Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  The opening night was a fiasco. It was a fiasco of production, direction, design and characterization. As Giulini put it: “It was an artistic mistake, utterly routine, thrown together, with nothing given deep study or preparation. . . . I conducted every performance with my head down so I wouldn’t see what was happening onstage.” It was everybody’s fiasco but it was treated as Maria’s. At La Scala, especially La Scala of the fifties, just as in the Circus Maximus, blood had to be shed; and the bluer the blood, the greater the thrill. The victimization was hardly subtle: some hissed and whistled; many talked while Maria was singing; others conspicuously walked out during the performance.

  It was a night to delight the philistines, but also to destroy some of the more pretentious illusions about high opera and high culture. It was a night that made Maria raise the barricades around herself even higher. And it was the night that gave Giulini what he described later as the worst memory of his life in the theater and led to his giving up conducting at La Scala. “The audience is jaded, annoyed, bored, so it prays for a scandal. When Maria’s Rosina was whistled and hissed, people went home content. This even though Maria was the prize of the theater, greatly admired, even to the point of idolatry. As such, she became a target. In some ways she provoked such reaction. Her bows, for example, showed a certain insolence, her iron will to vanquish. With Alceste, Maria and I earned respect, esteem, probably because the audience was afraid to expose its ignorance about the work. I feel certain, however, that Maria’s greatest triumphs at La Scala—even her incomparable Violetta—left something of a bitter taste in her mouth.”

  This bitter taste, even after her triumphs, is the key to understanding why she became increasingly weighed down by the anguish her work was causing her. There was the work itself and the impossible demands she kept making on herself; there was the accumulated resentment when colleagues, designers, directors and opera staff did not live up to her own perfectionist standards; there was the drain of always wanting, and expecting, to be first; finally—and this is the key Giulini hinted at—there was the disappointment, the bitter taste, left after her achievements and despite all the acclamation. This was partly caused by the intensity with which she felt the hostility, and partly by the merciless way she judged herself even when everyone else clamorously celebrated her triumphs. “Only on very rare occasions do I feel I have given a really marvelous performance,” she once said. “Here is one of the things that nearly drives me out of my mind. I can never tell absolutely when I have given a great performance. For this is the paradox. What an audience feels is a great performance does not necessarily mean the same thing to me. It sometimes happens that I think I have not been doing justice to a role. And yet after just such an evening, people come crowding in to congratulate me, and all compliments embarrass me. Then at other times, when I feel I have really given of my best, the audience’s reaction is not the same. So the mystery remains. It haunts me.”

  Also, by now Maria had reached the fulfillment of her dream, and dreams fulfilled rarely satisfy beyond the period of novelty and a sense of completion. Coping with ambition fulfilled had turned out to be much harder than achieving the ambition in the first place. The force pulling her away from the self-imposed torment of her work was growing all the time.

  The season at La Scala ended with Giordano’s Fedora, based, as is Tosca, on a play by Sardou, and written, again like Tosca, as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt. The hatchets were out for Maria even before opening night. She was thought by many to be unsuitable for Fedora, an opera with so much realism, unlyrical music and heavy orchestration. On opening night the catcalls and whistles made the point less elegantly and more forcefully. And in the reviews that followed, the main theme of the criticisms of the years to come could be clearly heard: Maria’s voice was losing its power. Even among her admirers the same criticism was implied: “Even if she is not the greatest singer she is certainly one of the world’s greatest actresses.” Maria onstage, coached by the Russian actress Tatiana Pavlova, became the Russian princess, Fedora Romanov. Franco Corelli still remembers all the hard work that went into the production for four weeks. More to the point, he remembers Maria, the devoted colleague, whose first commitment was to the total effect of the drama. “No one can imagine what it meant to me, a virtual beginner on the stage, only in my second year at La Scala, to work with Callas. I learnt so much. . . . Maria was extremely thoughtful with me and tried to make everything easy. And she did. She herself was so involved in the opera that she involved me too. I felt it a duty to respond, to work deeply, as never before, in a way I did not fully comprehend, but which I strongly sensed.” Maria’s generosity toward those of her colleagues who were at the start of an international career shows just how much she was able to give and how much she did give when she was feeling confident and secure.

