Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (19 page)

Like so many who bask in reflected glory, Meneghini was becoming more royal than the queen—always on the lookout for signs of
lèse-Callas
. He seemed constantly to seek out people’s ambiguous gestures and equivocal words in order to decipher them as signs of disloyalty. The surest sign of it was a less-than-total willingness to do anything demanded—which in Meneghinese meant to
pay
anything demanded—to obtain Maria’s services. Rudolf Bing had failed to pass the cash test; negotiations were broken off and both Meneghini and, with his prompting, Maria worked themselves into a solemn rage. Meneghini gave vent to it in a statement to the press: “My wife will not sing at the Metropolitan as long as Mr. Bing runs it. It is their loss.” It was not long before he had to eat his words, but for the time being, instead of New York, Maria went back to London. Once again at the Savoy, she was given the same suite with its beige-and-white walls, and the huge mirror over the fireplace. From now on this was unofficially known as “the Callas suite,” and for the older members of the Savoy staff who still remembered Tetrazzini, there was a spasm of nostalgia when the massive bouquets arrived before and after all Maria’s first nights. This time there were three:
Aida, Norma
and
Trovatore
. It was her Leonora in
Trovatore
that carried the day. “In some way I cannot define,” wrote Cecil Smith in
Opera
, “she embodied both Leonora’s passionate humanness and the formality with which the score and libretto universalize her emotions. The voice—or rather the use of it—was a source of unending amazement. For once we hear the trills fully executed, the scales and arpeggios totally full-bodied, the portamentos and long-breathing phrases fully supported and exquisitely inflected. The spectacular ovation after “D’amor sull’ ali rosee” in the last act was no less than Callas deserved . . .”

But Maria was not happy: she was not happy with the shabby sets, she was not happy with many of the singers engaged, and she was not happy with the conventional production. She probably would have been irritable even if the production had been of the highest artistic standards and the singers perfect. She had, after all, kept a punishing work schedule, living on green salads, almost raw meat and electrical massages. And an Audrey Hepburn likeness still seemed a very long way away.

She returned to Italy at the beginning of July and spent the summer between the Arena of Verona and recording sessions in Milan. After
Cavalleria Rusticana
with Serafin conducting, she began recording
Tosca
—a recording that was to make history, and one in which Maria’s transforming effect on what she is singing is there for all to hear. The combination of four ruthless perfectionists—Walter Legge, Victor de Sabata, Tito Gobbi and Maria—meant that for eleven days at La Scala, where the recording was being made, perfection was relentlessly pursued through miles of tape. Tito Gobbi had to sing his first-act music thirty times, working on the color and the inflection even in individual syllables, before it would pass, and Maria worked on one phrase, “
E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma
,” for half an hour before they were satisfied.

Maria had first worked with de Sabata nine months earlier when they opened the La Scala season with
Vespri Siciliani
. The beginning of their relationship was quite tempestuous, right up to and including the dress rehearsal attended by critics and invited guests. At one point there was a slight discrepancy between Callas and the orchestra. De Sabata instantly stopped and shouted, “Callas—watch me!” “No, Maestro,” smiled Maria, wagging her finger. “
You
watch me—your sight is better than mine.” They had both tested their strength, and had decided that war between them would be too exhausting, so a peace followed, which during the recording grew into a friendship based on total professional respect.

After the recordings were over, Maria had more than a month of rest ahead before the resumption of her autumn engagements. It was spent at home in Verona. Each of these respites had a distinct effect on the Meneghini home: more and more gilded objects, the latest gadgets and every kind of expensive knickknack filled the rooms. As her home became heavier and more cluttered, the hostess became lighter by the day. The effect was not yet as dramatic as it was going to be, but Madame Biki, the new influence in Maria’s life, was doing her best to accentuate it. Biki, who as well as being one of Milan’s leading fashion designers, was also Puccini’s granddaughter, was introduced to Maria at a dinner party given by Toscanini’s daughter, Wally. Wally had become very close to Maria and kept doing her best to wean her father away from his total commitment to Tebaldi. It was Wally who had arranged the audition with her father that led to the plans for the
Macbeth
that in the end never happened. Now she was responsible for another—and much more fruitful—introduction. Biki took charge of Maria’s wardrobe and her influence on Maria was unchallenged, at least for the moment.

