Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  No applause was allowed, but there was, nonetheless, a loud burst of clapping when Maria walked in from the wings. She waved her hand for silence: this was a class, not a performance. “Are we all settled?” There are pictures of her at Juilliard with her long auburn hair falling in thick waves over her shoulders, her horn-rimmed glasses more on than off (after all Ari is unlikely to be watching), involved, smiling, at ease. The emphasis of the teacher, like the emphasis of the performer, is on reaching the emotional heart of the music, communicating its drama. She listens absorbed, sometimes beating time with her ball-point. Sometimes only her ever-expressive eyes show whether she approves or disapproves; sometimes with a regal wave of the hand she stops them.

  To the young tenor singing a duet from Butterfly: “Do you know what you are saying to her?”

  “Yeah, I’m telling her ‘At last you’re mine.’ ”

  “Then sing it that way,” she snapped back.

  To the soprano who has just gone through Gilda’s “Caro nome”: “Gilda is a passionate girl, you know; you must convey to the audience all her palpitating emotion before you even begin to sing. The very act of breathing is an emotion.”

  To a tenor slightly lacking in intensity: “Come on now, Mario. More passion. You are a Neapolitan, you have no excuse.” But when he made to embrace the soprano, she instantly interrupted: “No gestures! With the voice!”

  To a Korean baritone singing the Prologue from Pagliacci: “You have a big voice there; let it out . . . I don’t care if you crack on the top note, but hit it hard. Caruso cracked many times.” And not just Caruso. But only once did Maria allow her pupils and the audience into her own private agony. A young soprano had just finished singing Aida’s “O patria mia,” and had made a bit of a mess of it. She turned to Maria to explain: “There are three or four notes I just can’t manage.” “Likewise,” was Maria’s reply, and the self-mocking smile did not stop the shivers from running down everyone’s spine.

  When she was asked once what was the greatest key to performing music well, Maria had replied, “You must make love to it.” Yet when a student soprano at Juilliard neglected the trills in a Verdi aria, Maria stopped her.

  “Where are those trills?”

  “Do I have to do them?” pleaded the girl.

  “Could you imagine a violinist or pianist,” she snapped, “even a beginner in this conservatory, refusing or unable to perform those written ornaments? He would be thrown out, considered incompetent. With singers, it is no different—whatever they might think.”

  This combination of technical mastery and musical passion was what made Maria unique. But could this secret be communicated? For that matter were the Juilliard master classes the opportunity for music’s retired High Priestess to pass on her wisdom and her secrets to the younger generation? Or were they a safe way for the greatest dramatic singer in the world to try out her strength in public, illustrating her teaching by singing but without running the risk of being judged? There is no doubt that, although Maria became totally involved with her pupils, she did see the master classes mainly as an attempt to break through her terror of singing in public by doing so as an extension of teaching onstage. And there is no doubt that most of the notables in the audience, from former colleagues to the new general manager of the Met, were there not so much to hear Maria’s advice on interpretation as to hear Maria demonstrate her advice.

  “Suddenly,” wrote Richard Roud, “during the Butterfly duet, one heard a ghostly third voice—Callas singing along with the soprano. Then, like something out of the past, that magnificent voice welled up. Like the curate’s egg, however, it is magnificent only in parts. A phrase of five or six notes comes out with all the black velvet splendour of the old days: then without warning it goes. Like some ancient tapestry there are patches where the colours are still bright, where the gold threads still gleam, but there are others where it is so threadbare that you can see right down to the warp and woof.”

  Despite all the caveats, Maria did get from the Juilliard master classes the simple confirmation that she could once again face the public without the paralyzing panic of the last years of her career. But she could not have enough reassurance; she wanted another opinion. Michael Cacoyannis happened to be in New York at the time producing Bohème, so she arranged to sing just for him one afternoon at the Juilliard theater, which she had booked in great secrecy. “She asked me to sit somewhere where she couldn’t see me,” recalled Cacoyannis. “She was nervous and apologetic. ‘I’ve just come back from the dentist,’ she explained, ‘so I’m not in very good voice. . . .’ ”

  It is a haunting scene. The great Callas, nervous as at her first audition, singing in an empty auditorium for one man, a friend who she knew cared for her, but who nevertheless she wanted hidden somewhere in the dark, so that she could not even feel him there, even though, blind as she was, she would not have seen him; and yet eagerly, anxiously, waiting for his opinion, for reassurance. “You can do it, Maria,” he said.

