Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (21 page)

“Q
UESTION: WHICH IS MAD, THE CALLAS LUCIA OR HER FRENZIED PUBLIC
?”—so read the headlines on Claudia Cassidy’s review of Callas’ last creation in Chicago. “Near pandemonium broke out. There was an avalanche of applause, a roar of cheers growing steadily louder and a standing ovation, and the aisles were full of men pushing as close to the stage as possible. I am sure they wished for bouquets to throw, a carriage to pull through the streets. Myself, I wished they had had both.” There were twenty-two curtain calls at the last performance of
Lucia
and still the cheering audience would not let her go. Maria felt more vindicated than triumphant. “There is justice,” she said at the time. “I have had it. There is God. I have been touched by God’s finger.”

She had indeed. But behind the glory, the adulation, the dream come true, a cloud was darkening the sky. So far, it could hardly be seen with eyes dazzled by the blaze of her triumph; it was, after all, nothing more than a tiresome lawsuit brought by the disgruntled Bagarozy. The suit, based on the 1947 contract that granted Bagarozy power as the artist’s sole representative, claimed a percentage of Maria’s fees and the expenses he was supposed to have incurred on her behalf—a total of $300,000. Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who had signed the same agreement, paid a few thousand dollars and reached a settlement, but Meneghini had no intention of giving up anything, and Maria immediately issued a denial of Bagarozy’s claim, declaring that the 1947 contract was obtained under duress and that Bagarozy had done absolutely nothing to promote her career.

The draining effect of the Bagarozy lawsuit, over three years of expensive and highly publicized legal maneuvers, grew inexorably greater, and like many of the other clouds over her life, it could so easily have been avoided. But for now Maria’s career, like the midday sun, was at its zenith. It would soon begin to set, but that moment still seemed far off, and Maria basked in the light shed by a popular acclaim never equaled, before or since, in all the history of opera.

8

“W
HAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ALL
that weight? How did you make yourself so beautiful?” It was Maria’s first day back at La Scala. Blonde, slim, still riding high after the Chicago triumph, she walked into the theater and was greeted by an amazed Toscanini. The transformation was so spectacular that even Toscanini, whose sight had always been notoriously poor, had noticed. The maestro had been lured back to inaugurate La Piccola Scala with
Falstaff
, though in the end it all became too much for him, and he never did. Visconti had been inspired by Maria. It was one of the most striking ways in which she helped revolutionize opera. She drew to the opera houses, and fired with her own vision, first Visconti and then Zeffirelli. Together they created the total theater, the perfect fusion of music, singing and drama of which so many had dreamed. She helped usher into opera houses, where conductors were kings, the reign of the producers, and at the same time she put the singer back in the center as the chief vehicle for the composer’s dramatic intentions. From one perspective we can see every major reform of opera, whether through Gluck, Wagner or Verdi, as directed toward raising the dramatic interest to equal the musical interest. With Maria the dramatic interest not only equaled the musical interest, it often far exceeded it, for she breathed richness into empty melodies, and gave dramatic life to operas which musically hardly deserved to be staged. Virtually single-handed, she revitalized and expanded the bel canto repertory and made us listen seriously to Bellini, Donizetti and even Spontini, by bringing to their music and her work a total dramatic commitment.

Spontini’s
La Vestale
, with which her collaboration with Visconti was launched, demonstrated this point. Maria had asked for its revival after it had suffered twenty-five years of neglect. Her reasons could hardly have been musical.
La Vestale
, with its pedestrian score and stilted plot, is a kind of poor man’s
Norma
: Giulia, like Norma, is a priestess who betrays her calling for the love of a Roman soldier; she allows the sacred flame to go out in the temple and is condemned to death for it. When she asked for
La Vestale
, Maria also determined that Visconti should produce it, so that together they could transcend dramatically the opera’s musical limitations. It was she who sought him out, and she who cleared the way into La Scala for him. He had the entire Milanese establishment against him—those who did not mind his homosexuality objected to his Communism and vice versa. But Maria was the reigning queen and Maria wanted Visconti. She wanted to draw into the world of opera men whose hearts were in drama. A few years later she did it again, when she approached Alexis Minotis, the great Greek theater director, and pleaded with him to direct her Medea.

