Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  At times Maria talked of her voice as though it was a Siamese twin, a physical appendage with a life of its own. Often she treated her voice almost as a semihostile, intractable force outside herself. “The voice was answering tonight,” she would say, or “The voice was not obeying tonight.” It was to be a long, continuing struggle.

  While Maria was perfecting her roulades, Greece had begun preparing for war. After the fall of France and Italy’s entry into the war in the summer of 1940, the tension had been mounting. It was no longer possible to ignore the fact that Greece’s involvement in the war was only months, perhaps even days, away. The prime minister, General Joannes Metaxas, began speaking publicly of the national danger and quietly, but determinedly, Greece mobilized. On October 28 it began. The Italian minister presented Metaxas with Mussolini’s ultimatum: allow Italian troops to take up strategic positions on Greek territory or war would follow. Metaxas rejected it instantly with no more than a laconic “No.” Italian troops immediately crossed the border, but were promptly driven back, and the Greek army even found itself occupying about a quarter of Albania.

  So when, late in November, Maria made her professional stage debut at the National Lyric Theater, Athens was celebrating and Maria was singing and dancing in a barrel in Suppé’s operetta Boccaccio. Her part was not the kind triumphs are made of, but if not a triumph, it was a solid success. She was applauded, praised, appreciated, for the first time recognized as an established, professional singer. She was finally acting out her mother’s fantasies, except that by now they had become her own. She was exultant, and so was Greece. The period that followed the repulsing of the Italian forces was full of elation and what proved to be a short-lived optimism.

  As for Maria, she was to have triumphs that made singing in a barrel at the Lyric Theater of Athens little more than a practical joke, but then her delight was never directly related to external success. Indeed the triumphs, won at greater and greater cost, brought her less and less joy. “I’m never satisfied,” she said thirty years after she had leapfrogged her way out of the Lyric Theater, beaming with happiness. “I am personally incapable of enjoying what I have done well because I see so magnified the things I could have done better.”

  But on that November night in 1940, the first of hundreds of first nights, she allowed herself to savor her success. Her whole family was there applauding, yet after the performance it was to de Hidalgo that she ran for reassurance that it had gone well. Yes, it had gone well, very well, smiled Elvira, and all the sleepless nights and the nerves and the panics were instantly washed away. The more withdrawn she became from her mother and Jackie, the more devotion she felt for de Hidalgo; and the closer she felt to her, the more detached and, gradually, the more angry she felt with her own family. All this time she had been driving herself on with huge quantities of food and nervous energy spurred by ambition. Going out, flirting, making friends, formed no part of her life. It was not until much later that she learned about romance and the sudden leapings of the heart—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

  Her adolescent urges, however thoroughly suppressed in the daily grind of study and music making, were making themselves felt. Without being aware of it, she was finding it harder to stifle her resentment toward her mother—resentment for all Evangelia had not been, for all the love she had denied Maria and for all the love she had unconditionally poured on Jackie. Jackie had by now learned to take her mother’s special ministrations completely for granted and to be, if not spoiled, outrageously favored. The result was that Maria seemed to be almost constantly in a state of combustion. She had learned to invest her emotions and wild impulses in her work, but she found it increasingly difficult to do so at home. She felt more isolated than ever, and aloofness became her only shield.

  3

  AT THE BEGINNING OF APRIL 1941, the Germans came to the aid of their humiliated Italian allies, and on April 6 they bombed and almost destroyed Salonika in northern Greece. General Metaxas had died a couple of months earlier, but under their new prime minister, Alexander Koryzis, the Greeks were no less determined to fight. Athens steeled herself, awaiting the bombs.

  On April 6 at Patissiou 61, Evangelia, Maria, Jackie, her fiancé and Athena, the maid, were more at one than ever before. Family resentments were set aside for the moment. As soon as dinner was cleared from the table, Maria began singing “La Paloma.” They all joined in. Suddenly on that first night of the Nazi invasion, everything else stopped. Time stopped, everything fell into place, became of a piece. Despite the underlying anxiety about the future, there was joy and laughter inside Maria’s home. What is more, there was a real, deep peace. Outside there was no doubt that the war was on: the food shops were empty after the housewives’ rush to stock up as much as they could, radios everywhere blared out warnings, news and information about the dead and the injured, and the cafés were full of men arguing, swearing and drowning their fears in ouzo and retsina.

  Two weeks later, as the Greeks were fighting a series of rearguard actions, withdrawing farther and farther to the south, the prime minister committed suicide. It was an act that symbolized the growing demoralization of a nation. On April 27 what they most feared took place: the Germans occcupied Athens. It was as if a plague had hit the city. The streets became deserted apart from soldiers in Nazi uniforms. Schools, theaters and public offices were closed and there was a six o’clock curfew. Maria, with Jackie and her mother, joined the long lines of women in black headscarves on the sullen pilgrimage from church to church lighting candles for their men, for their families and for Greece. Suddenly the religious ritual became all important. Maria would go into a church, right foot first, crossing herself as she went in and as she came out, and every Friday she would wash all the icons with wine and put fresh cloths on the altar.

