. But Callas you could not get around. She knew exactly what she wanted, and why she wanted it." Despite
this,
Bing's admiration for Callas never wavered, and in September
1959, he sneaked into La Scala in order to listen to
Callas record La Gioconda for EMI. Callas and Bing reconciled
in the mid 1960s, and Callas returned to the Met for two performances of Tosca with
her
friend Tito Gobbi. In her final years as a singer, she sang
in Medea, Norma, and Tosca,
most notably her Paris, New York, and London Toscas of January –
February
1964, and her last performance on stage, on July 5, 1965, at Covent
Garden. A television film of Act 2 of the Covent GardenTosca of
1964 was broadcast in Britain on February 9, 1964, giving a rare view
of Callas in performance and, specifically, of her on-stage
collaboration with Tito Gobbi. In
1969,
the
Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo
Pasolini cast
Callas in her only non-operatic acting role, as the Greek mythological
character of Medea, in his film by that
name. The production was grueling, and according to the account
in Ardoin's Callas,
the Art and the Life,
Callas is said to have fainted after a day of strenuous running back
and forth on a mudflat in the sun. The film was not a commercial
success, but as Callas's only film appearance, it documents her stage
presence. From October 1971 to March 1972, Callas
gave a series of master classes at the Juilliard
School in New York. These classes later formed
the basis of Terrence
McNally's 1995 play Master Class. Callas staged a series of joint
recitals in Europe in 1973 and in the U.S., South
Korea, and Japan in 1974 with
the tenor Giuseppe
Di
Stefano. Critically, this
was a musical disaster owing to both performers' worn-out voices. However,
the tour was an enormous popular success. Audiences thronged to hear
the two performers, who had so often appeared together in their prime.
Her final public performance was on November 11, 1974, in Sapporo, Japan. In 1957,
while still married to husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini, Callas was
introduced to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle
Onassis at a
party given in her honour by Elsa Maxwell after a performance in Donizetti's Anna Bolena. The affair that followed
received much publicity in the popular press, and in November 1959,
Callas left her husband. Michael Scott asserts
that Onassis was not why Callas largely abandoned her career, but that
he offered her a way out of a career that was made increasingly
difficult by scandals and by vocal resources that were diminishing at
an alarming rate. Franco
Zeffirelli,
on the other hand, recalls asking Callas in 1963 why she had not
practiced her singing, and Callas responding that "I have been trying
to fulfill my life as a woman." According to one of her
biographers, Callas and Onassis had a child, a boy, who died hours
after he was born on March 30, 1960. In his book about his wife,
Meneghini states categorically that Maria Callas was unable to bear
children. As
well, various sources dismiss Gage's claim, as they note that the birth
certificates Gage used to prove of this "secret child" were issued in
1998, twenty-one years after Callas's death. Still other sources claim
that Callas had at least one abortion while involved with Onassis. The relationship ended nine
years later in 1968, when Onassis left Callas in favour of Jacqueline
Kennedy.
However, the Onassis family's private secretary, Kiki, writes in her
memoir that even while Aristotle was with Jackie, he frequently met up
with Maria in Paris, where they resumed what had now become a
clandestine affair. Callas
spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris and died at
age 53 on September 16, 1977, of a myocardial
infarction. A funerary liturgy was held at Agios Stephanos (St.
Stephen's) Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue
Georges-Bizet, Paris, on September 20, 1977, and her ashes were
interred at the Père
Lachaise Cemetery. After being stolen and later recovered, they
were scattered over the Aegean Sea,
off
the
coast of Greece, according to her wish. During
a 1978 interview, upon being asked "Was it worth it to Maria Callas?
She was a lonely, unhappy, often difficult woman," music critic and
Callas's friend John Ardoin replied, That
is such a difficult question. There are times when certain people are
blessed -- and cursed -- with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift
is
almost greater than the human being. Callas was one of these people. It
was as if her own wishes, her life, her own happiness were all
subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given,
this gift that reached out and taught us things about music that we
knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought
about, new possibilities. I think that is why singers admire her so. I
think that’s why conductors admire her so. I know it’s why I admire her
so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this
career. I don’t think she always understood what she did or why she did
it. She usually had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But
it was not something she could always live with gracefully or happily.
I once said to her “It must be a very enviable thing to be Maria
Callas.” And she said, “No, it’s a very terrible thing to be Maria
Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you
can never really understand.” She couldn’t really explain what she did.
It was all done by instinct. It was something embedded deep within her.
In
late
2004,
opera and film director Franco
Zeffirelli made
what many consider a bizarre claim that Callas may have been murdered
by her confidant, Greek pianist Vasso
Devetzi,
in order to gain control of Callas's United States $9,000,000 estate. A
more likely explanation is that Callas's death was due to heart failure
brought on by (possibly unintentional) overuse of Mandrax (methaqualone),
a
sleeping aid. According
to
biographer
Stelios Galatopoulos, Devetzi insinuated herself into
Callas's trust and acted virtually as her agent. This claim is
corroborated by Iakintha (Jackie) Callas in her book Sisters, wherein
she asserts that Devetzi conned Maria out of control of half of her
estate, while promising to establish the Maria Callas Foundation to
provide scholarships for young singers. After hundreds of thousands of
dollars had allegedly vanished, Devetzi finally did establish the
foundation. In
2002,
filmmaker Zeffirelli produced and directed a
film in Callas's memory. Callas Forever was a highly fictionalized
motion picture in which Callas was played by Fanny Ardant.
It
depicted
the last months of Callas's life, when she was seduced into
the making of a movie of Carmen,
lip-synching
to
her 1964 recording of that opera. In
2007,
Callas
was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award. In the same year, she was voted the greatest
soprano of all time by BBC Music Magazine. The
30th
anniversary
of
the death of Maria Callas was selected as main
motif for a high value euro collectors' coins; the €10 Greek Maria Callas
commemorative coin,
minted in 2007. Her image is shown in the obverse of the coin, while on
the reverse the National Emblem of Greece with her signature is
depicted. On
December
2,
2008,
on the 85th anniversary of Callas's birth, a group of
Greek and Italian officials unveiled a plaque in her honor at Flower
Hospital (now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center) where she
was born. Made of Carrara marble and engraved in Italy, the plaque
reads, “Maria Callas
was born in this hospital on December 2, 1923. These halls heard for
the first time the musical notes of her voice, a voice which has
conquered the world. To this great interpreter of universal language of
music, with gratitude.” Gus Van Sant's 2008 movie Milk features selected
recordings of Callas' rendition of "Tosca",
which, it is suggested, was an opera of which Harvey Milk was
particularly fond. Similarly, Jonathan Demme's 1993 movie Philadelphia features a recording by
Callas. A
number
of
musical artists including Linda Ronstadt, Patti Smith and Emmylou Harris have mentioned Callas as a
great musical influence, and some have paid tribute
to Callas in their own music. |