The Bravest Voices

by Ida Cook

  It was a great moment. And if we laughed and made jokes about it, we were also near to tears. We might so nearly, any one of us, never have seen the others again.

  It was during the last week of the Vienna Opera Company’s visit that Louise and I made the final, and perhaps the happiest, decision in connection with the famous flat. We told Krauss and Viorica that we wanted them to regard it as their home whenever they came to England, to look on it as always ready and waiting for them when they were on their travels abroad. There was a certain unspoken poetic justice about their being able to regard as home the place that sheltered so many people we might never have known or helped, if they had not first committed Mitia to our care. On the day we accompanied them to Victoria Station to say goodbye, we gave them each a key, so that they would always know the place was theirs.

  Smiling a little, Krauss returned his key and said, “Only one is necessary, because we are never apart and shall always come here together.”

  Viorica said nothing. She just turned the key over and over in her hand. And we guessed and he knew—because he knew every mood of hers—that she was trying not to cry. We hugged her and told her to put it away safely. Then, because it was nearly time for the train to go, we kissed them both and watched them get on the train.

  They stood at the window together, smiling and looking very much as they had looked all those years and years ago, when I had photographed them outside Covent Garden. Then the whistle blew, and the train began to move.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Originally, this was intended to be just the story of two girls who followed their operatic stars through the comparatively carefree days of the 1920s into unexpected drama in the ’30s and ’40s; and when this book was first written, that was the full extent of the period it covered. But, looking back over a much longer period now, I realize that nothing is ever really over, and it seems to me unnecessarily arbitrary to break the narrative abruptly on that day in 1947 when we waved goodbye to Krauss and Viorica at Victoria Station. Consequently, in revising the book for present day publication, I have decided to take the story further.

  To a very great extent, the pattern of life for Louise and me has remained the same. That is to say, we are still inveterate star-gazers and voice-lovers. And, although we had supposed that our refugee work had stopped at the outbreak of war, for many years after the war, we found ourselves involved in work for displaced persons when we joined the Adoption Committee for Aid to Displaced Persons—later Lifeline. Unlike the pre-war refugee work, there was no sense of danger or high drama connected with this, but it did bring us very close once more to tragedy and deep human need.

  Our special interest covered the camps for non-German refugees in Germany, where there was a bewildering mixture of nationalities. Many of the unhappy inmates were Poles, who had been brought to Germany for slave labour during the war. They had been quite literally slaves for years, and when the end came, all that anyone could offer them was a return to Poland under the Russians. As this would mean either death or fresh slavery under different masters, they naturally refused. Temporarily, there was nothing to do but put them in camps.

  Then there were Russians who had fled from their own form of national persecution, Czechs who had escaped from either the Germans or the Russians, depending on the date of their flight. There were people from the three Baltic States.—Who even bothers to remember the very names of Lithuania, Estonia, or Latvia now? But when the Russians flooded in, many people escaped to the West, penniless and rootless.—There were a few Hungarians, some Ukrainians, and individuals or groups from almost any country you could name in Middle or Eastern Europe.

  Most of our work consisted of fund-raising for daily fresh milk provision for children under six, or helping to provide treatment and rehabilitation for the many tuberculosis cases. But we did sometimes go out to visit our camp, and so we came to know some of our cases personally, as well as the wonderful personnel who worked on the spot.

  The first time we went, we were vaguely expecting a sort of collection of Nissen huts. But we found that our particular camp was housed in a huge barracks. Inevitably, the accommodation consisted of large rooms; and in each of these rooms lived four, six, sometimes eight families—most of them hating each other, naturally. If you wanted a bit of privacy, you put up a blanket or a piece of cardboard, but that often shut out the light. They went to the soup kitchen, then they came back and sat on their beds. No wonder they thought they were the forgotten people, until World Refugee Year came.

  What does a human being crave when life has been stripped to the bone like that? The most strange and varied things. And in working with such people, you have to try to sympathize with what they want and not what your common sense seems to be telling you they should want.

  I remember an elderly Hungarian, whose tragic story included the loss of his whole family as well as his way of life. What do you say to anyone like that? I put my arms around him and kissed him, and he broke down and wept. So did Louise and I, to tell the truth.

  Afterwards, when I asked the compassionate camp worker what we could do, he said, “It may sound strange and trivial to you, but what that man needs is a suit of new clothes. He came of very good people, and the squalor of being a refugee and having to accept charity is killing him. Someone else’s kindly donated second-and third-hand clothes are welcome to many people, but he needs something new. And he needs to go into the town and buy it for himself.”

  Fortunately, our committee was also compassionate and understanding. He was sent enough money from England to refit himself modestly, and he was asked to go and buy the clothes himself, as sizes were always difficult if one were buying for a friend.

  In some indefinable way, it helped him face life again.

