Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  The first night of Trovatore was on June 20, 1950. It was the first new major role Maria had prepared on her own. Before she left Italy, she had asked Serafin for advice, but he had refused to help her prepare a performance that was to be conducted by someone else. So Maria threw herself into the role on her own, and the performance was the most passionate and full-blooded Leonora she ever sang. A few months later, when she sang it again in Naples, this time under Serafin, her portrayal had become much more lyrical and much less full-blooded. Kurt Baum, who had already forgotten his vow that he would never sing with her again, was Manrico. His presence gave rise once again to some crude but electrifying competitive singing. During the celebrated trio in the first act (with Leonard Warren as the Count di Luna), Maria and Kurt Baum sailed to an unwritten D flat, each determined to outsustain the other, and neither prepared to release the note first; it was Baum who was the loser. Leonard Warren only sang one more performance of Trovatore and then had to leave Mexico, suffering from the high altitude—and no doubt also from the antics of his two colleagues. For the third and last Trovatore, Ivan Petroff took the place of Warren, Maria and Kurt Baum outdid themselves in vehemence and overpowering declamations, and the added D flat was held not for seven measures, as in the previous two performances, but for nine.

  This was Maria’s last appearance in Mexico for the 1950 season. The following morning she left for Madrid and Meneghini. Her mother was at the airport to say good-bye. In the car on the way to the airport, Maria gave her mother the $700 that her godfather had lent her, and money for her hospital bills. Evangelia was going to stay in Mexico for a few more days, “catching her breath,” as she put it. She was not overeager to return to New York and a marriage that only seemed emptier as time went on. She spent her last three days in Mexico surrounded by the flowers the hotel manager went on sending up every day, but sunk deep in a sea of foreboding. She never saw her daughter again.

  Maria, in Madrid with Titta by her side, felt relieved that Mexico and her mother were behind her. She was exhausted, but also proud of this glittering year and, looking ahead from Madrid, all things seemed possible—even an Italian sequel to her Mexican popular triumph. Nearly three months of rest in her new penthouse in Verona lay ahead of her. In a letter to her godfather at the time, she summed up how she felt both about life and her closeness to him:

  Dear Leo, it’s true that our lives are very similar. You are married to a younger woman, I to an older man—both happily married. We both have become famous, you a doctor, I a singer—both worked hard and really earned their happiness and success. Am I right?

  Maria had earned her happiness and success, but not the ability to relax and recharge herself. Only when she had severe headaches, some of them too painful for her to do anything but rest, would she stay in bed, and even then there would always be a score next to her. Occasionally she might be persuaded by Titta to stay in bed for a little while after the pain itself ceased to issue commands, but in general doing nothing was extremely hard for Maria. Even the three months of rest were crowded with shopping, adding more gilded swans to her bedroom, or more golden mirrors to the bathroom, and having dinner or drinks with members of the Veronese Establishment.

  The growth of her reputation could be measured in social terms: invitations were becoming more numerous and more persistent. The first stage of Maria’s transformation had been completed, and fashionable Italian hostesses—extremely sensitive barometers of success—began issuing their invitations as if to let Maria know that she was ready to “go out into the world.” Yet Maria felt unready. She was still awkward at social gatherings and she was so preoccupied with how she looked and how she was dressed that she felt quite drained afterward. Stepping outside their provincial, tightly knit Veronese circle seemed even more threatening. But fashionable hostesses were very persuasive, and Maria half wanted to be persuaded. After all, social success was an important element of the dream image she had built for herself, even though ideally she would have liked the social success without all the hard work that other people called “having a good time.”

  “You learn according to the rules and then you forget them,” Maria had said about her singing, repeating Serafin’s advice. Onstage she put this into practice more brilliantly than any singer in this century, but in life she was never confident enough, never sufficiently at ease, to forget the rules and the form and just be. So her life became yet another performance—one in which she was least assured and least happy. Three months’ socializing on top of practicing and worrying about the performances coming up began to tell on Maria’s nerves. She became intensely irritable, annoyed by trifles, exaggerating their importance and unable to shake off her excessive concern with them; and when she was not irritable she would sulk. Sulks were for Maria a rarely used weapon, but they were a weapon that occasionally took complete control of her.

