She returned to Milan exhausted. A painful boil at the back of her neck was a constant, tangible reminder of just how run down she was both physically and emotionally. Her doctor ordered complete rest; it was not the first time, nor would it be the last. The opening night of La Sonnambula had to be put off for two weeks, to the great delight of Leonard Bernstein who was conducting and who managed to get eighteen orchestral rehearsals for a score that was often done with one. Visconti had found in Bernstein a fellow perfectionist and they spent hours together going over details of the production, including sitting in the costume warehouses of La Scala, picking feathers for the caps of the chorus.
Maria, no less infatuated with Visconti now than she had been three months earlier, kept herself informed of all his movements—even from her sickbed in the Grand Hotel. Visconti remembered the first time he and Bernstein went to see her. “When the moment came to leave, we said, ‘Ciao, Maria. Get well!’ and headed for the door. ‘You stay here!’ she commanded me. ‘I don’t want you going off with Lenny again!’ ” And when, a couple of days later, Maria was going to leave the Grand Hotel and start rehearsing Sonnambula, she was no less demanding and no less possessive of her Luchino. During Vestale all her jealousy had been directed toward Franco Corelli; now it was Bernstein who became the target. The very things that she had found attractive before—his looks, his forcefulness, his rambling, leisurely voice—suddenly became a threat. She watched their every step together; she even spied on them when they left the theater to go for a walk or a cup of coffee.
Once at work, however, the love-struck, impetuous teenager was transformed into an obedient, almost deferential, disciple, ready to carry out Luchino’s every wish. Only once did she protest. La Sonnambula takes place in a Swiss village, yet Visconti insisted that Maria should wear her own real jewels at rehearsals.
“But, Luchino,” she said, “I am a village girl!”
“No, you are not a village girl. You are Maria Callas playing a village girl, and don’t you forget that.”
“You must believe what you see, but truth must be filtered through art”: that was Visconti’s artistic philosophy and Maria helped him give it life. He left nothing to chance. With the help of Piero Tosi, the designer, he turned Maria’s Amina into a visual incarnation of the renowned nineteenth-century ballerina Maria Taglioni, who had inspired Visconti’s conception of the part. Maria looked graceful, fragile—she even looked small. Luchino coaxed the little ballerina steps from her and even taught her how to stand in a ballerina’s fifth position. “A sylphide tripping on a moonbeam” is how Piero Tosi remembers her.
Amina walks in her sleep, and one night she actually walks into a stranger’s bed. Elvino, her fiancé, who knows nothing of her sleepwalking, is outraged, and is only finally convinced of her fidelity when he sees her walking in her sleep over a fragile bridge. Piero Tosi recalls that in the dress rehearsal Maria, “with the lake and the mountains behind her, looked like a shadow, a specter, floating upward. When she came to the broken plank of the bridge—where she must simulate falling and all the chorus gasps in horror—I watched her closely. Though she seemed to fall, I saw that she actually remained absolutely still. Yet she had caused the sensation of a fall—the fall of a ghost. I was fascinated. I had to know how she did it and so, at the premiere, I stood in the wings near her as she ascended the bridge. Slowly, she began to fill her lungs with air, and this gave an illusion of flight, of floating upward. . . . Then, when she had to fall, she quickly exhaled all her breath. What can you say? She was a theatrical wizard and knew all the tricks.”
Yet the theatrical wizard was far from confident in her wizardry. She needed constant encouragement. For nearly seven years, Meneghini had been her chief and constant support. He was always in the wings whispering: “Go on, Maria. There’s no one like you. You’re the greatest in the world.” Now, for the first time since 1947 and the Arena of Verona, his place in the wings had been taken by another. It was to Visconti that Maria turned for encouragement and reassurance. He had to lead her to the stage before each act and prod her to go on. Then she would beg him: “Please take me to this point,” and again “to this point. . . .” And they would go two feet, and then two more feet, nearer the opera stage. Paradoxically it was during the last act, when her theatrical wizardry was most admired, that she was least secure and needed Visconti all the more to tell her if her tone had been pure, if her phrasing had been good, if she had made any mistakes.