“But I don’t know anything about opera,” he protested. “I don’t even like it.”

“So much the better,” she snapped. “I don’t want opera directors. I want
directors
.”

In Visconti, she had that and much more. Opera and drama were in his blood. Born in Milan, at the same moment that the curtain was rising on a performance of
Traviata
, he felt that he had been “practically raised at La Scala.” He grew up in a home saturated with art, and it was in his family’s box at the opera, fourth on the left in the first tier, decorated in red damask, that he learned to love opera as a very young boy. In 1897, his grandfather, Guido Visconti, duke of Modrone, headed a group of Milanese opera lovers who saved La Scala when the commune of Milan had unexpectedly withdrawn its financial support. He then proceeded to perform an even greater service to the house by appointing Toscanini as its artistic director. And now, in 1954, fifty-seven years later, Toscanini and the duke’s grandson had both been lured back.

To Maria, Visconti was a magician. He summoned up imperial, neoclassical Rome with enormous pillars flanking La Scala’s stage and with colors as stark as white, moonstruck marble. And he summoned up for Maria her vestal virgin, complete with every gesture, movement and expression. Maria and Visconti met at a point of intensity where there are no barriers. She was fascinated. More, she was in love. He had become part of her, and Maria, all sense of propriety forgotten, had no compunction about making it obvious to her husband and all those around her. At first her imagination was aroused by his stage genius, by the energy he radiated as he chain-smoked his way through rehearsals. But gradually the woman in her took over from the artist, and whether at rehearsals, backstage at La Scala or at the Biffi Scala, the restaurant nearest to the opera house, she scanned the horizon for his large, imposing figure with the elegant leonine head. Visconti was just as fascinated, but there was no sexual element in it, his own orientation being largely homosexual. “Beauty. Something beautiful,” was the way he summed up Maria. “Intensity, expression, everything. She was a monstrous phenomenon. Almost a sickness—the kind of actress that has passed for all time.” For Maria, Visconti was more than a monstrous artistic phenomenon; he was a man. She even began to be jealous of Franco Corelli, the young tenor making his first Scala appearance, persuading herself that Luchino was attracted to him.

In the photographs of their rehearsals of
Vestale
, Maria appears softer, younger and more beautiful than ever before. In the photographs of the performances she looks almost ethereal. All this newly awakened femininity needed an outlet, and Meneghini had stopped being a romantic focus for Maria a few days, perhaps hours, after they had met. There were, of course, times at the beginning and occasionally even later in their marriage when there was a real glow to the relationship, but those moments were rare. It is true that Meneghini could occasionally catch fire, but very quickly he subsided into his everyday self: an efficient, unimaginative manager with more than his share of vanity and self-importance.

Walter Legge described an instance that typified the Meneghinis’ relationship when the following year, after the first night of
Lucia
in Berlin, he returned to his hotel at three in the morning to be informed by the anxious concierge that Maria Callas and her husband were waiting for him, and insisted on seeing him no matter how late he came. “There they were, both sitting up in their beds,” recalled Walter Legge, “woolen undervests visible beneath their nightwear, reading Italian illustrateds, while they waited for an inquest upon the performance. Had she done herself justice? Was her applause louder and longer than anyone else ever had in Berlin? Reassured, they turned on their sides and switched off the lights.”

Toward the end of 1954, other forces and other needs had been awakened in Maria, and it was this awakening that had led to the obsession with Luchino. She was slim and attractive, and for the first time felt confident in her appeal to men, not just as a singer but as a woman. “Maria began to fall in love with me,” said Visconti a few years later. “Like so many Greeks she has a possessive streak and there were many terrible jealous scenes. She hated Corelli because he was handsome. It made her nervous—she was wary of beautiful people. She was always watching to see I didn’t give him more attention than I gave her.” The jealous scenes did not stop backstage at La Scala; they were carried on at Biffi Scala. Maria would burst in, looking for Visconti if she had failed to find him around La Scala. She would peer through her glasses—often specially put on for the occasion—and if she failed to see him, she would just storm off, ignoring everyone present. If he was there, she had a way of sensing, almost smelling, where he was and, even without her glasses on, darting toward him. There was something spectacular, even sublime, about the way she was prepared to make herself ridiculous. Her passion may have been sparked originally by art, but the way it was expressed was pure adolescence.