La Wally
, the opera after whose heroine Toscanini had named his daughter, had been chosen by La Scala to open their 1953–54 season to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Alfredo Catalani’s death. Renata Tebaldi was Wally, and even before opening night the press, the claqueurs and the Scala regulars were eagerly anticipating trouble. Ghiringhelli had once again divided the season with Solomonlike fairness:
Lucia, Don Carlo, Alceste
and
Medea
for Maria;
La Wally, Otello, Tosca
and
Eugene Onegin
for Renata. The only thing he could do nothing diplomatic about was the crucial question of who should have the honor of opening the season. The previous season it had been Maria. This season, on the basis of Ghiringhelli’s symmetrical justice, it had to be Renata.

Emilio Radius, music critic of
L’Europeo
, suggested with a touching naïveté that the two rivals should bury the hatchet and have a great public handshake for the greater glory of opera. It is not clear whether Mr. Radius’ suggestion influenced Maria’s decision or not, but there she was on opening night fervently and prominently applauding from her box. “Happily,” commented
Musica e Dischi
, “rivalry goes hand in hand with chivalry.” In the proscenium box was Toscanini himself, applauding no less fervently. A couple of nights later when Maria opened in
Medea
, Tebaldi failed to return the compliment. She was not there at all. Nor was Toscanini, who to the end remained one of Tebaldi’s staunchest supporters.

Medea
was a replacement for Scarlatti’s
Mitridate Eupatore
. After Maria’s
Medea
in Florence, the public response was so overwhelming that Ghiringhelli felt he had almost no option but to include
Medea
in the forthcoming season; Maria’s Medea demanded to be heard. For Margherita Wallmann, who was directing the production, the last-minute switch was a nightmare. As if all her problems with sets, costumes and staging were not enough, ten days before opening night Victor de Sabata fell ill. Despair crept over La Scala. Suddenly Ghiringhelli saw a savior in the shape of Leonard Bernstein, who was just coming to the end of a long concert tour in Italy. At the age of thirty-five, Bernstein had written musicals and one symphony, he had conducted the New York Philharmonic, he had taught at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, but he had never worked in an opera house, he had never even heard of Cherubini’s
Medea
, he was exhausted from his Italian tour, he was suffering from acute bronchitis—and he had ten days before opening night. But he fell in love with Cherubini’s score at a glance, and to the absolute delight of everybody at La Scala, he said yes. His two main worries after he had said yes were the decomposing first-edition score with which La Scala had provided him and his impending meeting with Maria—especially since he wanted to cut out one of her arias. The tattered pages went on giving off dust throughout the rehearsal and making tears stream down his face. But Maria found the Bernstein amalgam of sharp wit, good manners and sense of drama irresistible. As for Bernstein, working with Maria was to make up for all the coughing, the sneezing and the tears. “Then came the famous meeting with Maria. To my absolute amazement she understood immediately the dramatic reasons for the transposition of scenes and numbers, and the cutting out of her aria in the second act. We got along famously—just perfect. She understood everything
I
wanted and I understood everything
she
wanted.”

On opening night, Maria, at her most powerful and most magnetic, had the audience enraptured. Or as Bernstein put it: “The place was out of its mind. Callas? She was pure electricity.” In the last act, when Medea is ready to murder her children, she was seen, as the curtains parted, lying head downward diagonally on the high staircase of the temple, a great bloodred cloak and her glowing auburn hair spread out around her. Totally immobile, gazing into the stormy night sky, she sang her first line: “Numi, venite a me, inferni Dei!” (“Deities, come to me, infernal gods!”). At the first rehearsal, Maria broke down in tears. “I can’t sing from such a position. It’s impossible,” she said to Margherita Wallmann between her tears. But she did, and the tornadoes of applause at the end continued to ring in her ears for hours afterward.