  Meneghini so totally identified with his wife’s moods that he ended up prolonging and intensifying them. If she was critical of someone, half-knowing it to be unjustifiable and fully expecting to be contradicted, he took it so seriously that she began to think there must, after all, be something in it. If she railed against someone in a momentary outburst, Meneghini’s support turned a passing irritation into a real, solid grievance. The more hostile the world, the more convincing was his role of Husband-Protector; and he was very good at painting dragonlike pictures of “the enemy,” so that he would always be there, ready to provide the fortifications to keep the enemy out. During these three months in Verona, the two of them spent more time alone together than they had in a long while. It is true that Maria’s affections were equally divided between her Titta and her piano, but still they were together, and Meneghini found Chopin and Rachmaninoff no more threatening than Verdi and Bellini.

  In the meantime Maria had begun working at home on her first role in comic opera—Fiorilla in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia. As the young wife of Don Geronio she wandered around her home extolling the joys of infidelity and flirting with the visiting Sultan. For Maria, who had so far brought to life only woebegone operatic creatures, Il Turco was a real challenge. “It particularly appealed to me,” she explained six years later in an article she wrote for Oggi, “because it allowed me to stray from the subject—by this time frequent—of great tragedies in music, and to breathe the fresh air of a very funny Neapolitan adventure.”

  She had been offered the part by Maestro Luccia, but there was another man who had chosen her and was the prime mover of the whole enterprise: Luchino Visconti. He was to become, after de Hidalgo and Serafin, the third great influence in the shaping of Maria Callas. She was instantly fascinated by him, a fascination that went much beyond the aura of aristocratic elegance that surrounded him and the fame as perhaps Italy’s foremost film director that preceded him. Maria sensed Visconti’s dramatic genius, and his mere presence at the rehearsals—even when he was not offering any specific suggestions—had a powerful effect on her. “I was so surprised,” she remembered later, “to see a man of his distinction sit in attentively at almost all the rehearsals, which lasted a minimum of three or four hours—and we rehearsed twice a day.”

  The fascination was mutual. Visconti had first seen Maria the previous year during the Rome Opera performance of Parsifal. So when the Anfiparnaso group, a group of left-wing artists and intellectuals to which he belonged, decided to revive Il Turco in Italia, Visconti immediately suggested Maria. The flighty young wife of an old Neapolitan, madly in love with the faithless Turk Selim, is a long way from Kundry in Parsifal. Visconti’s imagination bridged the gap. In Rome that October, in and around the Teatro Eliseo on the Via Nazionale, an incongruous friendship began to develop. Over meals, the roles were reversed. It was Maria who sat, enthralled and listening, and Visconti and his Anfiparnaso friends who were doing the talking. Politics, art, revolution, new music, new morals—it opened up for Maria worlds as fantastic as a world in which Turkish sultans descended on Naples. In themselves, intellectual specu
lation and aesthetic theorizing had no appeal for her, but, filtered through Visconti’s personality, they acquired a kind of fascination by association.

  “Maria Callas was the surprise of the evening,” wrote the Rome correspondent of Opera after the opening night on October 19. “She sang a light soprano role with the utmost ease, making it extremely difficult to believe that she can be the perfect interpreter of both Turandot and Isolde.” The cast included Cesare Valletti, Mariano Stabile (Toscanini’s great Falstaff) and Sesto Bruscantini, but there was no doubt as to who was the star of the evening: “The solo voices were splendid, but it required Maria Callas’ superb musical flair to keep the others together in the concerted numbers.”

  There were only four performances of Il Turco, the last one on October 29. The next time Maria sang Fiorilla onstage was five years later at La Scala in a production created for her by Zeffirelli. In the interim there came the Visconti period of her life. She did not work with him again until 1954, the year that marked their dazzling season at La Scala, yet we can begin dating the Visconti period from the autumn of 1950. Maria’s close contact with Visconti over the rehearsal weeks had revealed a whole new dimension of her dramatic personality, and his initial influence remained alive working underground until they came together again, four years later, for Spontini’s La Vestale.