  Yet Maria was present only physically in all these activities. Her mind remained full of arias, trills and scales, and her heart longed to be back with de Hidalgo. So despite her mother’s objections, despite Uncle Efthimios’ long, graphic descriptions of what would happen to her one dark night as she was walking home, and despite her own fears of walking alone through the deserted streets, Maria decided that at ten o’clock every morning she would be at de Hidalgo’s house. She stayed there the whole day and walked home at whatever time in the evening she stopped practicing and studying. She broke the Nazi curfew not with any great sense of heroism, but rather with a matter-of-fact defiance—as if the Nazi soldiers in the streets represented nothing more than an inconvenience and a slight change in her routine.

  By the spring of 1941, Crete had fallen to the Germans. The conquest of Greece was total, and the king and his government barely managed to escape to Egypt. Friends had been asking Evangelia for some time now if she was thinking of trying to flee with her daughters back to America, but she never seriously considered it. For a start, Jackie would not hear of leaving her fiancé behind and, war or no war, Maria would not be dragged away from de Hidalgo. At the same time, the last they had heard from George was that he was traveling around the States selling pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and could not for the moment give them a fixed address; so even if they had been willing to leave, there was really nowhere for them to go.

  A few months after the occupation began, life in Athens became a little easier. The Germans extended the curfew to midnight and allowed shops, schools and theaters to reopen. Once more Maria found herself at the conservatory, but this time not just as a student. While the theaters were closed, the fairy godmother had toiled long and hard on Maria’s behalf. The result was that when they reopened she could announce to Maria that she was now, at seventeen, a permanent member of the Athens Opera. Maria’s successes in Boccaccio and in the student productions of acts from Un Ballo in Maschera and Aida had made de Hidalgo’s efforts much easier, but they did little to lessen the antagonism, the jealousy and the outright hostility that spread rapidly and bitterly throughout the opera house as soon as the appointment was officially annou
nced.

  The chorus of disapproval, naturally enough, was led by the female members of the company and, still more naturally, by the older ones in particular. This hostility, sparked by nothing more than envy and the instinct of self-preservation, was fueled by one real grievance and one real objection. The objection came from those who genuinely believed that Maria’s voice had such physiological flaws that no amount of teaching and practice could produce from it a consistency of sound. The complaints in 1941, about her “unruly top” or “too much metal in her upper register,” were essentially the criticisms of Maria’s voice that persisted throughout her career. In the future they would be elaborated, adorned with musicological jargon and peddled to the multitude by learned critics, but in principle they remained the same objections raised by her Greek colleagues right at the beginning of her career. They could be reduced to one basic observation: Maria’s voice was not, and never would be, beautiful in the classical sense. It was muddy in the lower and middle ranges, and sometimes could turn into a squawk in the upper register. It had “too much metal” in it, too many sharp edges; it could cut as well as ravish. Also Maria would always sacrifice homogeneity of color, smoothness and other hallmarks of beautiful singing on the altar of emotional truth. So those who rated a singer first, second and third by the conventional beauty of her voice, with expression and dramatic truth coming low on the list, had a valid objection to Maria’s appointment.

  Much more important was the grievance against Maria herself. According to the rules of conduct that Maria had, largely unconsciously, drawn for herself, she looked on her fellow students and her colleagues as adversaries. Her cynicism about other people’s motives was deep, as though she had been born with it, instead of, like most people, acquiring it through experience. She was at this time going through what was probably her most egocentric and insecure period, so she could see the rest of the world only in terms of rivalry and domination. And the rest of the world obliged her by behaving as she had assumed it would. There was little camaraderie, and still less love, between Maria and her colleagues. And Maria as always, in response to what she felt to be withdrawal, denial and rebuffs, threw herself even more obsessively into her work. She adopted an aloofness that hid the pain from the world and to a large extent from herself.

  While Maria became more and more the wholly absorbed artist at work, the war continued. First there was the bombing. Athens itself was not bombed, but whenever bombs fell on its port, Piraeus, the sound of the sirens pierced the air in Athens, and everybody was ordered to the shelters. Maria and Jackie ran first to the canary room, picked up a cage each and followed Madame Evangelia down the 120 steps to the cellar. The other tenants, running down the stone steps, some barefoot, others in their pajamas, would overtake the two young women with their canaries, waving their arms and making loud, reprimanding noises at time-wasting frivolities like canaries. Maria never let her fear of air raids or of Nazi soldiers on the streets affect her actions, but once in the shelter, the cellar door firmly closed behind her, she was always violently sick.

  Food was the other great problem. Since Greece had always relied on imports for a large proportion of her food, the Allied blockade and enemy indifference caused great hardship, which the Red Cross tried to relieve without much success. All food was rationed and black markets had sprouted up in odd places. The main black market was up in the mountains, a long, exhausting walk or an almost equally long ride in fragile little cars drawn by temperamental woodburning locomotives. Sometimes Maria went with her mother and sometimes she went alone, walking home laden with whatever vegetables, chickens or rabbits she was able to buy.

