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.
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 Lammer-moor, 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 di
dn’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 makeup 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.
16
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.
It is there for the newcomers too. In witness, let me call to mind the return to London of Giovanni Martinelli in his eighties. Young and old rose as one to acclaim him, and rightly so. Not only did he electrify everyone by singing some fragmentary but unforgettable phrases at a master class; but just by talking he had, as the saying goes, everyone eating out of his hand.
Among our own cherished recollections of him in old age is the occasion when Lauder Greenway and Francis Robinson, of the Metropolitan, took him and us out to Connecticut to visit his old colleague Geraldine Farrar. He was in splendid spirits and, on the way out, told us he had recently become eighty. We did think he had been seventy-nine for some little time, but were charmed, when he added that he usually gave his age in French, quatre-vingts because, as he said, “I say the quatre very quickly and linger on the vingts.”
When we arrived at Farrar’s home, she was standing there ready to greet us, leaning slightly on a cane, her hair silver, her figure no longer slender. But one looked at that old lady and knew instantly why she had been the toast of two continents at the beginning of the century.
She also spoke of her age—even more frankly and a trifle boastfully—informing us that she was in her eighty-fourth year. This was a little awkward for Martinelli, who could not very well age within the hour. However, he firmly—perhaps not quite so firmly—repeated his bit about being eighty. Whereupon Farrar regarded him with those famous forget-me-not blue eyes twinkling and said, “Is it possible, Giovanni? Then I am older than you.”
He blushed slightly at this and exclaimed gallantly, “I will run and catch you up.”
She smiled at him them, with ineffable charm, and replied, “Giovanni, I cannot run so fast nowadays.”
If that had happened on a stage and the curtain had then been rung down, the whole house would have risen and applauded to the echo. The wit and charm of those two old stars and, above all, their perfection of timing was little short of miraculous.
Something the same still happens with Ponselle. But with her, it is more a kind of dynamic projection of personality, with which neither age nor youth has any connection. Even now, if she enters a room, no one can look at anyone else. And to be with her while one of her own records is played is a fascinating experience. She will tip back her head, as though listening to something across the years, and then her whole appearance changes. Even the shape of her face seems to alter and become young, while her eyes widen. For a few brief, magical minutes, she is there again as one knew her in the old days—and unforgettable Norma, Violetta, Gioconda, and so on.
She also has the capacity to recall a great colleague with one or two telling phrases. Of Caruso, she once said, “His voice was not in any sense directional. Even if you were near enough to him to sing a love duet, the sound did not just come from his mouth, it came from his head. It was all around you—and at the back of your neck as well.”
Once, when we were listening to a Chaliapin record and I rather expected her to say something about the phenomenal size of the voice, she exclaimed, “Listen—listen now for that pianissimo!” Then she added, almost humbly, “I always used to listen for that when I sang with him—and try to copy it.”
Understandably, she is a wonderful judge of a voice—except that she tends to start with perfection as the norm and to be slightly irritated by anything that deviates from it. Among our treasured possessions, we have a tape-recording in which she describes how she got some of her own most famous effects. It contains the best throwaway line I have ever heard from a prima donna. At the end, she says almost plaintively, “It’s so simple, really!”
Over the years, we have become very close indeed. We still telephone her across the Atlantic on May 28; and whenever we visit the States, we spend some days with her in her Maryland home. Our long association with Rosa constitutes one of our strongest and most valued links with the past. But those indestructible links are not always operatic ones. From time to time and over land and sea, some entirely unsuspected strand will tug us back in a startling and moving way to the days described in the earlier part of this book.
A year or two ago, when we were in New York, we went with our good friend Mary Ellis Peltz—the incomparable archivist of the Metropolitan—to a lecture she was giving at a Senior Citizens Club. It turned out to be a Jewish club, which made Louise and me feel particularly at home; and just before the talk began, a distinguished looking old lady came up to me and asked if I were the speaker.
I assured her I was not—that we were, in fact, just house guests of the speaker. Whereupon she looked at me more closely and said, “Are you one of the two sisters?”
Surprised, I replied, “We are Louise and Ida Cook, if that is what you mean.”
“I met you once,” she said. “In Frankfurt in 1938. You were not getting me out. You were getting out friends of mine. We all knew what you were doing, and we never forgot you.”
I could have burst into tears. Frankfurt in 1938 and New York in 1973! If I had invented that in one of the Mary Burchell romances, someone would have been sure to say that such things don’t happen in real life.
Here is a thought-provoking little story about the unbreakable links that exist between those who make great music and
those who joyfully receive it.
Earlier in this book, when I listed some of those who shared our happy gallery days, I mentioned Jenny. I suppose we knew her surname at some time or other, but if so, I have forgotten it. Jenny, like Francis, could be very trenchant in her criticisms, but among the artists she truly loved was Elisabeth Rethberg. On one of our visits to the States after the war, I tried to recall her to Elisabeth. But though she thought she remembered the name, she said, “I can’t actually visualize her. I wish I could!”
I said she could hardly be expected to remember more than a few of us. But when we met again some days later, Elisabeth said triumphantly, “Of course I remember Jenny! How could I have forgotten her? The strange thing is that I dreamed of her last night—so clearly that she almost stood there before me, and I remembered her instantly. Do give her my love when you get home.”
We promised that we would. And on our return, I telephoned a mutual friend to ask for Jenny’s address.
“My dear, I’m so sorry,” came the reply. “Jenny died while you were away.”
Inevitably, since I am now looking back over many years, there have been other gaps in the circle of our operatic friends on both sides of the curtain; the one that affected our lives most deeply was the death of Clemens Krauss. After our great reunion in 1947, Krauss and Viorica came quite often to London. They always stayed at the flat and came to be among our closest and most dearly loved friends. It was therefore a great personal blow to us—quite apart from the loss to our musical world—when Krauss died suddenly in May, 1954.
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