Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  She was equally unsparing of herself when it came to her schedule. On April 26, only a fortnight after the last Entfühurung and with Norma in between, she opened the Florence festival with another long-forgotten opera, Rossini’s Armida. Maria loved Rossini but Armida, which Rossini wrote for Colbran who became his wife, is an almost impossible part, full of perilous roulades, hazardous trills, runs and leaps—and, as sung by Maria, full of dazzling fireworks. Despite its five important tenor roles, Armida is undeniably a one-woman show, and, on this occasion, it was greeted universally as a one-woman triumph, especially by those who knew that Maria had learned the part in five days. At the dress rehearsal, the performance officially attended by the critics, Maria’s spectacular memory let her down for once, and she emerged from the elaborate litter in which Armida makes her first appearance totally unable to remember her first line. Completely unflustered, she asked for her words and made her entrance again. On the first night she was in absolute control throughout, and during her twelve-minute final scene, she pushed her voice to new limits, spanning almost three octaves. It all came to a climax with one of the most elaborate of all Rossini’s arias, delivered by Maria in a torrent of sound. “It is possible,” wrote Andrew Porter in Opera, “to feel that the phrases beneath the florid passages are far too much overlaid with ornament; but it was impossible to regret it when Maria Callas was singing them.”

  From Milan to Florence, from Florence to Rome and two performances of I Puritani, then from Rome to Verona. There were two weeks left before Maria was due to arrive in Mexico for the beginning of her third tour, and, instead of there being a time of much-needed rest, they were consumed almost entirely by two major additions to her repertoire: Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The slave driver inside Maria was pushing her on more relentlessly than ever. Of course it made sense to have these new roles ready to try in Mexico before exposing them to the more critical Italian audiences, and of course it was wonderful that from the beginning of January to the beginning of May in this new year, she had sung one Vespri, five Puritanis, nine Normas, three Trovatores, four Entfühurungs and three Armidas, but the price she was paying was very considerable. The part of her that needed space to breathe and to grow was being stifled, her need for attention and love ignored or denied. Maria Callas—already, according to many, the most exciting singer on the operatic stage—was shuttling from city to city, from role to role and from triumph to triumph.

  From Italy to Mexico. Partnered by Giuseppe di Stefano, she was getting ready to open her Mexican season in I Puritani. There was a story behind this choice of opening opera which Antonio Caraza-Campos, the general director of the Opera Nacional, did not tire of repeating to his guests on the opening night. During Maria’s first Mexican season, Campos went to see her with a score of Aida which had belonged to the nineteenth-century soprano, Angela Peralta, indicating that she had sung a top E-flat at the end of the Triumph Scene; he asked Maria to do the same. “If you want to hear my E-flat,” she replied, at her most imperious, “sign me up for Puritani.”

  Caraza-Campos got the point: Maria Callas had stopped auditioning. On May 29, he and thousands of others heard her high E-flat in I Puritani—and much else besides. It was a chaotic performance. Guido Picco’s conducting was so haphazard that he seemed half-asleep, and the male singers, with the exception of di Stefano, ranged from barely tolerable to atrocious. The opening night was broadcast and it is possible to hear Maria time after time saving the performance from the shambles it nearly became. But she was seething with anger. She, the most professional of professionals, could not bear amateurism. Her perfectionism made it even harder to bear having the overall effect of a performance diminished or even destroyed by the lack of total commitment on the part of anyone else involved. The devotion to her work that she radiated had an effect on everyone around her. It is true that some, certainly those for whom their work had become routine, were exasperated, but it soon became legendary that when Callas was singing everyone in the theater performed better: the leading tenor sang better, the conductor conducted better, the usherettes ushered the audience better, the cashier sold tickets better . . .