  One day in the early summer of 1941, when Maria returned from the mountains, she discovered that the Germans had issued another of their endless series of proclamations, this time against any kind of noise both in public places and in private homes. She exploded, and this became the order she most loved to disobey, with fervor and bravado. On the very evening that the Germans issued their proclamation, she moved her piano up to the door of the balcony and sat there playing and singing at the top of her voice to the great relish of the passersby who broke into sudden, spontaneous applause. So infectious was the enthusiasm that many of the Italians and some of the Germans in the street joined in.

  Throughout the war, Maria’s voice proved to be a magic gift which gained for her friends, food, protection. The first war friend Maria’s voice brought her was a young Italian soldier who heard her sing when he was walking past her open window in Patissiou Street. He waited until she came out on the balcony and talked to her, full of emotion at the memories from home that her Italian singing had evoked. They met a few times after that; they would sit on a park bench, Maria singing his favorite arias from Italian opera, and he unable to hold back his tears. He would give her food from his rations, and Maria would go away and hide in doorways, tear the package open and eat the food then and there. Her mother was furious that she hardly ever brought anything back, but Maria was too hungry, too lonely and feeling too unloved to share.

  Her voice had brought her another war friend: Colonel Mario Bovalti from Verona. At first he started calling at Patissiou 61 and accompanying Maria on the piano; gradually, he began bringing little gifts, sharing his rations with the family and giving Maria a great deal of attention and some much-needed love.

  In the autumn of 1941 her voice saved her life. One night a Greek air force officer, a friend of the family, came to Patissiou 61 with two disguised British officers who had escaped from prison. Evangelia knew that the punishment for sheltering fugitives from German justice was death, and was reluctant to take them in. In the end, however, prodded by her two daughters, she yielded. The two British officers were installed in the canary room, with strict instructions not to cough, not to use a light at night, hardly even to breathe; their only luxury was listening to the nine o’clock news from London. The secret was so carefully guarded that not even Jackie’s Milton had been told. If Milton was with them in the evening, Maria’s self-imposed duty was to go to the piano promptly at nine o’clock and start singing—anything loud that would muffle the sound of the radio from the canary room. Maria grew really fond of the dark-haired Scotsman and the fair-haired Englishman. They sensed that and also sensed Maria’s daring; they therefore went to her whenever they wanted to break any of the rules of shelter, and she would invariably agree to help them get around her mother. One day they even pleaded with her to take them out into the street so they could walk in the sun. Maria, always very practical, said nothing to her mother until she had found some black paint and with Jackie as her accomplice, had dyed Robert’s hair. When Evangelia saw the quartet that came arm in arm to ask her permission to leave the house, she laughed too hard to be able to say no.

  Six weeks after their Greek friend had arrived out of nowhere, bringing the two British officers with him, he came back and with just as few explanations took them away. The day after, Italian soldiers, following a lead, came to search the house. As they pushed through the door, revolvers drawn, Maria, who knew that the letters and photographs the British officers had left behind were still in the apartment, ran to the piano and started singing Tosca—Tosca pleading to save her lover’s life, Maria singing to save hers and her mother’s and sister’s. When Maria started singing, the Italian soldiers forgot about searching the house, put down their revolvers and sat on the floor in a circle around the piano. They came back the next day, this time knocking instead of pounding on the door and heaping loaves of bread, salami and macaroni on the piano as thanks for the music of yesterday and a plea for more music today.

  If her voice was the magic weapon, Tosca seemed to be the magic part. It was Tosca that she sang the first day she moved her piano to the door of the balcony to disobey the German ban on noise; it was Tosca that she sang to distract Milton’s attention the first day he heard strange noises coming from the canary room; it was Tosca that she sang when the Italian officers came to search the house. One evening
when she was once again singing Tosca on the balcony a man answered her across the rooftops, singing Mario. The next day when Maria got back from the conservatory, she ran to the balcony and started singing. The unseen Mario responded again. And again. And again. The duet across the rooftops continued through July. One July evening when Maria ran to the balcony there was a special joy in her voice. That morning the Tosca at the Athens Opera had been taken ill and Maria was asked to take over. Tosca once again—this time not to deceive the Italian officers or defy the German soldiers, but her first major professional role. Antonis Dellendas, a huge, exuberant tenor and the idol of the Greek operatic world, was her Mario. (The identity of the Mario who sang with her across the rooftops is still a mystery.)

  Tosca gave Maria her first opportunity to display offstage her fierce passion. The elderly soprano she was replacing happened to be, as fate would have it, the leader of those opposed to Maria’s permanent appointment to the company. When she heard who was to take her place, too ill to get up and stop Maria herself, she sent her husband to block the way to the stage entrance. One does not need to be a tigress to resent such petty behavior, but Maria did not merely resent him—she jumped at him and scratched his face with both hands.