Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  So gradually Maria came to a decision which was to lead to a fairytale transformation that would stun the world. It was still over a month before the time for New Year’s resolutions when Maria resolved to become in reality the sylphlike creature of her imagination. And unlike millions upon millions of New Year’s resolutions, this one was to stick. There is no doubt that one of the reasons was that, apart from Meneghini, Maria told nobody. An even more securely locked secret, from which even Meneghini was excluded, was Maria’s choice of model for this transformation. It cannot have been easy to look at herself in the mirror and then choose the almost invisible Audrey Hepburn as the model of what she wanted to become, but then Maria loved challenges—especially self-imposed ones.

  In the meantime December 7, St. Ambrose’s feast day and La Scala’s traditional opening night, was not far away. The blaze of advance publicity, the press coverage, the boxes decorated with clusters of carnations, even the gift of a piece of fabric for an evening shirt presented to box subscribers by an enterprising haberdasher’s firm—they all proclaimed that this was more than a big night, an event; it was to be a unique occasion. Maria was opening the season as Lady Macbeth and the performance was being televised—the first opera ever to be televised in Italy. It was her first Lady Macbeth, and ten days later, on December 17, she sang the part for the last time. From then on she was always nearly singing the part. She nearly sang it under Toscanini’s direction a year earlier in Busseto, near Verdi’s birthplace; she nearly sang it in San Francisco; she nearly sang it at the Met; and she nearly sang it at Covent Garden. Those who actually heard her as Lady Macbeth at La Scala experienced exactly what Verdi had put in the music and had even expressly asked for: “I would like a voice harsh, choked, dark. There are places that must not even be sung, but acted and declaimed with a veiled, black voice.”

  Nicola Benois had designed the production and Carl Ebert, who had made a success of Macbeth in Berlin in the early 1930s, and again, a little later, at Glyndebourne, was the director. But Maria, as Serafin had impressed on her from the beginning, sought the direction in the music. “When you want to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act onstage,” she said once, “all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that. If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and your ears—and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much—you will find every gesture there.”

  Verdi wanted Lady Macbeth to be “ugly and evil.” Maria agreed that “the role, and therefore the voice, should have an atmosphere of darkness.” In fact her voice created, all by itself, drama, scenery and action; and her huge, penetrating eyes added to the potency and atmosphere with which she filled the music. The sleepwalking scene electrified the audience and earned Maria seven curtain calls. Yet there were many who could not cope with what one critic described as her “almost inhuman vocal qualities.” “Callas was not in her best voice and at one point was even whistled at,” reported Peter Hoffer in Music and Musicians. She had been whistled at but mainly by those for whom a singer who made her voice deliberately harsh and dark as the character in the music demanded was “not in her best voice.” Still, the thunderous ovation at the end, and the overwhelmingly glowing comments the day after, drowned the voices of the detractors.

  The day after Christmas, Maria was back at La Scala singing La Gioconda. Ebe Stignani was Laura and Antonino Votto the conductor. He had worked closely with Maria on her two Cetra recordings and was an unequivocal admirer: “She was the last great artist,” he said some years later, recalling her nearsightedness. “Just think—this woman was nearly blind, and often sang standing a good hundred and fifty feet from the podium. But her sensitivity! Even if she could not see, she sensed the music and always came in exactly with my downbeat. When we rehearsed she was so precise, already note-perfect. But she had a habit that annoyed her colleagues: even in rehearsal she always sang full voice and it obliged them to do so as well. Most singers are stupid and try to save themselves, but a rehearsal is a kind of hurdle. If on a track you must run a mile, you don’t practice by running half a mile. For over thirty years I was Arturo Toscanini’s assistant, and from the very first rehearsal he demanded every nuance from the orchestra, just as if it were a full performance. And Callas did this, too. I remember we had a dress rehearsal in Cologne of La Sonnambula at ten in the morning and she sang her entire role full voice; that night we did the premiere! She was not just a singer, but a complete artist. It’s foolish to discuss her as a voice. She must be viewed totally—as a complex of music, drama, movement. There is no one like her today. She was an aesthetic phenomenon.”

  America was beginning to share the same opinion. Maria had not yet sung there but the Callas legend had preceded her across the Atlantic. Her recording of Gioconda, with Votto conducting, had thrilled and baffled opera lovers. The woman who had won fame as Lucia, who had sung Isolde and Armida, could now finally be heard on record singing Gioconda. And the world loves nothing better than stories of superhuman feats that stretch the limits of possibility: stories of a Lindbergh making the first solo transatlantic flight; of a Blondin crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope; of a Mozart writing the overture to Don Giovanni the night before the first performance; of a Callas singing Brünnhilde on one night and Elvira the next, a Callas rumored to be a fabulous Lucia and a marvelous Gioconda.

