Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  What made these details suddenly very important and brought out the censorious nanny in music lovers was that when Maria woke up the next morning, less than thirty-six hours before curtain time, her voice was gone. She could hardly whisper, and she soon realized that she simply could not sing. An urgent call was put through to the management of the opera house. A substitute had to be found. The artistic director rushed around to the Hotel Quirinale. “Substitute? Impossible,” he snapped. “This is no ordinary evening. This is a gala opening! The house is sold out, and the public has paid to see and hear Callas.” The president of Italy was going to be there with his wife, and so was a large slice of Italian society. It had been planned months in advance and it was being treated as the artistic event of the year. On top of all that it was being broadcast. There is no way Maria can cancel, insisted the management. There is no way, said Meneghini. There is no way, echoed Elsa Maxwell, who had by now joined the anxious vigil in Maria’s suite. Maria kept spraying her throat, taking all the prescribed medication, crossing herself in front of her little Madonna, putting hot compresses on her chest; but the Voice was not going to obey. Only a miracle would bring it back, and the miracle was not happening. There was no doubt in Maria’s mind that she could not sing, and yet this supposedly strong, tough, stubborn woman, the tigress of the international press, feebly gave in. “I don’t want to be bullied by anybody,” she had said once. “My own convictions and inner feelings tell me what I should do. Maybe those feelings are right or maybe they are wrong, but I stand up, and have the courage to do so.” By allowing herself to be bullied on this occasion, and deciding, against her instincts, to go ahead, Maria was about to create the greatest scandal of her career and the most widely publicized scandal in the history of opera.

  “Norma approaches, and the star of Rome veils itself in terror,” sing the Druid priestesses at the beginning of the opera. Maria made her entrance, and from the first phrase she knew that she was not going to get through it. She was in agony, her voice painfully strident and slipping away from her with every note she sang. It is obvious from the tape of the broadcast that there was no room in Maria’s mind for any thought of drama or interpretation. All her instincts were directed toward one thing—survival. The audience sat in amazed silence; it might almost have been embarrassment. At the end of the first act some found their voices. There were loud shouts of “Go back to Milan” and “You’ve cost us a million lire!” But underneath the noise of those shouting, the same stunned silence could still be felt.

  Back in her dressing room, Maria, white and trembling with exhaustion, made her decision thirty-six hours too late: she could not go on. Panic broke out among the management. Despite all the warnings, despite the fact that everyone was perfectly aware of Maria’s condition, no one in the opera house had thought of making arrangements for an understudy. Carlo Latini, the general manager, beseeched her to go on; Elsa Maxwell dabbed her face with cologne; Margherita Wallmann tried to convince her that the hardest moments of the opera were behind her; Gabriele Santini, the conductor, appealed to her artistic pride; other voices reminded her of what she owed to Italy, pointing out that the president himself was in the audience, even insisting that the evening could still be saved if she merely walked through the part, declaiming it without singing. The intermission was going on and on, the audience was getting restless, the rumors were getting wilder. Everyone’s eyes kept darting to what was once the Royal Box. No, the president was still there. Yes, the president was still waiting. And then suddenly the president had gone. He had been told minutes before the public announcement and had left only to discover that his chauffeur was not waiting outside—the poor man had taken what he felt was a safe risk, found out what time the performance was due to end and had gone to the cinema. He lost his job, but he was by no means the only casualty of the night. All over Rome, husbands or wives were coming home unexpectedly early, with dire consequences. Or even when they were expected: one straying husband, arriving at the time the opera was supposed to have ended, described in detail to his wife a performance she already knew had been canceled.