  La Scala’s season was over, and the pall of defeat hung in the air. It had not been a bad season in itself, but it was not being judged by itself. It was constantly judged against the triumphs of the year before —La Sonnambula, La Vestale, Traviata.

  At the beginning of June 1956, Maria was glad to leave Milan for Vienna, where the majestic Staatsoper was celebrating its first season since its reconstruction after the war. As part of the celebrations, La Scala, with Karajan conducting, was presenting Maria in Lucia. The visit began with a sudden fright. Maria had barely settled in the Hotel Sacher when she discovered that the miniature oil painting of the Madonna that she always carried with her was missing. After frantic phone calls to Milan, it was found in her bedroom and a friend was dispatched to bring it to Vienna in good time for the opening night on June 12. The little Madonna had been a present from Meneghini during her Verona debut in 1947. Maria, who never went onstage without crossing herself three times, was devoted to her Madonna. And she stayed devoted long after Meneghini had faded from her life. It was much more than a child’s need for her doll or an empty superstition. It was a largely unconscious but deeply fearful recognition that her great powers were on loan—the gods give them, the gods take them away. Holding the little Madonna in her hands or crossing herself before going onstage was almost an act of propitiation designed to keep the gods on her side. Among Maria’s rituals, the only thing that changed was the way she crossed herself. While she was married to Meneghini, she would cross herself Italian style, with fingers outstretched. Soon after Onassis came into her life, she began crossing herself like a good Greek Orthodox, with the fingers bunched together. And she would often stop at a church she was passing, especially in Greece, to light a candle to the Virgin.

  The miniature Madonna certainly performed her miracle on that first night in Vienna. The applause and the bravos at the end lasted for twenty minutes and Theodor Körner, president of the Austrian Republic, applauded with as much fervor as the rest. Meneghini was watching with the air of a provincial manager who was pleased with a full, enthusiastic house but never doubted he would have it. He had a way of licking his lips which reinforced his air of self-satisfaction. At the end of the opera, traffic outside the Staatsoper had to be stopped, and special police had to be brought in to disperse the crowds and make it possible for Maria to leave the opera house. Italian catcalls and out-of-season radishes seemed a long way away. Maria, whom thousands had already discovered through her records, had once again lived up to the legend that surrounded her.

  She sang three Lucias in Vienna and the third, on June 16, was her last engagement until a recording session on August 3. She was worn out after a week that was emotionally, as well as physically, exhausting; July was spent on Ischia, off the coast of Italy, waiting for her strength to return. October and her long-awaited debut at the Met were not far away. While she was resting and swimming in Ischia, the news reached her that in the week of her opening at the Met, she was going to be on the cover of Time magazine—the authentic seal of international stardom. Henry Koener had been commissioned to paint her portrait for the cover. Their first meeting took place in Venice in the middle of Au
gust. Maria was a guest of honor at the Seventeenth Annual Motion Picture Festival, and Koener had first set eyes on her sitting behind dark sunglasses under a tent on the Lido on a sweltering Friday afternoon. She was again lying under the tent, this time chatting with Carla Mocenigo, a younger friend from the Fenice days, when two young men approached them and asked them out that night. Maria was instantly transformed into a flirtatious little girl. “I can’t tell you now. I have to ask my father,” she replied, pointing at Meneghini who was fast asleep beside her.

  Back in Milan the following Sunday, she had her first sitting with Henry Koener. Koener arrived at Via Buonarroti and was rather unexpectedly confronted not with the glamorous Queen of Opera but with another Maria: “She looked forbidding, like a New York career girl: black dress, dark-rimmed glasses.” That was how some saw this second Maria. Others saw her as a forbidding Greek matron severely dressed in black. Either way, it was not the Maria of the press and the legend. The sittings, in between recording sessions, lasted for ten days and were fraught with tension. “I hated her, yet enjoyed painting her beautiful face, and I paid her back by making her pose even harder.” These do not sound like the ideal conditions for portrait painting, but they seemed to work, and Maria, Koener and Time magazine were all satisfied with the result.