  So the stories of Maria’s superhuman feats were going the rounds in America even before the Americans had had a chance to hear her sing in person. Meanwhile, back in Milan, Maria was making quite sure that when they did hear her in the flesh there would be much less flesh to see. She had begun to think ahead to her first Medea: “My first instinct was to say that the face is too fat and I can’t stand it, because I needed the chin for expression in certain very hard phrases, cruel phrases or tense phrases. And I felt—as the woman of the theater that I was and am—that I needed these necklines and the chinlines to be very thin and very pronounced.” So her resolve to transform her appearance dramatically became stronger than ever. It was strengthened further by the growing admiration from everyone around her, especially—and this mattered to her more than anything—within her own profession. More and more singers, conductors, designers, directors, whether they had worked with her or not, were taking sides. For the moment the admirers were much more outspoken than the detractors. After Maria’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Florence on January 25, 1953, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, who was her Edgardo on the first night, actually went into print describing her performance as “an immense triumph,” “This young artist,” he said, “with her ability to rouse the multitudes, may yet lead the lyric theatre to a new golden age of singing.”

  Immediately after her four performances of Lucia at the Teatro Comunale in Florence, Maria went on to record Lucia with Giuseppe di Stefano as Edgardo, Tito Gobbi as Enrico, and Serafin conducting. It was the first recording by the Callas, Gobbi, di Stefano trio. And it was a little spool of tape containing the last three minutes of the second act that persuaded Herbert von Karajan to conduct Lucia at La Scala. He had listened to it reluctantly, at Walter Legge’s insistence, but no sooner had the tape come to an end than he was on the phone to La Scala asking for the score of Lucia to be sent to his hotel—already determined that he would not only conduct but stage it.

  Sandwiched between her Lucias in Catania and Rome was Maria’s first Medea in Florence. She had once again proved that she was vocally unique. She could move with equal success from the florid tightrope walking of Donizetti and Bellini to the soaring, dramatic intensity of Puccini and Verdi, with the fiendish part of Cherubini’s Medea in between. But Maria longed to be a dramatic, not just a vocal, phenomenon. She had an instinctive sense of drama which made the final rehearsals of Medea all the more frustrating for her. The lean and hungry look that she longed for was still not there: “I darkened the colour and all that. It doesn’t work . . . and then I was tired of playing a game like—for instance—playing a beautiful young woman
, and I was a heavy, uncomfortable woman finding it difficult to move around . . .” She had studied all her life to put things right musically, but vocal achievements were never for Maria an end in themselves. Her vocal mastery of Medea became an instrument for infusing the tragic princess with the grandeur that would bring her to life. Through her interpretation, the contained classicism of Medea became torrential emotion, and a little-known opera a huge boxoffice success. As Robert Mann put it in Musical America: “The oblivion that has shrouded this opera for a hundred and fifty years is explained by the fact that singers of Miss Callas’s artistry and intelligence are so very rare.”

  It was the first performance of Cherubini’s opera in his native land for nearly forty-five years. For the large festival audience the evening was an unprecedented experience; but Maria knew—and the knowledge was a torment—that dramatically her Florence Medea was not yet the magnetic demiwoman, demigoddess she saw in her mind’s eye. “The way I saw Medea,” said Maria a few months before her final Medea in 1961, “was the way I feel it: fiery, apparently calm, but very intense. The happy time with Jason is past; now she is devoured by misery and fury.” Those who were expecting classical tradition and cultured civility came up instead against Maria’s raw primitivism—the beast and the goddess in the same body at war with each other. Norma agonized over taking her children’s lives but could not bring herself to do it. Medea not only did it but gloried in the murder. And the audience heard and felt the portrayal of unvarnished hatred, flaming jealousy, even raw evil. It was as if that night at the Teatro Comunale in Florence the veil with which civilization had masked such emotions was lifted, and in the darkness of the opera house the audience could allow itself to experience emotions which many had convinced themselves were safely under control or even nonexistent. Now that Maria was expressing all the feelings they feared, their suppressed emotions could find a safe outlet and they could do their hating, envying and agonizing through her. The fact that the audience was perhaps the most fashionable of the Maggio Musicale in the city the very name of which is a symbol of civilization added a poignancy—and a certain irony—to the occasion.

  Among the fashionable and the knowledgeable in the audience was the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Rudolf Bing. Backstage after the performance he made it clear to Maria and Meneghini that the Met was eager to welcome her as soon as her commitments allowed. It was not to be as soon as that. Meneghini was once again playing hard to get. On this particular occasion he made financial demands on Bing which he half knew Bing could not, or at least would not, meet. Throughout the endless business talks, Meneghini, with snatches of English and torrents of Italian at his command, was at his most bad-tempered. In many ways, of course, ill-nature was about the only thing that saved Battista from total insipidity. In the beginning, as the wealthy bon vivant of provincial Verona, he had a certain raffish sparkle about him, but the more international and glamorous his wife’s career became, the more his own sparkle diminished. And this was not by comparison alone; it was as if in some absolute sense the growing excitement that Maria generated and the grandeur that increasingly surrounded her brought out all the blandness and pettiness in her husband.