  Maria left the opera house through an underpass that led directly to the Hotel Quirinale. It was just as well. All the street exits, including the stage door, had been blocked by angry crowds waiting for Maria’s exit. When it was clear that their prey had somehow eluded them, they moved on, still shouting and gesticulating, to Maria’s hotel. Some of them stayed there until the early hours of the morning, punctuating her sleeplessness with their bitter abuse. Maria, awake throughout, spent the night waiting. Waiting for someone to arrive from the opera house and explain that it had all been their fault for forcing her to go on? For someone to arrive from heaven and erase these nightmarish hours from her life? For the morning newspapers so that she could read what she had already heard, already knew, they felt about her? “This second-rate artist,” began Il Giorno, “Italian by her marriage, Milanese because of the unfounded admiration of certain segments of La Scala’s audience, international because of her dangerous friendship with Elsa Maxwell, has for several years followed a path of melodramatic debauchery. This episode shows that Maria Meneghini Callas is also a disagreeable performer who lacks the most elementary sense of discipline and propriety.”

  It seemed that there was no news other than of Maria. The papers were savage—“Scandalo!” “Disgrazia,” “Insulta.” Mercifully the new day brought not only vicious press reports, it also brought phone calls and telegrams from all over the world, from colleagues and friends reassuring Maria of their support and understanding. Visconti’s was one of the first telegrams to arrive. Not much later came a phone call from the president’s wife herself. Maria had immediately sent a letter to her and her husband explaining and apologizing. And Signora Gronchi called to assure Maria that neither she nor her husband had been offended, and no apology was necessary. But tempers were still running high. At the Biffi Scala in Milan, diners actually came to blows when one of them dared to speak up for Maria; and in the Italian Parliament, Deputy Bozzi denounced Maria for her slight against Italy and its head of state. In these circumstances the opera house, in the interests of public order as they put it, asked the prefecture of Rome for an order banning Maria from claiming her right to sing the remaining three performances of Norma for which she had been contracted—in effect banning her from entering the precincts of the opera house. The order was granted and Anita Cerquetti was flown in to take Maria’s place. Maria, embittered, exhausted and lonely, had no option but to flee Rome for Milan. She made sure that the flight was a richly operatic performance. Dressed in a severely tailored suit with dramatic makeup and a veil over her face, she appeared, after five days of isolation, in the lobby of the Quirinale, where a huge crowd of photographers was waiting for her.

  Later in the year the memory of her humiliation was sufficiently alive for her to sue the Rome opera house for the sum of 2,700,000 lire in fees for the performances she had been barred from singing, as well as for traveling expenses and an unspecified sum in damages. Another legal battle, another battle she would eventually win, another hollow victory paid for with conflict, separation, worry. “Always a fight—that’s been the trouble with my career, I’ve always had to fight. And I don’t like it. I don’t like fights and I don’t like quarrels. I hate the nervous mental condition they engender. But if I have to fight, I’ll fight. Up to now I have generally won, but never with any feeling of elation. They are bleak triumphs, simply because it was necessary to fight in the first place.”

  There were to be more triumphs before the dramatic change now approaching in her life, but they were all bleak, won against the background of growing isolation. The world Maria had conquered was crumbling around her. She was losing the joy she had once found in her work. And she knew it. Those who still seek an explanation for the declining number of her performances and new roles after 1958 have the answer, clear and unambiguous, in her own words: “When you are young, you like to stretch your voice, you
enjoy singing, you love it. It’s not a question of willpower, it has nothing to do with driving ambition. You simply love your work—this beautiful, intangible thing which is called music. If you sing out of pleasure and enjoyment things come beautifully. It’s like getting drunk—only from pleasure, the pleasure of doing something well. Just like an acrobat when he feels on form and feels the happiness of the public and is inspired to more and more adventurous feats of daring. The more you enjoy it, the more you feel like doing.”

  And the less you enjoy it, the less you feel like doing. It is clear that she was enjoying work less and less, especially after the open hostility she felt from everybody at La Scala. The strained civility of the previous months between Ghiringhelli and herself had collapsed into undisguised antagonism after the Rome scandal. “I love the Scala above all other theaters,” Maria had said. “I consider it my home.” Now her home was spurning her. It was the most painful blow of all, and it cost Maria more than her disputes with Rome, Vienna, Athens and San Francisco put together.