  There were not many left who believed that she could. She asked Peter Mennin, the head of the Juilliard School, whether he thought she could do it. “It was an honest question, and it deserved an honest answer,” he remembers, “so I said no. The room she had been working in with Masiello was acoustically very good, a room that flattered the voice. This and the response she got during the master classes had encouraged her too much. But demonstrating a phrase beautifully is not the same as carrying off a whole evening.”

  In March 1972, the master classes were drawing to a close, and the future lay barren ahead of her. George Moore, president of the Metropolitan Opera board, very unexpectedly had offered her the job of artistic director at the Met. She was sufficiently interested to spend a lunch hour at the Oak Room of the Plaza, discussing with Schuyler Chapin, then manager of the Met, the dreadful state of opera houses. But no more. It was around this time that di Stefano came back into her life. The last time they had sung together was on December 22, 1957, the last night of Un Ballo in Maschera at La Scala. “Maria, let’s come back together,” he said now, and he said it again and again. Maria never answered no right away, even when she had no intention of ever saying yes, but in this case she had a much greater investment in the discussions. For a start, she dreaded the emptiness stretching ahead once the master classes were over. Even more important, in terms of reliving her old triumphs, di Stefano was infinitely better than a hundred pirate recordings. He was like a walking embodiment of her glorious years. All the old animosities, fights and walkouts melted in the warmth of reliving their past together. Di Stefano’s tenor voice was one of the best of the century, but the animal intensity with which he sang had very quickly worn it out. “What is so exciting about him,” someone had said in di Stefano’s heyday, “is that he is dying as he is singing.” By the time he met Maria again, his career had rather ingloriously petered out. It was a curious match, grounded in weakness: di Stefano, musically dead for years, feeding off Maria’s legend, and Maria, consumed with fears, feeding off his raw Italian bluster which at first she took for strength. Deeply lonely, Maria let herself drift into a relationship that gave her some joy but mostly caused her great pain. Di Stefano was married and, according to Maria’s strict moral code, one does not have affairs with married men. What made it even harder was that di Stefano’s wife—another Maria, as it happened—was someone she knew and liked. As always for Maria, when action and belief diverged, guilt closed the gap. She remained, right to the end, extremely secretive about their relationship, and only to her godfather did she write openly and freely.

  Their match was rooted in the past, but di Stefano was determined that it would at least have a professional future. The first attempt was a recording made in London at the end of 1972 with Antonio de Almeida conducting. The greatest secrecy shrouded all the arrangements. Until the last moment the London Symphony Orchestra did not even know who the soloists would be. Verdi and Donizetti duets were recorded and rerecorded. There were many proble
ms, one of them being that di Stefano seemed unable to sing except at full volume. But they were all determined to perform the miracle, and slowly, patiently, resurrect two of the century’s greatest voices.

  On December 4, a few days after the recording sessions had begun, Maria heard the news of her father’s death in Athens. He was eighty-six years old, and by then nearly blind. After his marriage he had returned to live in Greece, and had become even more remote from Maria’s life. So she felt all the more strongly that she had left unfinished business with him, and now he was dead. She felt a warmth for him she had not often experienced in the last few years, and this intensified her grief. She remembered once, when she was a child, walking with him in New York. She wanted an ice cream but would not ask for it. She stopped in front of the ice-cream vendor and pulled her father’s jacket, but she would not ask. And when, then and later, she longed for his attention and tenderness she still did not ask. Nor did he. So they met mainly on her first nights, but rarely connecting, by then both finding it hard to give or to receive tenderness. And the rift his remarriage had caused seemed now so unnecessary.