  By now Italian audiences were so used to Maria’s ability to sing anything, and to follow it by singing anything else, that it was no longer stirring news when, just over three weeks after she had sung her last Fiorilla, she was back in Rome singing Kundry in a radio broadcast of Parsifal with Boris Christoff as Gurnemanz. In between the two, she had been working on a major new role, Elisabeth de Valois in Verdi’s Don Carlo. Throughout her life, Maria, too driven to pace herself, had to have rest forced on her when her body revolted against overwork, nerves and anxiety. This time, too exhausted to fight the infection, she collapsed with jaundice. She had to leave in the middle of the Don Carlo rehearsals with no hope of returning. The doctor had ordered not just rest, but complete rest, so all performances of Don Carlo, both in Naples and in Rome, had to be canceled, the only time such an event did not find its way into the headlines as another “Callas Cancellation.”

  Maria’s recovery was filled with letters from Athens. Her mother, finding life with her husband increasingly unbearable, had suddenly decided to leave New York and join Jackie in Greece. Filled with bitterness, she poured some of it into her letters to Maria. At first the complaints were directed exclusively at Maria’s father, but gradually, when Maria failed to respond, they became reminders of all Evangelia had done for her daughter. The reminders of the past were accompanied by pointed reminders of the stark present—of Evangelia’s financial burdens and of a daughter’s duty to do something about them, especially since the daughter was married to a millionaire. Evangelia’s attacks on Meneghini became less and less veiled. Ostensibly they were all about his lack of generosity and concern for Maria’s family, but behind this litany of grievances was Evangelia’s pain at seeing her place at Maria’s side filled by Meneghini.

  If anyone in the world seemed to have a special claim on Maria, a special claim to her glory, it was no longer the mother who had first nurtured her talents, but the husband. Evangelia sensed Maria’s withdrawal, and she panicked. The more she panicked, the more strident and reproachful her letters became, and the more Maria withdrew. Every sentence in her mother’s letters was an accusation, and every accusation a further invitation to withdrawal. Maria stopped replying. Instead she sent a letter to her godfather:

  . . . I beg you not to repeat this Leon—but my mother wrote a letter cursing etc. as is her usual way (she thinks) of obtaining things, saying also that she didn’t bring me into this world for nothing—she said she gave birth to me so I should maintain her. That phrase I’m sorry but it’s hard to digest.

  It’s hard to explain by writing, Leon, when I see you I’ll explain. Only believe me I did and I will do my best for them but I will not permit them to exagerate. I have a future to think of and also I would like a child of my own.

  Please, love me and believe in me—we are so much alike . . .

  She did feel a special affinity with her godfather and commented on it in many of her letters. Besides, she felt enormous gratitude and love for him; he was the only person in her life to whom she could write consistently and intimately, without screen or reservation:

  Nobody else but you dear Leon helped me and gave me courage then, and I’ll not forget it. Neither will I forget when I had to fulfill my contract to Verona and I didn’t have the money to leave. If it were not for you, dearest . . . Not only that but I only had $70 with me—and not one winter clothing. It’s hard to believe but it’s true. . . . Please write to me both of you for I sincerely love you both.

  I kiss you and Sally so very much.

  Please write—

  Maria

  At the same time, Maria sent a letter to her father inviting him to join her and Meneghini in Mexico in July 1951 for her South American season. On the principle that “my enemy’s enemies are my friends,” Maria was aligning herself with her father, and taking one more step toward totally closing her heart to her mother. From this point until Maria died, she saw her mother through a distorting haze, as a shadowy, almost menacing figure. Throughout her life she remained in the grip of this unconscious adolescent rebellion—haunted by her mother, but right up to the end frozen in her belligerence.

  Meanwhile, Italy was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi’s death, with festivals springing up all over the country. Maria’s Verdi year began at the Teatro Comunale in Florence on January 15, 1951, with her first Traviata. She had started working on it in May 1949 when she and Serafin were going by ship to Buenos Aires for seven weeks of performances there. At the time there were no plans for her to sing Violetta, and for over a year before she did sing it, she kept declining offers to do so, feeling not yet ready for the part. When she finally accepted the Teatro Comunale’s offer, she and Serafin started working together again.