  She had never felt as pained or as relieved at leaving Milan as she did this time. A concert in Chicago, the hearing before the American Guild of Musical Artists and, if that went well, a season at the Metropolitan were ahead of her. On her way to Chicago she stopped in Paris for six hours. In her present dejected state the overwhelming welcome Paris gave her restored her for the moment, and colored forever her view of the city she was eventually to make her home. A huge crowd of photographers and radio, television and press reporters were at Orly airport, waiting for her. Maria, in a beige mink coat, a velvet hat and with Toy in her arms, was ready to meet the French press for the first time. She was clearly moved—as if they were all there to remind her that she was still glorious, still loved, still supreme.

  The questions jostled each other: “All the journalists have left Paris to be here with you. N’est-ce pas magnifique?” “Are you not moved by the welcome Paris is giving you?” “What about Rome?” Maria answered patiently, smilingly, while Toy, cosy in her arms, devoured the orchids she had rested on her lap. “Rome has at least allowed me to count my friends,” was Maria’s half-sweet, half-bitter reply to the Rome question. “Thank you to all those who have defended me.”

  Maria, who had not yet sung in Paris, had Paris at her feet. After a quick change at the Hôtel Crillon, she arrived at Maxim’s for the dinner given in her honor by EMI’s French counterpart. As Maxim’s monthly newsletter proudly proclaimed on its cover: 350 minutes à Paris—84 au Maxim’s. The chef had created a special dish for her, la selle d’agneau à la Callas, and next to her plate had been placed a little transistor radio on which she could hear her recording of Trovatore the French radio was broadcasting. No detail and no courtesy had been overlooked. Even her superstitious belief that thirteen at table was unlucky had been attended to: the other guests had been warned that if one of them had to leave the table for a few minutes, another was to get up from the table at the same time. As Le Figaro put it: “Paris gave Maria the welcome it reserves for sovereigns and honored prophets.”

  The ten minutes of applause in Chicago before the concert began seemed a pale welcome by comparison, but none of this could dispel her growing concern as the day of the hearing before the American Guild of Musical Artists approached. It turned out to be a great performance. The immediate cause of the hearing was Maria’s cancellation of her appearance in San Francisco, but for well over two hours, putting aside the regalia of the Queen of Opera, she defended herself and her entire professional record to the jury of twenty men whose verdict would determine whether she would appear at the Met eight days later. The verdict was equivocal. Maria was not suspended, but she was reprimanded. She could, therefore, go on singing, but it was to be under a swelling cloud of professional disapproval.

  She started rehearsing for her first Traviata at the Met. It was the revival of the Tyrone Guthrie production, with shabby, unimaginative sets, cosingers who ranged from indifferent to downright incompetent, and grossly inadequate rehearsal time. Maria, who knew just how much her own performance depended on everything and everyone else onstage, was angry and apprehensive. “I try always to have a decent company around me,” she explained once for the benefit of those who accused her of being too demanding, “and about that I am touchy. Because if I work up to a certain atmosphere and suddenly my colleague bursts out with a ridiculous phrase or sings without feeling, then this hard work of creation—which may have taken half an hour of performance—is shattered in a split second. One then has to work for another half hour to rebuild it.” But on this occasion she decided to say nothing and show nothing. With the press and the public eagerly looking out for signs of the famous Callas temperament, she could not, and would not, risk another confrontation.

  The first night of Traviata on February 6 turned out to be one of Maria’s greatest personal triumphs. It was not the perfect Traviata, but it was clearly the most exciting, the most dramatically true Violetta the New Yorkers had ever seen. During thirty minutes of curtain calls, Maria was recalled again and again, leaving no doubt as to whose night this was. “We pay for these evenings,” was Maria’s comment on the hysteria that so often surrounded her first nights. “I can ignore it. But my subconscious can’t. And that’s worse. I confess there are times when part of me is flattered by the high emotional climate, but generally I don’t like any moment of it. You start to feel condemned.” It was as if, never able to enjoy the present, she felt subconsciously condemned to live up to the future expectations the hysteria aroused, condemned to go on performing at a level and intensity that would justify the hysteria, condemned to repeat and exceed the feats of the first night on the second and on the third and on the fourth. “The more fame you have, the more responsibility is yours and the smaller and more defenseless you feel.” So she said and she never ceased to believe it.