She could not take Visconti onstage with her, so she devised a substitute, which Visconti described with relish: “I always kept a handkerchief in my pocket with a drop of a particular English perfume on it, and Maria loved the scent. She told me always to place the handkerchief on the divan on which she had to lie down during the inn scene. ‘That way I’ll be able to walk directly to it with my eyes closed.’ And so that’s how we accomplished this effect. Luckily no musician in the orchestra ever decided to wear the same perfume or one night she might have walked right off the stage and into the pit.”
At the end of the opera, when Amina awakes and is reunited with her fiancé, all the lights both onstage and in the auditorium were turned up full, including La Scala’s great central chandelier. The last bars of her final bravura aria “Ah! non giunge” were drowned in the pandemonium, the bravos and the applause that broke out.
It was another Callas-Visconti triumph. Maria was riding the full swell of this great year, and the presence of Visconti by her side made her relish it all the more. As for Meneghini, he did not allow himself to be disturbed by his wife’s blatant infatuation, or at least he did not show any signs of being disturbed. So long as there was no chance of the infatuation being consummated, the manager’s prudence controlled the Italian husband’s indignation. As it happened, he had much less opportunity than usual to act the part of Maria’s shadow, as most of his time was spent on the Via Michelangelo Buonarroti where a four-story house was being turned into a home fit for the Queen of La Scala. If Verona had been Maria’s first real home, Milan was about to see her first real palace. The intervening years and Visconti’s influence had gone some way toward obliterating the gilded Veronese vulgarity of her first home. The elegance with which Visconti had inspired her was bound to spill over to her surroundings. Still, she had not stopped being Madame Meneghini, so the house on Via Buonarroti reflected Maria in transition. Three-quarters Meneghini, a quarter Visconti: all glass and red marble with elaborate antiques, indifferent Renaissance paintings and every kind of bric-a-brac. When he was not supervising Via Buonarroti, Meneghini was busy negotiating with Lawrence Kelly, who had flown over from Chicago in a final attempt to get a contract out of Maria for the second season of the Chicago Lyric Opera. Meneghini was playing his favorite game of increasing his demands and, as soon as these were granted, going away to think up more conditions that had to be met before actually signing the agreement, and when these were met, remembering a few more points that had not been discussed . . .
Kelly knew that Maria was not simply crucial for the Chicago season—without her there might not be any Chicago season. So he gave way on every point raised by Meneghini and on every additional point raised by Maria whenever he managed to track her down eating at Biffi Scala. One of the more bizarre clauses in the contract that Maria finally signed was the assumption by the management of the Chicago Lyric of full responsibility during the season for protecting her against legal proceedings by Bagarozy. And one of the more bizarre suggestions Maria made in the course of the interminable discussions involved Renata Tebaldi. “You should sign up Renata Tebaldi,” she said to Lawrence Kelly. “Then your audience will have the opportunity to compare us, and your season will be even more successful.” It is impossible to say whether the suggestion stemmed from childish hubris or from unconscious self-destructiveness; what is certain is that Maria was in a provocative mood.
Tebaldi returned to La Scala on April 26, 1955, in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. This was the last time she sang at La
Scala until December 7, 1959. It was a decision quietly made but tenaciously kept. Renata had decided that La Scala was not big enough for two queens—and she was not going to play lady-in-waiting to Maria.