  Maria’s obsession with her work was interpreted by many as vainglorious. In fact, from the very beginning of her career, Maria knew that, however brilliant she might be, the real success of a performance depended on the quality of the ensemble. And beyond that, the most intense moments in Maria’s life, the moments when past, future and vanity disappeared, were the moments of blissful absorption in the role she was singing. Then she stopped being Maria Callas and merged with the emotions of the woman she was portraying—emotions larger than those of any one individual. There was nothing easy or effortless about Maria’s greatness, and however much work and energy she devoted to each new role, she always regarded it as work in progress, never complete, never final. Lucia was her first new role in Mexico this season. After the Mad Scene, she received sixteen curtain calls and a twenty-minute ovation. The whole audience and the normally blasé musicians in the pit rose together and applauded with an enthusiasm new even to the full-blooded Mexicans. Yet Maria’s summation of her Mexico Lucia sixteen years later was: “Very sure, the first Mexico performance. Absolutely sure, beautiful top notes and all that, but it was not yet the role.” Her attitude toward her performances was and would always remain that of the severest of headmistresses.

  After the creative euphoria of Lucia came a week of acute depression. She was worn out and racked with worry about the Rigoletto ahead of her. She had had neither the time nor the energy to rehearse properly, and she said as much to Caraza-Campos as soon as she arrived in Mexico. He reminded her that she had signed a contract to sing Gilda at the highest fee ever paid to an artist in Mexico and there was nothing he could do about it now. Goaded by Meneghini, Maria felt bitter and hard done by, yet at the same time she was full of self-accusation—not so much because of the punishing schedule she had imposed on herself, but because she feared that both her own performance and the entire under-rehearsed production would be artistic and critical disasters.

  As it turned out, there were moments when the production verged on disaster and some when it actually was a disaster, but Maria’s performance, her transformation of Gilda from an innocent young girl into a strong, passionate woman, made the audience see the character in an altogether new light.

  There was one more Rigoletto, the final Lucia and two Toscas to be sung before Maria could return home. The press went on eulogizing her Tosca and rhapsodizing over her Lucia, but it was the dissenting voices that rang in Maria’s ears. Rigoletto had been an anticlimax, and, as one of the critics put it, “Miss Callas’s Gilda did not improve the situation.”

  Back in Verona, with the daily pressure of performances and rehearsals removed, for the first time in months Maria had some spare energy, which she promptly turned against herself. The Mexican season was suddenly transformed into a failure in her eyes. The endless curtain calls, the tempestuous applause, the rave reviews, all were forgotten, and what remained was the “humiliation” of Rigoletto. She swore she would never sing it onstage again—nor did she. With this decision a real opportunity was lost. She could have made the musical world reappraise Gilda as she had made it look with new eyes on Lucia, Tosca, Norma, Armida. Instead she dropped Rigoletto from her active repertoire and only sang it again when she recorded it with Tito Gobbi and di Stefano.

  Maria’s reaction to the Mexican season was typical: a speck of failure was examined under the microscope and enlarged until it had completely obliterated all the surrounding successes, all the peaks of triumph. It was in that physically exhausted, emotionally wrought state that Maria received a letter from Greece. Her mother had decided to put an end to the increasingly uneasy alliance with her husband. She had gone back to New York to start divorce proceedings and returned to Greece with a temporary judgment for a weekly alimony. But the judgment went the way of many other similar judgments, an
d nothing was forthcoming. Evangelia, who had always been clever with her hands, began making operatic dolls and selling them first to friends and then, as the word spread, to others. So while Maria was singing Tosca, Violetta, Aida and Lucia, Evangelia created images of the characters her daughter was portraying. At the same time her family continued to meet many of her financial needs, and Jackie’s perennnial fiancé was also on hand to bridge any gaps. For him this was partly a way of assuaging his guilty conscience for giving in to his family’s wishes not to marry Jackie. They were implacably opposed to their son and heir marrying socially so much “beneath” their own family, and their son and heir was not grown-up enough to stand up to them—at least not yet, as he kept repeating to Jackie.

  Evangelia was concerned about Jackie, who continued to give piano lessons and even a modest recital now and then; also she was obviously concerned about her own financial future. But most important of all, she longed to reestablish contact with Maria, whose life from such a distance seemed entirely dreamlike. The mother’s letters went unanswered, and her desperation grew. In that desperation she drew on the advice of a friend who was a medium. It is not quite clear what the medium said. What is clear is that what followed demonstrated grave misjudgment on Evangelia’s part. She wrote asking for—demanding—a regular weekly allowance and for Maria to sponsor the launching of Jackie’s career.