  Then there was dear Mrs. Rafalsky. She and her husband had been on the run either from the Russians or the Germans for a large part of their adult lives. We used to manage to talk to each other in a strange mixture of languages, and Louise and I found that Mr. Rafalsky was also an opera lover. He could hardly believe that we actually knew the names of Russian singers like Neshdanova and Sobinoff, though only from records. He had heard them both, he told us, in a performance of Faust, the cast being completed by Chaliapin. Some cast!

  When Mr. Rafalsky died, his widow did not want food or warmth or comfort of any sort. She wanted a little headstone for his grave. When you have been a displaced person for half your life and even in death you have no place, I suppose a headstone means a lot.

  It was Rosa who paid for that headstone, I remember. When we told her the story she said, “That is something I completely understand.” I think Mr. Rafalsky would have liked to know that a prima donna paid for his headstone.

  One heartening thing about this particular aspect of refugee work was that, in the end, the problem was almost completely solved. Most of the displaced persons were either absorbed into the German community or they emigrated. It is one of the tragedies of this tragic century that as soon as one area is free of the refugee problem, another develops. But there is never a complete answer to anything that stems from man’s inhumanity to man. So one always goes on to another facet; though of course, as one gets older, it has to be a slightly less active part that one plays.

  On the lighter side of our lives, we remained star-gazers. Once a star-gazer, always a star-gazer. Though I must admit that the operatic firmament in the last two decades has not been thickly star-spangled. For good or ill, this is the age of the mediocre. It is also, as I have said, the most credulous age since the South Sea Bubble. Opinions and statements only have to be repeated often enough in certain publications or on certain radio or television programmes for most people to accept them as fact.

  “Who is this new girl that everyone says is going to be the second Callas?” people ask us at regular intervals. And when we say we haven’t the slightest idea, you can see they think the old girls are slipping.<
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  Usually, we go to hear the current claimant to this, or any other, vocal throne. More often than not, there is a fine, bright top to the voice, a good deal of mixing of gears in the middle, unbounded self-confidence and the clearest evidence that the young woman had done about a third of her job.

  At the back of the programme, there may be quite a list of recordings in which she appears, showing that the engineers have done a good job of turning the most useful knobs at the right moment. One can hardly blame enthusiastic, if unknowledgeable, members of the audience if they applaud heartily. They have come with the sound of those records in their ears, and if they are, unaccountably to them, a trifle disappointed, they soon cheer up. They love the good old tunes—who doesn’t?—and they know they are hearing a great singer. Lots of people have said so, and the records sound splendid. So they clap a little harder. And the inexperienced performer feels more certain than ever that near-stardom had now been obtained without much further trouble being required.

  Oh, for those knowledgeable old music directors mentioned in the early pages of this book, who knew how to develop a voice instead of exploiting it!

  But it would be ungenerous and untrue to deny that we have had star-quality thrills over the last twenty years. Not very many of the real thing perhaps, but all the more welcome for that. Chief of those since the war was unquestionably the coming of Maria Callas. A star if ever there was one. Whether or not you like her is quite immaterial. She is the stuff of which headlines are made. This has not always been to her advantage, and I suppose more nonsense has been written about her than about almost any other singer. Again, only in a credulous age could half of it have been believed.

  Louise and I were present at the dress rehearsal of her first Covent Garden Norma, the opera in which she made her London debut. It is not fashionable to describe her at that time as fat, plain and ungainly. She was nothing of the kind. She was a handsome, well-upholstered young woman with, even then, a tremendous stage presence. The top of the voice was thrilling, the rest not completely in focus. And when, in later years, she pulled the whole thing together into a more even scale, there was inevitably a certain reduction in the actual size of the top.

  Even at the rehearsal, we realized that she was the most dazzling star to enter the operatic firmament for a long, long time. When we heard later that she was to sing Cherubini’s Medea in Florence in a few months’ time, we decided to go. Medea was, at that time, virtually an unknown opera—certainly unknown to us—and I had never been back to Florence since the Ponselle Vestale in 1933. Louise had never been there at all. With something of the thrill of old days, we prepared to “follow our star” again.

  It was an extraordinary occasion. I think we had both expected Medea to be something of a static period piece. Instead, as everyone who heard it later will know, it proved to be a tearing drama and a marvellous vehicle for a great singing actress.

  Fascinated by this new experience, we went around afterwards to see the heroine of the evening, and she was intensely interested to hear that we knew Ponselle and her work intimately. Then she looked at us rather searchingly with those beautiful, short-sighted eyes and asked outright, “What did you really think of my Medea?”

  At that time, of course, we were not at all used to the disconcertingly frank way Callas can ask for your honest opinion of her work if she has reason to think it may be worth having. I hesitated, wondering how to give a necessarily qualified approval and yet convey our very real admiration. And at that moment, Louise said, with sober truth, “You made a very good stab at it, didn’t you?”

  I think Callas always trusted us after that. Anything fulsome would not have satisfied her. She explained that she had had only a few weeks in which to prepare the work, and we all agreed—correctly as it turned out—that one day it would be one of her greatest creations.