  She longed for relaxation, for peace, for mental stability—words which crop up again and again in her letters and statements. In New York, among two Traviatas, three Lucias and two Toscas, she chose Elsa Maxwell as her guide to relaxation and tranquillity. The result was exhaustion and excitement—excitement from the luxury and glamour that Maxwell and her friends showed Maria; exhaustion because that world, far from being relaxing, demanded a constant, relentless performance. George Bernard Shaw had called Maxwell the eighth wonder of the world. Shavian irony aside, there was nevertheless something to wonder at in the way this seventy-three-year-old woman, whom someone else had likened to a baby whale stranded on a beach, had for years stayed at the center of the Beautiful People, with the rich fawning on her and the famous dancing attendance.

  Maria was busy acquiring a first-class season ticket to Maxwell’s world, and at the same time she was scoring an artistic triumph in Tosca. On this occasion her dramatic guide and inspirer was not a producer but a conductor and a fellow Greek, Dimitri Mitropoulos. He had also conducted her first Tosca at the Met in 1956, but this time there was a new fire, a new and deeper intensity in their collaboration. “You must give the public shivers,” Maria said fifteen years later to a student soprano at the Juilliard School. On February 28, 1958, her Tosca did give the New York public shivers. And on March 5, she did it again—and more so. She gave them shivers not only when they saw the knife gleaming as she was about to kill Scarpia, but even when she knelt to pray: “She really prayed,” remembered Mitropoulos. “It wasn’t just for the audience.” Maria’s father was there for the first night. So, of course, was Elsa Maxwell. “Why should a woman,” she wrote, “capable of so noble an expression in the classic arts, be tortured by a destiny that makes her happiness almost impossible? Her mother, I believe without question, has been the cause of this situation.”

  Evangelia, now divorced from her husband, had been living in New York for over a year, but Maria, who shared La Maxwell’s belief, had coldly refused all attempts by friends and relatives to reunite them. Maria had slammed the door on her past and its pain, and nothing was going to make her open it aga
in. All her pent-up affection flowed toward her father instead. Two days before the first night of Tosca she even appeared with him on Hy Gardner’s television talk show. George was dignified, a bit diffident, and above all proud. As for Maria, she spoke devotedly of her husband but refused to be drawn out on the subject of her mother. Hy Gardner, who also had a column in the New York Herald Tribune, had met Maria at a lunch given in her honor by publisher Henry Sell. “I came to lunch expecting to meet a cold, tempestuous but talented female ogre,” he wrote in his column, “and found instead a warm, sincere, handsome and down-to-earth human being, a real live doll.”

  Perhaps because he clearly responded to Maria, perhaps because Maria herself was feeling more relaxed and secure, the program was a much greater success than her Person to Person interview with Ed Murrow a month earlier. The Herald Tribune, commenting on the Ed Murrow program, had described her as the “epitome of moderation and easy-going good humor”; from beginning to end during the fifteen-minute interview with Murrow, Maria, the fascinating, unpredictable artist, had yielded to the conventional matron, and the result had been frigid propriety. Still, millions of people across the States who had no interest in opera had now seen her on the small screen. Standing near the pinnacle of worldwide fame, Maria was ambivalent about it, one moment radiant in the attention and admiration and the next moment snappish and resentful in the fear that it would all come to an abrupt end.

  Her stay in New York was coming to an end and she still had not reached an agreement with Rudolf Bing about the next season, about what it would include and in what order. They had discussed a large number of possibilities. At one point, Bing even asked her whether she would consider singing the Queen of the Night.