  The letter was waiting for Maria when she arrived home from Mexico. It is a hazard of letter writing that the recipient’s state of mind cannot be guessed at. This was an instance of the worst timing. Maria was in an explosive mood; her mother’s hectoring letter lit the fuse. At a time when Maria was aiming for the stars, when she sensed limitless possibility, all the things that she fought against in herself—frustration, failure, futility—she projected onto Evangelia. By now her mother had become in Maria’s eyes her nemesis, her lifelong burden and her base line for judging the distance she had herself traveled from Patissiou Street.

  Every word in the letter fed Maria’s resentment. The normal human fear of being used was magnified in Maria’s case into full-scale horror. At the mere suggestion of this, real or imagined, she would simultaneously cringe and attack. Her reply to her mother was ruthlessly direct: Jackie’s career was no business of hers and Evangelia was young enough and healthy enough to get a job and support herself.

  The war of the letters had begun. It was a contest in bitterness: joyless memories on Maria’s side, self-sacrificing memories on her mother’s. It was as though Maria was dredging up her whole past for an airing until, unable to relinquish it, she would store it away again. She was more tied to the past than she ever knew.

  On July 19, 1952, an event from the past—this time the not-too-distant past—reoccurred. Five years after her Italian debut as Gioconda in the Arena of Verona, Maria was back in the Arena, once again in the same theater and the same role. The differences, however, were significant. She was ecstatically welcomed by the huge audience as if she was victoriously returning home. The ecstasy apart, she was now being paid 600,000 lire for each of her six performances. Two days after the opening night, on July 21, Maria took a step that was to prove more important for her career than it seemed at the time. At her apartment in Verona she signed an exclusive recording contract with EMI. Walter Legge, director of artists and repertory for EMI, was present and he breathed a deep sigh of relief and incredulity. The negotiations had begun well over a year before in Maria’s dressing room at the Rome opera. Walter Legge had just heard Maria for the first time in Norma and had rushed back to offer her an exclusive contract. Meneghini and Maria seemed delighted, and they continued to seem delighted as the negotiations dragged on over meals in Verona, in Rome, in Milan. At every meeting Maria, like a goddess, seemed to expect sacrificial offerings, both from Walter Legge and from Dario Soria (who had by then left Cetra for EMI): “My arms still ache,” recalled Walter Legge years later, “at the recollection of the pots of flowering shrubs and trees that Dario Soria and I lugged to the Verona apartment.” Finally terms were agreed on and Walter Legge gave them a contract with his signature and asked Maria for hers on his own copy. But it was not to be—not yet. Meneghini explained that they had a superstition that prevented them from signing a contract until two weeks after it had been mutually agreed. Instead they gave their parole d’onore that the signed copy would be mailed a fortnight later.

  It was not. In fact, it was not mailed at all until Walter Legge had flown to Verona and agreed to raise the terms. Meneghini knew when the cards were stacked in his favor and he had no qualms about waiting to play them to his full advantage. For him the financial dealings of Maria’s career were not a purgatory leading to the heaven of aesthetic experience. Driving a hard bargain was for Meneghini heaven itself, and wherever possible he asked for the payment in cash—even from the Met. Once in revenge, the Met’s general manager, Rudolf Bing, gave him Maria’s fee in five-dollar bills. Given half a chance there is little doubt that Meneghini would have kept rolls of bills stuffed inside his socks.

  Still, the enemy was finally conquered, the hard bargain was struck and the EMI contract signed. Walter Legge was destined to be a crucial influence on Maria’s recording career and, by extension, a key influence on her career as a whole. He was a fellow perfectionist and greatly admired the perfectionist in Maria. “It is easier to admire her than to love her,” he said once; but it must have been a kind of love that bound them together through all of Maria’s recording triumphs. We can see that love—the love of perfection—in action ten years after their first recording together, when they spent three hours repeating over and over again the last dozen bars of the Jewel Song in Faust because neither was satisfied.