  Meanwhile, Maria’s recording of Trovatore under Karajan was followed by her recording of La Bohème under Antonino Votto. Maria had learned the part of Mimi specially for this recording, but she never sang it onstage. Votto was also the conductor for Maria’s third recording that year: Un Ballo in Maschera. The name of Serafin is conspicuously absent from Maria’s recording output in 1956. The maestro, Maria’s most important musical mentor apart from Elvira de Hidalgo, had fallen from royal favor. He had dared to accept EMI’s offer to record Traviata with Antonietta Stella, since under the terms of her contract with Cetra, Maria could not rerecord Traviata until 1957. Maria, as sensitive as ever to signs of betrayal and hints of exclusion—even imaginary ones—was quick to retaliate. From the Via Michelangelo Buonarroti came the imperious announcement: no more recordings with Serafin. It was a decision that soon became part of the folklore of ingratitude and ruthlessness that was to surround Maria.

  The public personality of Maria Meneghini Callas, the compelling demon born of the needs, fears, aggressions and insecurities of Maria Kalogeropoulos, was still in flux. New York, with its sleepless legions of hidden and not-so-hidden persuaders, PR men, reporters, photographers, gossip columnists and scandalmongers, was soon to change all that.

  9

  ON OCTOBER 15, 1956, ON THE eve of those two world-changing events, the Suez invasion and the Hungarian Revolution, Maria arrived at New York’s Idlewild Airport. There to meet her, eleven years after he had met her on his own when the Stockholm docked in New York, was George Kalogeropoulos, this time accompanied by Francis Robinson of the Met, Dario Soria of EMI, and an attorney in the event of legal complications. Nor was Maria alone. With her were her husband, two secretaries and her poodle, Toy. And this time George did not have to discover that his daughter was arriving in New York by stumbling across her name in a passenger list. Even if Maria had not let him know, he could hardly have failed to notice that the New York press was full of her imminent debut at the Met. George collected every newspaper and magazine that even so much as mentioned his daughter’s name, kept them all in neat piles and seemed to care more for them than for the recordings that Maria sent him. He never learned to love opera, but he would go to the end of the world to hear his daughter sing. Whether it was Mexico, Italy, Greece or Idlewild Airport, Maria’s invitation to be present was a royal command.

  In thirteen days, she would be opening the Met season in Norma. The agreement had been reached nearly a year earlier when, just before going onstage at the Chicago Lyric to sing Leonora in Trovatore, she finally signed the long-awaited contract engaging her to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Rudolf Bing had bowed and kissed her hand and then he had bowed and kissed her hand again and again for the benefit of the swarming photographers determined to get the best shot of the ceremony for the late editions of their papers. “How much have you settled for? $1000 a night? $1500? $2000?” The press knew that Bing’s celebrated principle of never exceeding $1000 a night had been abandoned. What they wanted to know was: by how dramatic a margin? But Bing, the perfect courtier when he chose to be, was not going to kiss and tell. “Come, come, our artists work for the love of art! Or sometimes for a few flowers. . . . Let’s just say that this time she’ll be getting a few more flowers.”

  Bing continued to be the embodiment of courtesy and support through the days leading up to opening night. “We gave Miss Callas treatment no other singer has ever received,” he wrote in his memoirs. “He was helpful and kind without being gushing,” was Maria’s summing-up. And she needed all the support he could give her; on the surface every bit the cool, toughened professional for whom one opera house is very much like another, underneath she was anxious and uneasy. Bing himself was struck by her “girlishness, the innocent dependence on others that was so strong a part of her personality when she did not feel she had to be wary.” “Is New York anxious to hear me?” she had written to him from Milan. Indeed it was, replied Bing, who remembers Maria’s opening night as “undoubtedly the most exciting of all in my time at the Metropolitan.”