Six days before Renata opened at La Scala for what was therefore to be her last performance for over four years, La Scala saw Maria for the first time in a comic role: Fiorilla in Il Turco in Italia. The same opera that five years before had signaled the beginning of the Visconti stage of her life was now the first opera produced for her by Zeffirelli. At first Maria, fiercely loyal to Visconti, was very suspicious of this young producer who was rumored to be the great future hope of La Scala, and as Maria saw it, a threat to the supremacy of her beloved Luchino. But she loved Zeffirelli’s designs for Il Turco, and it soon became clear during the rehearsals that here was a director whom she could unequivocally trust and in whose capable hands she could do what, paradoxically, she most loved doing—surrender. It became clear equally quickly that Zeffirelli knew exactly how to bring out the best in Maria. “Offstage,” he remembers, “Maria was not a very funny lady. She was always taking herself so damn seriously. To make Fiorilla come alive I had to invent clever byplay for her. Well, Maria was greedy for jewelry. She had a diamond necklace and an emerald collar and after every premiere her husband added a new souvenir to her collection. So I covered the Turk—Nicola Rossi-Lemeni—with many jewels. I told Maria that as soon as Fiorilla sees him she must be frightened but fascinated by this fool with his splendid ornaments. Whenever the Turk offered her his hand, Maria would take it and examine his rings. She was adorable doing it, really very funny. At one point she even danced a little tarantella and at another took off her shoe to hit her rival Zaida.”
Maria was enjoying herself and La Scala’s audience loved the transformation of their foremost tragedienne into an accomplished, effervescent comedienne. At the end of the first night, her dressing room was full of fans, photographers and fashionable opera-lovers, but when Zeffirelli walked in, Maria left everyone and approached him. “Your father liked it?” was her first question. Zeffirelli assured her that he had loved it and was coming to see her, but it was taking him some time to cross the stage as he was crippled. Then Maria did something she did all too rarely throughout her life: she followed what her heart told her instead of what the role of the reigning prima donna dictated. She gripped Zeffirelli by the hand and walked out in search of his father. When they found the old man she kissed him and before he could congratulate her, she thanked him for coming to see the performance. Zeffirelli never forgot this, one of the precious moments that, much more than their professional respect for each other, served to cement their deep friendship.
The last performance of Il Turco was on May 4, 1955. Maria had exactly thirty-three days before the opening night of what was to be a great Callas-Visconti-Giulini triumph: La Traviata. It was Visconti’s favorite opera, but the production was built entirely around Maria. “I staged it for her, only for her, not for myself. I did it to serve Callas, for one must serve a Callas.” Visconti began his daring innovations by moving the action about forty years forward to fin-de-siècle Paris. The reason? Maria would look wonderful in costumes of the time, in gowns with a tight bodice, a bustle and long train. She did more than that. She looked a dream within the dream of the belle époque that Visconti and Lila de Nobili, the designer, masterfully conjured up.
Maria’s waist seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. After she had seen Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, she was determined to appear even slimmer, so she kept tightening her already tight corset and calling the wardrobe mistress to have the seams of Violetta’s dresses pulled in. Maria’s transition from fat, awkward opera singer to slender, elegant singing actress was not and never would be complete in her mind. It had occurred with a speed that bewildered her, and part of her remained forever locked in the plump, clumsy adolescent she had once been. She knew she had been fat and might be fat again, a fear all the stronger on the days when she gave in to old temptations and consumed an entire box of marrons glacés at a sitting. But worse was the pervasive and persistent conviction that she was ugly, that the beautiful woman the world responded to was a mask, a disguise, almost a trick. She remained convinced to the end of her life that it was the package of clothes, hairdos, jewelry, figure and furs that was admired and never Maria herself. As a result her preoccupation with her appearance was almost obsessional, and much precious energy was absorbed by the presentation to the world’s hostile eyes of little, insignificant, unworthy Maria. Her beauty was a weapon, not a charm, and every warrior’s first duty, after all, is to keep his weapons in top condition.
Yet Maria never looked more bruised or more frail than in the last two acts of this Traviata. She sang “Dite alla giovine,” her renunciation of her lover in response to his father’s plea, with her face inclined to the floor and her voice a mere whisper that somehow filled the theater. Those who worked closely with Maria could not fail to sense the vulnerability in the woman as well as in the artist. Jon Vickers, who sang Jason to her Medea three years later, always referred to her as “little Maria.” “But she won’t let the little Maria show through,” he said once. The world had to be content with seeing the little Maria in little Amina, little Giulia, little Violetta . . .