  His death had another effect, in many ways much more painful. It opened the doors to the greatest of all the remaining items on the agenda of her life—her relationship with her mother. “I would never make up with my mother, and I have very good reasons,” she had said a year earlier. “She did many wrong things to me, and blood is just not that strong a tie. I don’t feel I have to act and say ‘Mother darling.’ I just can’t fake.” It was by no means so clear-cut. Her resentment was one side of the equation, her guilt was the other. When the buzz of the world had subsided, the guilt recollected in solitude became too intense, too uncomfortable, to be ignored. She still could not bear, as she said, to “make up” with her mother, but she needed to do something to exorcise the guilt, so she began sending money. Evangelia saved all the pink receipt slips from the bank as though they were love letters. And in a sense they were; or if not love letters, at least they were the first evidence of a thawing in the relationship.

  Maria’s conflicts with her family came up in one of her most pained, incoherent and contradictory outbursts to John Ardoin, beginning with a reference to a recent letter from her sister. “But when you have a family and that family kicks you like mad . . . And then on top of it she says of Mamma’s growing, Pappa’s growing, older, you know. Now what would you feel like? I could strangle that girl, girl—a woman of over fifty. You tell me that they’re growing older. Well, of course they’re older, so am I, everybody’s growing older. So what do we have? Four homes isolated, mine and three of theirs. Miserably alone. At least I have accomplished something that is true. But why should I have accomplished something alone, and why should I now be alone at home when we all should be, all four of us, one helping the other? . . . Not the least thought. A revolution happened in Paris. Do you think my parents called or my sister? Not one. My friends called, admirers who don’t even know me, from London, from Italy. My ex-maid, my ex-cook called me. That makes you think, you know . . .” And seven years later, in August 1975, after Jackie’s perennial fiancé, Milton Embiricos, had died of cancer, she came back to the same bitter theme, and even some of the same bitter words, in a letter to her godfather (see page 320).

  There is not one word from Maria on the subject of her mother and her family spoken from any position other than that of the victim. Her unconscious longing to end the division with her family became much more intense and conscious when there was no longer any hope of having a family of her own. And yet she did nothing, and indeed thwarted all attempts, to bring them together. The longing was real, but the fear was no less real; nor is the paradox so hard to understand. If Maria had been reconciled with her mother, she would have had, for the first time, to stop blaming her for everything in her life, and this would have started the process of ending one of her most persistent and self-destructive patterns. There were very many things for which she could blame her mother, just as there was a lot of truth in her complaints about Meneghini, the Rome opera house management, Ghiringhelli and Rudolf Bing. But her sense of having been victimized and her underlying self-pity became a poison running through her life and corroding everything long after the events themselves or the actual harm done. “God, I’m still feeling the result of Rome,” she said in 1968, exactly ten years after her Rome walkout. “I could not go on with the performance, I could not be killed that way. It would be stupidity. If I had my vocal possibilities, if I hadn’t been sick, I would have stood there. I’ve done that thousands of times at the Scala, everywhere. I’m famous for having defended myself well. The tigress, they call me. But do I need to be crucified? I didn’t have my voice. It was slipping all the time, with an aggressive public. And so forth and so on, and this and that, and my mother and now him. I’ve got to sit back and take it and try not to say anything, for whaever I do say will be to my disadvantage. Whatever I say, it will be undignified for me, not for them. Who cares? So I don’t have even one friend. Why?”

  This outburst, which puts Maria in the center of a hostile world out to do her harm, to betray her, to “crucify” her, sums up the way she perceived reality. “Only my dogs will not betray me,” she said in the last few months of her life. By the end, these convictions had become a veil which would not allow her to experience or even see anything that contradicted them. What she looked for she discovered, what she expected she brought to pass; yet toward the end, the same woman who had against all odds made herself everything that she had become, was seeing life as something that happened to her, and herself as at the mercy of others, as the victim of their hostility, their incompetence, their dishonesty. And this in turn increased her pain, her anger and, above all, her fear.

  Yet she did have glimpses of how, contrary to what she believed, she had in herself the key to change things and to find the peace that eluded her. “All these things have become reflexes. . . . I look at myself and I say, ‘Well, Maria, you had better start working on your subconscious now, to clean out the bad thoughts or the bad reflexes that have been created.’ ” But this would have meant daring to delve into the depths of her consciousness where she had all these years stored hurt, bitterness, anger and resentment; having truly confronted them and understood them, she could, for the first time, have been free of them—and free of her mother, free of her ex-husband, free of all the assorted enemies she went on carrying on her back right to the end. But she did not dare set out on the journey she had outlined for herself. She was becoming more desperate, more isolated, more bitter with each year. The recording, in the middle of which she had received the news of her father’s death, turned out to be a failure. Despite the most skillful editing, she decided that it could not be released.