  A few days after the EMI contract was at last signed, Walter Legge and his wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, went to the Arena to see Maria in Traviata. Backstage after the performance, the great German soprano offered Maria one of the most moving tributes she ever received: her decision never to sing Traviata again. “What is the sense,” Schwarzkopf replied when asked to explain her decision in public, “in doing a part that another contemporary artist can do to perfection?” In September, Maria went to Turin to record Traviata for Cetra. Traviata and Gioconda were the only two operas Maria ever recorded for Cetra. From then on her recording career was in the hands of Walter Legge and EMI in Europe, and Dario Soria and Angel Records, EMI’s transatlantic label, in America.

  The Cetra recordings over, Maria and Meneghini left in late October for London with a sense of anticipation which London, now and in the future, was to fulfill. Maria, with her powerful, almost primitive sense of fate, felt at the time as if God was answering her prayers, watching over her, guiding her. With husband and secretary in tow, she arrived at the Savoy, which right to the end was to be her home in London. Enormous bouquets and baskets of flowers were waiting for her. She had conquered even before she had sung, and onstage she was unmistakably a woman bursting with vitality. Norma had been chosen as the vehicle of her debut at Covent Garden. Maria was the only reason for the revival of an opera that had not been heard at Covent Garden since Rosa Ponselle sang it in 1930. And singing next to her in the small role of Clotilde was Joan Sutherland who, fifteen years later, was to sing Norma at Covent Garden herself. The ovation began at rehearsal, with the orchestra and David Webster, Covent Garden’s general administrator, applauding Maria’s first London “Casta diva.”

  The first night, November 8, 1952, was a twofold revelation—Maria to the audience, and, in many ways more important, the audience to itself. To the hundreds present at Covent Garden on November 8, Maria’s Norma was an intensely private moment of self-discovery. She evoked emotions and responses in the audience that they had never suspected were available to them; she provoked a depth and intensity of feeling that went beyond anything they had previously experienced; she made an entire audience feel more vital, more responsive, more alive. It is little wonder that so many deified her.

  Opera was suddenly alive again at
Covent Garden, no longer an art form better fitted for museums than for the stage, but an art with a glittering present and a future that promised to be even more exciting. There were, as there always would be at Maria’s performances, the detractors, led on this occasion by the doyen of English music critics Ernest Newman who found her “slightly sub-normal.” And there were, as there always would be, those who complained of harsh nasal tones. But the audience responded in a way that made it clear they knew—or at least sensed—that a new era had arrived in opera.

  The fact that with Maria Callas a dramatic turning point had been reached may have been overlooked in Italy where the operatic tradition was an unbroken one. In London, however, and even elsewhere in Europe, the life of opera had always been a chain of islands in a sea of indifference. And now there had emerged from this sea a newfound land, recognizable from afar, by even the most indifferent, as a treasure island.

  Andrew Porter summed up her Norma: “Maria Meneghini Callas is the Norma of our day, as Ponselle and Grisi were of theirs.” Philip Hope-Wallace summed up her presence: “Tall and splendid, like one of Millais’ pictures of mid-Victorian divas.” David Webster summed up the response of the opera house: Maria Callas became his child and Covent Garden was offered to her as a home in which she grew and flourished as time went by, and in which, as if to show her gratitude, she did much of her finest work. It was a celebration all around. Maria brought international splendor to a still provincial Covent Garden. Covent Garden hailed her as the new Norma, the new operatic superstar, the new beginning.

  “But does she have to be so big?” That was one of the questions asked directly or covertly in the press commentaries that surrounded her visit. That was also the question that began to work its way more and more pressingly into Maria’s mind. When she first appeared in Aida at the Arena of Verona, one of the critics had written that “it was impossible to tell the difference between the legs of the Elephants on the stage and those of Aida sung by Maria Callas.” “I cried bitter tears for many days when I read the article,” said Maria shortly before she died, the memory still painful and alive. “It was cruel, horrible.” At the time she was not yet prepared to do anything about it, but by the end of her Norma performance in London, Maria the actress was feeling seriously hampered by her traditionally operatic size. Also she was beginning to be increasingly bothered by headaches, fainting spells and attacks of car sickness which she attributed more to the excess weight she carried than to anything else.