  Like so many who bask in reflected glory, Meneghini was becoming more royal than the queen—always on the lookout for signs of lèse-Callas. He seemed constantly to seek out people’s ambiguous gestures and equivocal words in order to decipher them as signs of disloyalty. The surest sign of it was a less-than-total willingness to do anything demanded—which in Meneghinese meant to pay anything demanded—to obtain Maria’s services. Rudolf Bing had failed to pass the cash test; negotiations were broken off and both Meneghini and, with his prompting, Maria worked themselves into a solemn rage. Meneghini gave vent to it in a statement to the press: “My wife will not sing at the Metropolitan as long as Mr. Bing runs it. It is their loss.” It was not long before he had to eat his words, but for the time being, instead of New York, Maria went back to London. Once again at the Savoy, she was given the same suite with its beige-and-white walls, and the huge mirror over the fireplace. From now on this was unofficially known as “the Callas suite,” and for the older members of the Savoy staff who still remembered Tetrazzini, there was a spasm of nostalgia when the massive bouquets arrived before and after all Maria’s first nights. This time there were three: Aida, Norma and Trovatore. It was her Leonora in Trovatore that carried the day. “In some way I cannot define,” wrote Cecil Smith in Opera, “she embodied both Leonora’s passionate humanness and the formality with which the score and libretto universalize her emotions. The voice—or rather the use of it—was a source of unending amazement. For once we hear the trills fully executed, the scales and arpeggios totally full-bodied, the portamentos and long-breathing phrases fully supported and exquisitely inflected. The spectacular ovation after “D’amor sull’ ali rosee” in the last act was no less than Callas deserved . . .”

  But Maria was not happy: she was not happy with the shabby sets, she was not happy with many of the singers engaged, and she was not happy with the conventional production. She probably would have been irritable even if the production had been of the highest artistic standards and the singers perfect. She had, after all, kept a punishing work schedule, living on green salads, almost raw meat and electrical massages. And an Audrey Hepburn likeness still seemed a very long way away.

  She returned to Italy at the beginning of July and spent the summer between the Arena of Verona and recording sessions in Milan. After Cavalleria Rusticana with Serafin conducting, she began recording Tosca—a recording that was to make history, and one in which Maria’s transforming effect on what she is singing is there for all to hear. The combination of four ruthless perfectionists—Walter Legge, Victor de Sabata, Tito Gobbi and Maria—meant that for eleven days at La Scala, where the recording was being made, perfection was relentlessly pursued through miles of tape. Tito Gobbi had to sing his first-act music thirty times, working on the color and the inflection even in individual syllables, before it would pass, and Maria worked on one phrase, “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma,” for half an hour before they were satisfied.

  Maria had first worked with de Sabata nine months earlier when they opened the La Scala season with Vespri Siciliani. The beginning of their relationship was quite tempestuous, right up to and including the dress rehearsal attended by critics and invited guests. At one point there was a slight discrepancy between Callas and the orchestra. De Sabata instantly stopped and shouted, “Callas—watch me!” “No, Maestro,” smiled Maria, wagging her finger. “You watch me—your sight is better than mine.” They had both tested their strength, and had decided that war between them would be too exhausting, so a peace followed, which during the recording grew into a friendship based on total professional respect.

  After the recordings were over, Maria had more than a month of rest ahead before the resumption of her autumn engagements. It was spent at home in Verona. Each of these respites had a distinct effect on the Meneghini home: more and more gilded objects, the latest gadgets and every kind of expensive knickknack filled the rooms. As her home became heavier and more cluttered, the hostess became lighter by the day. The effect was not yet as dramatic as it was going to be, but Madame Biki, the new influence in Maria’s life, was doing her best to accentuate it. Biki, who as well as being one of Milan’s leading fashion designers, was also Puccini’s granddaughter, was introduced to Maria at a dinner party given by Toscanini’s daughter, Wally. Wally had become very close to Maria and kept doing her best to wean her father away from his total commitment to Tebaldi. It was Wally who had arranged the audition with her father that led to the plans for the Macbeth that in the end never happened. Now she was responsible for another—and much more fruitful—introduction. Biki took charge of Maria’s wardrobe and her influence on Maria was unchallenged, at least for the moment.

  La Wally, the opera after whose heroine Toscanini had named his daughter, had been chosen by La Scala to open their
1953–54 season to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Alfredo Catalani’s death. Renata Tebaldi was Wally, and even before opening night the press, the claqueurs and the Scala regulars were eagerly anticipating trouble. Ghiringhelli had once again divided the season with Solomonlike fairness: Lucia, Don Carlo, Alceste and Medea for Maria; La Wally, Otello, Tosca and Eugene Onegin for Renata. The only thing he could do nothing diplomatic about was the crucial question of who should have the honor of opening the season. The previous season it had been Maria. This season, on the basis of Ghiringhelli’s symmetrical justice, it had to be Renata.

  Emilio Radius, music critic of L’Europeo, suggested with a touching naïveté that the two rivals should bury the hatchet and have a great public handshake for the greater glory of opera. It is not clear whether Mr. Radius’ suggestion influenced Maria’s decision or not, but there she was on opening night fervently and prominently applauding from her box. “Happily,” commented Musica e Dischi, “rivalry goes hand in hand with chivalry.” In the proscenium box was Toscanini himself, applauding no less fervently. A couple of nights later when Maria opened in Medea, Tebaldi failed to return the compliment. She was not there at all. Nor was Toscanini, who to the end remained one of Tebaldi’s staunchest supporters.