The Visconti production of La Traviata and Maria’s portrayal of Violetta were to make operatic history, influencing many directors, designers and singers. “An opera,” Maria said once, “begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house. The audience sees only an excerpt.” On May 28, 1955, the curtain rose on the excerpt that the audience was allowed to see. Giulini described what he felt when, from the conductor’s podium, his eyes shifted to the stage, and to Violetta’s party: “My heart skipped a beat. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of what stood before me. The most emotional, exquisite decor I have seen in my entire life. Every detail made me feel I was materially entering another world, a world of incredible immediacy. The illusion of art vanished. I had the same sensation every time I conducted this production—over twenty times in two seasons. For me, reality was onstage. What stood behind me, the audience, auditorium, La Scala itself, seemed artifice. Only that which transpired onstage was truth, life itself.”
Giulini, Visconti and Maria spent hours, days, weeks together going over every detail. At no point did they lose track of their central concept: love was a thing Violetta had never known, even something she shied away from. Her unstated fear was that if she gave in to love she would lose her cold capacity to play with life. Maria’s transformation from a woman who lives for sheer selfish pleasure to a woman discovering for the first time her infinite capacity to give was so moving because it had been so deeply felt by Visconti, Giulini and Maria alike.
Words, music and action were in complete harmony. Maria had discovered in the music new movements and gestures, and through her understanding of Violetta she had found further colors in her voice, a deeper stillness and new, even sickly, tones for the last act. “I had striven for years,” she explained to Derek Prouse a few years later, “to create a sickly quality in the voice of Violetta; after all, she is a sick woman. It’s all a question of breath, and you need a very clear throat to sustain this tired way of talking or singing. And what did they say? ‘Callas is tired. The voice is tired.’ But that is precisely the impression I was trying to create. How could Violetta be in her condition and sing in big, high, round tones? It would be ridiculous.” And this sense of dramatic truth informed her every movement, even when she was not singing. Peter Diamand, who was then director of the Holland Festival and was later to fill the same role for the Edinburgh Festival, remembers a moment in her performance that vividly illustrates this: “I saw the production three times, and each time in the second act when Alfredo’s father comes in and makes a bitter remark about his son being ruined under her spell, Maria would walk across the s
tage with so strong an air of having been offended that every time I became convinced that something had happened to upset her and that she really was walking out of the production.”
The critics argued extravagantly about this Traviata, but it was largely Visconti who came under fire for, as one critic put it, “disfiguring and defiling Verdi’s opera.” The main targets for the critics’ anger were two of Visconti’s touches which many later came to see as inspired: Maria kicking her shoes in the air before tackling “Sempre libera” at the end of the first act, and Maria dying on her feet with her hat and coat on, her great eyes staring blankly into space, at the end of the last act. In time Visconti’s Traviata became one of the most talked about operatic legends, but for some time after opening night, on May 28, it existed in a kind of critical outer darkness. The custodians of Verdi’s sacred flame pronounced Visconti’s treatment irreverent, even vulgar. Maria had her detractors, too, but they were drowned in the general adulation for her performance, summed up by the critic of 24 Ore: “This aristocrat of the dramatic and vocal art was able to return to the opera its aura of fervor, its atmosphere of throbbing anguish of which the director was determined to rob the performance.”
Maria’s backstage detractors were much harder to handle. Through the long weeks of rehearsals, Giuseppe di Stefano, who sang Violetta’s lover, Alfredo, had been storing resentment against her. For him singing was singing and all the time she and Visconti were spending over gestures, movements and expressions amounted to nothing but tedious horseplay. When Visconti began coaxing him and Maria into the intimate love-play he had conceived for Violetta and Alfredo, di Stefano could take no more. He started turning up late and sometimes not turning up at all. “It’s lack of respect for me, lack of regard, and also for you!” fumed Maria. Visconti was much more philosophical. “I don’t give a damn if the fool comes late,” he told her. “We’ll act out his scenes together; worse for him if he doesn’t learn anything.” But the tension between di Stefano and Maria was rising and no one needed clairvoyance to predict that at some point it would have to break. That point came on the first night.
Maria Callas Page 17