  They worked long and hard, but for the first time the magic of their collaboration seemed tarnished. Perhaps because she was no longer prepared to play the respectful student to the celebrated maestro, perhaps because she was still recovering from her illness, perhaps because, however subconsciously, the role of the guru was now filled by Visconti, Maria was constantly irritable with Serafin and ready to flare up. On one occasion she did. It was their first quarrel, the prelude of worse to come, though when the first night arrived there was no trace of animosity. However fierce he could be at rehearsals, once the curtain went up on the first performance, Serafin was always there, ready in every way to support the singers. “When I am in the pit I am there to serve you because I have to serve my performance,” he would say. And Maria paid lavish tribute to this side of the maestro shortly after his death in 1968: “We would look down and feel we had a friend there, in the pit. He was helping you all the way. He would mouth all the words. If you were not well he would speed up the tempo, and if you were in top form he would slow it down to let you breathe, to give you room. He was breathing with you, loving it with you. It was elastic, growing, living.”

  When the final curtain came down on Traviata on the first night and Maria and Serafin acknowledged the applause hand in hand, whatever had passed between them during the rehearsals seemed to belong to the past. “Here was a great accomplishment,” said Serafin later, summing up Maria’s first Violetta, “and it surprised many.”

  She left Florence for Naples. There were only a few days before, on January 27, 1951, the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi’s death, she was due to sing her first Trovatore in Italy. She spent them rehearsing and working with Serafin on her Leonora, perfecting with his guidance what she had achieved a year earlier in Mexico with instinct alone. The reviews of that first night, however, did not suggest that there was anything great or even exceptional about Maria, or any other member of the cast, even though i
t included the celebrated Giacomo Lauri-Volpi in the title role. Lauri-Volpi was so incensed at what he described as “this dreadful indifference” to vocal art that he wrote an open letter to the Naples press in protest, with special vehemence reserved for the failure of the critics to acknowledge the greatness of Callas.

  Maria, who in any case was never very fond of the melancholy Leonora, was downcast by the lack of enthusiasm and relieved to leave Naples for Palermo where she was to open the spring season in Norma. She had barely arrived in Palermo when she received an urgent call from La Scala. It was Ghiringhelli himself: could she come to Milan to take over Aida from the indisposed Tebaldi? No, she could not, was the unequivocal reply. Singing once at La Scala as a replacement was enough. She would sing there again in her own right or not at all. She knew that Ghiringhelli could not afford to withhold a proper invitation for much longer. Nor did he. But he did hold out much longer than it would have seemed possible. When Gian Carlo Menotti told Ghiringhelli that his choice for Magda in The Consul was Maria Callas, Ghiringhelli exclaimed, “Oh, my god! No, never, never, never! I promised you that any singer you chose would be acceptable to me, but I will not have Maria Callas in the theater unless she comes as a guest artist.” Menotti went to see Maria and begged her to accept. She refused absolutely; and, as he was going out of the door, she stopped him: “Mr. Menotti, I want you to remember one thing, however, that I will sing at La Scala, and that Ghiringhelli will pay for this for the rest of his life.”

  On May 26, Maria opened at the Maggio Musicale in Florence in I Vespri Siciliani. This was to be the opera that brought Ghiringhelli from Milan, contract in hand, offering her the honor of opening the 1951–52 season at La Scala; it was one of her greatest Italian triumphs and the only opera she was ever to direct twenty-two years later. I Vespri, based on the massacre of the French by Sicilians at Palermo in 1282, was one of Verdi’s less frequently performed operas. The production was revived by the Florence May Festival as part of the festivities for the composer’s fiftieth anniversary, with Boris Christoff as Procida and the Austrian-born conductor Erich Kleiber making his Italian operatic debut. Lord Harewood, then editor of Opera, was there for one of the rehearsals and he described Maria’s first entrance on the stage: “ . . . The French have been boasting for some time of the privileges which belong by rights to an army of occupation, when a female figure—the Sicilian Duchess Elena—is seen slowly crossing the square. Doubtless the music and the production helped to spotlight Elena but, though she has not yet sung and was not even wearing her costume, one was straight away impressed by the natural dignity of her carriage, the air of quiet, innate authority which went with her every movement.” He was equally impressed by what he heard: “ . . . there was an assurance and a tragic bravura about her singing which was frequently thrilling.”