  Maria knew she was on trial, and part of her was sick and tired of being on trial, especially as she knew that she would go on being on trial every time she sang. She had reached the zenith of her career in Milan, London, Berlin, Vienna and Chicago, and yet she knew that in the eyes of the world and in her own eyes she was only as good as her next performance. Two days before the first night, Time magazine was published with Maria on the cover and a four-page cover story about her. For a long time after she had read it, Maria abandoned herself to grief and rage. Time, following its usual practice, had distributed a questionnaire to Maria’s friends—and enemies—and had managed to get many to talk; some had embroidered, or even invented, the stories they told. Time’s greatest coup was persuading Maria’s mother to give it an excerpt from Maria’s last letter to her: “Don’t come to us with your troubles. I had to work for my money and you are young enough to work too. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out of the window or drown yourself.” Her letter was blunt and mean, and even discounting the hyperbole, there is no doubt that she harbored the deepest, darkest resentment against her mother. As she herself once said: “I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad.” And in 1950, she had written to her godfather: “As for mother, I gave her all I could for this year. After all it’s about time each one arranges his own life as I did mine.”

  The revelations about Maria’s relationship with her mother were the most damaging for her public image, but there was another quarry that Time had relentlessly pursued: Maria’s relationship with her colleagues. Right at the start of the article, Maria was described as “a diva more widely hated by her colleagues and more widely loved by her public than any other living singer.” A colleague was quoted anonymously as saying that “the day will come when Maria will sing by herself.” To back their nameless source they had di Stefano declaring, “I’m never going to sing opera with her again and that’s final.” As Maria’s luck would have it, they had caught di Stefano at a time when his friendship with Maria had reached one of its recurring low ebbs. Seven months later, the man who was never going to sing opera with Maria again was recording Manon Lescaut with her. He had to eat his words, but the words had been printed and had already contributed to the damage the Time article had done.

  That damage was almost tangible on the first night. The New York Times had announced on the day that “never had so many Americans tried to pay so much money to hear an opera.” Actually many had paid to see Maria, no
t to hear an opera. Yet when the person they had come to see made her entrance on the stage, the applause was cold, formal, almost hostile—in ominously striking contrast to the applause that greeted Zinka Milanov when she swept down the aisle to take her seat. New York, the perfect haven for monstres sacrés, had decided that Maria had overstepped the limit. It was one thing to be eccentric, extravagant, tempestuous and temperamental, and quite another to be mean and ungrateful to your mother.

  So musical—and fashionable—New York had paid a lot of money to come and defy Maria to move them, impress them, convince them that she was all that legend insisted she was. And she did. The first act was difficult, nearly impossible. The heat of a New York Indian summer was exhausting, the tension was unbearable, and Maria, visibly nervous, was not in her best voice. So frightened was she that she stood in the wings literally unable to move until the stage director, Dino Yannopoulos, had to shove her forcibly onto the stage, saying, “I promised to deliver a prima donna and so I will; after that it’s up to you.” In the second act, the miracle happened. The magic that had been only intermittent and fleeting in the first act broke through and took complete command of the audience. Maria Callas the opera singer who was rude to deputy sheriffs and unkind to her mother disappeared under the force and majesty with which Maria invested Norma. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the audience surrendered. Ten years later, when Maria’s voice was nearly in shreds, Harold Schonberg of The New York Times summed up the reason: “Something in the woman hits nearly every member of the audience right in the viscera. While she continues to have that something, people will tear down the doors and yell themselves hoarse and what you or I or anybody else may say will make no difference.” On that long-awaited and much-feared night, the audience did yell themselves hoarse through sixteen curtain calls. The curtain calls were a performance in themselves, culminating in a solo bow in defiance of Bing’s instructions when Mario del Monaco and Cesare Siepi withdrew and left Maria alone. A minute earlier she had picked a bouquet of flowers from the stage and offered them each a rose with a smile impossible to resist.