  Indeed, one of the best and most characteristic stories I know about her concerns her marvellous series of Medea in London some years ago. In one of the intervals, a self-confident young man was holding forth about “sour notes” and what she ought to have done here and there. A world-famous pianist was passing at the moment and simply stopped and said, “I will not have this woman spoken of like that in my presence. She could teach most conductors today more than they will ever know.”

  I told Maria the story later, and she considered it for a moment. Then she said, “Well, Eeda, in this particular case, I think he was right. I am probably the only person in the world who has studied this work intensively for six years. Why should some young man, hearing it for the first time, tell me how it should be done?”

  Why, indeed?

  Always fascinated to know just how great interpretative artists work, I asked her once what she did when she had a completely new role.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what I do,” replied Callas smiling. “I go and sit alone in a small, uninteresting room, and I empty myself of myself as far as I can. Then I think about the woman I am to become, and I think of her in terms of basic gesture. I think of her age, her class—very important for the hands—her period and her fate. There are two or three gestures that are essential to that character and indissoluble from her, and until I have found them, I do not study her musically.”

  Intrigued, I said that now I realized why all her “mad scenes” were different. Something that can hardly be said of most people who attempt the early and middle nineteenth-century operas in which the unfortunate heroine so often goes mad.

  She looked doubtful and said, “I don’t think I know what you mean, Eeda.”

  So I explained that in Puritani, for instance, one was sorry for her, but felt she might recover, whereas in Lucia di Lammermoor, from the moment she appeared at the top of the stairs in the mad scene, everyone on the stage fell away from her instinctively, in terror as well as pity, knowing that she had become a homicidal lunatic.

  Again she said doubtfully, “I don’t know what you mean. I just come in. What do the other Lucias do?”

  I giggled slightly, having heard many Lucias in my time, naturally, and I said, “They just come in, clutching the dagger. You’re somehow there, you poor little thing.”

  And she leaned towards me and said in a chilling voice, “And without the dagger, Eeda. Do you realize?—I don’t need a dagger.”

  She was quite right, and I hadn’t realized it until that moment. She just stands there, and you know that poor young creature has done a murder. Highest art, of course.

  Another fascinating instance of her use of gesture came some years later, when she sang the heroine in Donizetti’s Poliuto, revived for her at the Scala. In this work, which takes place at the time of the early Christians, the heroine is torn between two religions and two men. Again and again, Callas expressed her basic state of indecision by the extraordinarily touching little gesture of putting her hands bewilderedly to her face.

  When we went backstage afterwards, I remarked, “I have never before seen you touch your face like that, Maria.” To which she replied, “But I think she would. Don’t you? I think she would.”

  I said that, of course, I thought she would, but I added, “Did you know that from the moment in the opera when you made up your mind which man and which religion you were going to follow, you never touched your face again?”

  “That I didn’t know!” she cried in frank delight. She had worked out that gesture and absorbed it into herself so completely that it became her natural expression of indecision. But the moment her basic emotion changed, she equally naturally dropped the gesture, without even realizing it.

  When people hear that you know Callas, they tend to ask the favourite question, “Is she really temperamental?”

  Well, of course she is! Or was during the tense days of her great career. You don’t do those tremendous performances and then go home and cook the lamb chops with your own little hands. Of course she was temperamental. That is part of the m
akeup of a unique musical and theatrical genius. She is not bad-tempered, and as I have said before, most of the preposterous stories about her are complete invention.

  What is entirely endearing about her is that she never forgets a friend. In our experience, never. The most retiring, undemanding person who has been good to her will always be remembered and greeted in any part of the world. I doubt if many of her self-appointed critics could have the same said of them. It is a rare and precious quality.

  If I had to name the role in which I would most wish to see and hear her again, I think I would choose Anna Bolena. She was at the height of her vocal glory when we heard her in this, and the portrait was an almost uncanny amalgam of the Anne Boleyn of history and the somewhat idealised Anna Bolena of Donizetti’s opera. Aided partly, I suppose, by the long full-sleeved dresses of the period and by her own quick, incredibly graceful movements, she gave the impression of some lovely, terrified bird ruthlessly pursued. And when, in the final scene, the guards closed around her to take her to execution, it was exactly as though the trap had been finally sprung. An ineffaceable memory, both musically and visually.

  Apart from what one might call phenomenal operatic appearances—which one must not, I admit, ask for too greedily in any period—of course we have derived the utmost pleasure and satisfaction from fine performances, where gifted and hard-working artists have done honour to great works with everything they have at their disposal. These also are memories to cherish. For one cannot say more of any artist than that he or she did everything possible with what God had given. Always remembering that the greater the gift, the greater the responsibility.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sometimes people rather resentfully suggest to us that we probably remember the stars of other days with the rosy glow of youth; that, as we look back, we tend to lose perspective. This view is, quite simply, nonsense—to be accepted only by those who have no faith in their own judgment. If one has a good aural memory and reasonable taste and judgment, it should not be very difficult to recreate a great experience. In any case, we have known some of those earlier “greats” in their days of retirement, and the old magic is still there.