  It was her last foray into a recording studio, but she needed to work. “Work, work, work, that’s everything,” she said at the time. “The important thing for me is to work. There is, of course, love too. But if I believe in love, I believe also in my art, and art demands discipline.” The mantle of the vestal virgin that she had worn willingly, single-mindedly, even passionately for over twenty years, she now clutched to herself, assuming an old role that she did not want, because she was afraid to fall back on herself.

  The woman who as a young girl had crossed the Atlantic alone with a hundred dollars in her pocket, ready to brave everything to build her career, was now scared to take any step without di Stefano to lean on. The Teatro Regio in Turin, which had just been completed and was described by enthusiasts as “the most beautiful theater in Europe,” was to open its doors on April 10, 1973. The management wanted a spectacular opening, so they asked the most spectacular person in the world of opera. They knew that she would not agree to sing, so they invited her to make her debut in a new career by directing I Vespri Siciliani, with which they were planning to open the first season. Yes, said Maria, but only if di Stefano can be my codirector. The Turin management agreed—after all, having Maria as an opera director was a spectacu
lar coup, di Stefano or no di Stefano—and Maria began work.

  Two months before she started rehearsing she was to be the witness to a deep misery she could do nothing to ease. On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis took off from Athens in his father’s Piaggio for a test run to check out a personal pilot before assigning him to the plane. Seconds later, the Piaggio banked sharply, causing the plane to cartwheel for 460 feet and crash. Alexander was recognized only by the monogram on his bloodstained handkerchief. His right temple had been reduced to pulp and his brain was irreparably damaged. Onassis’ son had been the most important person in his life, not because of their relationship, which was by no means a wholly happy one, but because the son represented the future—the only intimation of immortality for a man totally caught up in the world. By the time Onassis and Jackie arrived from New York, Alexander was being kept alive by a life-support system in an oxygen tent. A few hours later all hope had gone. Onassis asked the doctors to wait until Christina had arrived from Brazil and then “to torture him no more.” In his first shocking paroxysm of grief, he refused to have Alexander buried. Nobody quite knew what he wanted instead. In between spells of catatonic pain and outbursts of rage and blasphemy, he wanted the body “deep-frozen.” Then he wanted him buried inside the chapel on Skorpios—a privilege reserved for saints. Finally he agreed to have him buried by the side of the chapel and have the grave covered by an annex later.

  After the funeral Maria provided his only hold on life. She herself had been deeply shaken by Alexander’s death. Six months earlier, when the man who had succeeded Rudolf Bing at the Met had died in a car crash in Italy, she had written to Dorle Soria: “I was horrified by the death of Gentele. . . . We think we are here forever, and we plan ahead, but you never know.” When Maggie van Zuylen had died the year before, Maria had been afraid to surrender to her grief, with its inescapable reminder of her own mortality. Now, as she began to understand the depth of Ari’s sense of loss, she was too shaken to resist any longer the full power of her fear of death, and she could think of nothing else. But it was his pain that hurt her most. When he first came to see her after the funeral, she was appalled by the sight of the man who walked in, and after a few minutes with him she was even more frightened. He was not the man she knew, but he was still the man she loved. It was as if a lifetime’s guilt had crystallized around Alexander’s death. If he had only changed the Piaggio for a helicopter, Alexander would be alive; if only he had not asked to have the new pilot tested, his son would still be with him. . . . Maria could see that his grief and rage, unchecked and turned against himself, were destroying him. At such a time his conviction that behind the crash was a conspiracy by his enemies, baseless though it was, served to direct some of the poisonous rage away from himself and toward the imaginary but hated villains. He offered half a million dollars to any informant and half a million to a charity of his choice. “He had built himself,” recalled one of his aides, “a whole edifice of suspicion and paranoia; the number of suspects and supposed motives was almost limitless.” He seemed determined to spend everything he owned and the rest of his life to find out who had killed his son; that someone had, he was in no doubt.