Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (18 page)

Opera was suddenly alive again at Covent Garden, no longer an art form better fitted for museums than for the stage, but an art with a glittering present and a future that promised to be even more exciting. There were, as there always would be at Maria’s performances, the detractors, led on this occasion by the doyen of English music critics Ernest Newman who found her “slightly sub-normal.” And there were, as there always would be, those who complained of harsh nasal tones. But the audience responded in a way that made it clear they knew—or at least sensed—that a new era had arrived in opera.

The fact that with Maria Callas a dramatic turning point had been reached may have been overlooked in Italy where the operatic tradition was an unbroken one. In London, however, and even elsewhere in Europe, the life of opera had always been a chain of islands in a sea of indifference. And now there had emerged from this sea a newfound land, recognizable from afar, by even the most indifferent, as a treasure island.

Andrew Porter summed up her Norma: “Maria Meneghini Callas is the Norma of our day, as Ponselle and Grisi were of theirs.” Philip Hope-Wallace summed up her presence: “Tall and splendid, like one of Millais’ pictures of mid-Victorian divas.” David Webster summed up the response of the opera house: Maria Callas became his child and Covent Garden was offered to her as a home in which she grew and flourished as time went by, and in which, as if to show her gratitude, she did much of her finest work. It was a celebration all around. Maria brought international splendor to a still provincial Covent Garden. Covent Garden hailed her as
the
new Norma,
the
new operatic superstar,
the
new beginning.

“But does she have to be so big?” That was one of the questions asked directly or covertly in the press commentaries that surrounded her visit. That was also the question that began to work its way more and more pressingly into Maria’s mind. When she first appeared in
Aida
at the Arena of Verona, one of the critics had written that “it was impossible to tell the difference between the legs of the Elephants on the stage and those of Aida sung by Maria Callas.” “I cried bitter tears for many days when I read the article,” said Maria shortly before she died, the memory still painful and alive. “It was cruel, horrible.” At the time she was not yet prepared to do anything about it, but by the end of her
Norma
performance in London, Maria the actress was feeling seriously hampered by her traditionally operatic size. Also she was beginning to be increasingly bothered by headaches, fainting spells and attacks of car sickness which she attributed more to the excess weight she carried than to anything else.

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.