“This place will sink,” cries Medea. “You do not mark the center. Grass, earth, stones, speak to me.” So much of the music Maria chose to sing—and she was increasingly in a position to sing only what she chose—appealed to the primordial emotions, passions and sensibilities latent in modern man. “Maria identified with Medea,” said Margherita Wallmann. “She was still a very young woman, married to a much older man. I am sure that certain sexual frustrations found an outlet in her work—unfulfilled passions were released in her singing and acting.” This quasi-Freudian interpretation seems far too narrow to encompass the phenomenon of Maria. It was not only her own unfulfilled passions that were released by her singing and acting, but the unfulfilled, packed-down emotions of the modern public. Maria went beyond even that. Throughout her life, she played out in stark colors the conflict going on, in a much less clear and defined way, in each one of us: the conflict between our rational, respectable, conventional, “normal” self and the deeper, primordial self, home both of the darkness we harbor and of all life-giving forces. The divorce between the two was in her case painful and dramatic. Medea and the respectable housewife represented the two extremes—the uncontainable primitive emotions and the straitjacketed, meticulous, obsessive order with which she was surrounding herself. It was as if these emotions were to be tucked away in life as were her dresses, with matching gloves and shoes and labels indicating where and when they had been worn. Onassis helped reconcile these extremes for a while. When that was over, all that was conventionally respectable, even prudish, in her came to the surface to stay, increasingly dominating her public pronouncements. “In those days there was restraint,” she said in 1971 to a student soprano singing “D’amour l’ardente flamme” from
The Damnation of Faust
at the Juilliard School in New York. “I wish it were like that now. Now, it’s all exposed.” Was this the same Maria Callas who had sung Medea, Norma and Lady Macbeth?

Maria closed the year with
Medea
and it was with
Medea
that she opened 1954, always to sold-out houses. In between she spent a few Christmas days at her home in Verona. “If these were better times for music,” wrote Emilio Radius, “Maria Callas would be the most famous woman in Europe.” She was soon to be exactly that and more, and the fame had less and less to do with music. Meanwhile she was steadily losing weight and her confidence rose with every pound she shed. What with her growing success and her constantly improving appearance, Maria was acquiring that kind of self-confidence which enables a human being to take the risk of loving others. Although her security was far from deeply rooted, it meant that Maria could allow herself to become more relaxed with those around her, more aware of them and more caring toward them.

If headlines could build security the ones that greeted the first night of
Lucia
at La Scala, on January 18, 1954, would have made her secure forever:

LA SCALA IN DELIRIUM

FOUR MINUTES OF APPLAUSE FOR THE MAD SCENE

A RAIN OF RED CARNATIONS

The rain of red carnations had begun even before the audience went wild at the most famous mad scene in all opera. Maria picked up the red carnations one by one in a graceful allusion to the coming scene in which, as
The Opera News
reported, “she outdid many a stage Ophelia.” The plot of Donizetti’s
Lucia
, in which the heroine is forced to marry a man she does not love, was taken directly from Walter Scott’s novel. Maria was fascinated by it; Karajan, who conducted and directed the Scala production, was no less fascinated, even going to the trouble of touring the Walter Scott country to get the feel of its architecture, its light and its ironwork. The moody, dim lighting Karajan achieved in his production was all important for the effect of Gianni Ratto’s impressionistic designs. Maria hated the bare, stylized sets, but adored working with Karajan. Her visual realization of Lucia was largely her own and there were touches of striking originality in it. At the beginning of the Mad Scene, she emerged at the top of the staircase with her hair disheveled, wearing over her nightdress a long white robe with immense sleeves opening in a hundred pleats and with a glazed stare in her eyes. She was not holding a dagger and her reasons for this break with tradition provided eloquent testimony to the integrity of her dramatic sense: “I dislike violence and I find it artistically inefficient. Where it is necessary to include the shedding of blood, the suggestion of the action is more moving than the exhibition of it. I always eliminated the knife when singing Lucia. I thought it was a useless and old-fashioned business, that the action could get in the way of the art, and realism interfere with the truth.” It was the perfect epitaph for a thousand modern productions, often as untruthful as they are “realistic.”