Maria Callas Callas Edition (EMI Classics)
I have to be honest–I’m bored to death by any story about an opera diva throwing tantrums. (I like them even less than stories about imperious conductors incinerating hapless musicians with their laserlike glares.) So most of the Callas mystique leaves me indifferent. The tumultuous love affairs, the wild arguments at rehearsals, the melodramatic collapses in mid-aria before horrified audiences, and so on and on–I have a suspicion that it was all much more fun when Callas was the only diva pulling these stunts. Now they barely register on the scale of childish self-indulgence. Compared with the pampered lunacy of today’s divas, Callas’s strangest outbursts would barely provoke a stagehand’s sneer; put her up against any million-dollar athlete and she comes off as an exemplar of Cartesian rationality.
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But even if you ignore all that, there’s one long-running public tragedy you can’t avoid: her voice. Most opera singers gradually lose both range and control as they get older; that’s why they retire from performing full operas and switch to recitals, where they can pick and choose the music they can still sing well. But Callas’s voice didn’t decorously decay; it self-destructed almost overnight. To this day, people debate why it happened–overwork, exhaustion, poor training, some congenital defect in her vocal cords–but whatever the reason, her live performances and recitals from 1958 on are an erratic track of disasters, partial returns to form, sudden bursts of the old fire, and abrupt failures. It made everything about Callas’s career in those years weird and suspenseful. Would she show up? Would her voice function at all? Would she be able to get through to the end without falling apart? In some of her last recitals you can hear naked terror in her voice as she approached a challenging high note.
But maybe that’s not so surprising. Comedy requires exactly those gifts for discipline and precision that Callas had in abundance. So I suppose it’s only to be expected that she would make a wonderful Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia: serene, delicate, and elusive. (This is one role where she was better in her toned-down studio mode; onstage she overacted and bombed.) She’s a laugh riot as Fiorilla in Il turco in Italia; there’s one great aria where she ricochets from insincere flirtatiousness to cringing self-pity to imperious rage with the precision of a jet pilot executing a barrel roll. And in both operas she reveals a kind of jazzy delight in collaborating with other singers. For sheer exhilaration, there isn’t much to compare with hearing her race through long and intricate quartets at top speed without once stepping on her partners’ lines.
Callas was also lucky–most of the time–in her conductors. There is one loser: Antonino Votto, a hack who sounded like he had his gaze on the time clock offstage; if he kept the orchestra from drowning out the singers, he figured he’d done a good day’s work. His flaccidity undercuts some of the finest singing of the whole project: Callas, di Stefano, and Gobbi tearing through Un ballo in maschera. Two other conductors–Franco Ghione, who did the 1958 Traviata, and Georges Pretre, who shows up for the 1964 Carmen–are just as bad, but fortunately they’re around less often. On the other hand, there’s Victor de Sabata, who conducted the magnificent 1953 Tosca, von Karajan at the height of his powers (he would soon take a steep dive into self-parody), and Callas’s mentor, the great Serafin, whose strong, conservative, and vigorous conducting brings Callas’s wild originality together with the finest traditions of Italian opera performance.
Where did this capacity come from? I don’t have the slightest idea–though it does explain why people are so obsessed with her biography. Yet I don’t think the details of her life provide answers one way or the other, except that in her life as in her art she was looking for situations that seemed to correspond to the strangeness of her own psyche. She found what she was looking for in Tosca, where she could make the heroine’s suicide a kind of spectacular triumph. She was an amazing Madame Butterfly, because Butterfly’s grief seemed to come so naturally to her; it rises to a religious fervor by the end, as though abandonment and death were the most exalted of earthly states. I don’t think I’ve ever heard another human being sound quite as angry as she does in Cherubini’s Medea (EMI has a good performance scheduled, but the best ones are on the pirate labels); when she contemplates murdering her children, her voice takes on a sublime demonic fury. And she’s the only singer I know who has ever made the ending of Manon Lescaut believable: when the heroine is exiled to America and left to die of starvation in what Puccini blithely describes as “a vast featureless plain on the outskirts of New Orleans,” Callas makes such a surreal fate seem somehow inevitable–go down her road, the moral is, and you’re bound to end up in the abyss, no matter what the map says.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): album covers.