The total absence of sophisticated feminine tricks—coyness, aloofness and a diplomatic disguising of feelings—is refreshing, but at the same time hard to believe. Yet it is true. Maria at the age of thirty had a violent teenage crush on her teacher, for that was the role Visconti came increasingly to adopt in the course of the production. “I could forgive her anything,” said Visconti, referring to the jealous outbursts, “she did all I asked so scrupulously, so precisely, so beautifully. What I demanded she rendered, never adding anything of her own. Sometimes during a rehearsal I’d say, ‘Come on, Maria, do a little by yourself, do something you like.’ But then she’d ask, ‘What should I do? How am I to place this hand? I don’t know where to put it!’ The simple fact was that because of this crazy infatuation, she wanted to have me command her every step.” Maria had surrendered: the virago in her had gone into hiding and the lost little girl who wanted to be guided, protected and told what to do promptly emerged. “For me,” explained Visconti, “she was a wonderful instrument which could be played as I wished and which responded in an inspired way.” And, added the headmaster graciously, “If put on the right course, she always exceeded your hopes.”

Rumors about the production of
Vestale
had been circulating for some time before the first night, and expectations soared. Visconti was making a sensational debut as an opera director . . . Toscanini was going to be in the first-night audience . . . the production’s budget was an unprecedented 80 million lire . . . a raised stage had been built over the existing one . . . the performance was being broadcast . . . Maria Callas was more beautiful than ever . . .

On the night itself the spectacle, with the massive three-dimensional sets and the feathered headgear, was overwhelming. But what distinguished this first Callas-Visconti collaboration, and explains the influence it had on subsequent productions, was that the audience could at last believe in the action on the stage. The highlight of the evening, however, was not part of Visconti’s contribution. It was pure Callas. During one of the curtain calls after Act II, Maria was greeted by a torrent of carnations torn from the garlands that were decorating the opera house. She picked up one of them, bowed to Toscanini who was sitting in a stage box and gave the flower to the old maestro. The house went wild. Maria’s exact and instinctive sense of timing, both in character and during her curtain calls, was unique. Whether through the brilliant attack of her voice, the power to make it sound unexpectedly steely and harsh or the way she would suddenly color a phrase or shape a gesture to make a precise dramatic statement, she could create intense and unrepeatable moments. The day after the first night of
Vestale
, the front pages were full of the Toscanini-carnation incident. And full of Maria: “She looked superb,” wrote Peter Hoffer in
Music and Musicians
. Her appearance vied increasingly with her singing for first place in the critics’ praise.

Her first opera in 1955 was meant to be
Il Trovatore
with Mario del Monaco as Manrico, but five days before opening night on January 8, del Monaco, at the height of his popularity at the time, succeeded in persuading Ghiringhelli to replace
Trovatore
with Giordano’s
Andrea Chénier
, which he had sung three weeks earlier with great success at the Met. Maria, who at the time felt strong enough to undertake anything and who in any case loved throwing herself into new roles, agreed to learn the part of Maddalena di Coigny in five days. It was like old times again—as if she could not resist creating new challenges for herself.

She had always thrived on taking risks, but this time she fell off the tightrope. The punishing schedule of the previous six months and the concentrated rehearsals for
Chénier
showed in her voice on the first night, and by now, after her accumulated successes, there were plenty of people eager to magnify any flaw. They waited for her greatest moment in the opera, her big aria “
La mamma morta”;
and they did not wait in vain. Maria let a climactic high B get out of control and wobble widely. The result was pandemonium. Loud booing broke out and the hoots and whistles drowned the applause. The composer’s widow went backstage to congratulate Maria on her interpretation; Emilio Radius wrote that her performance “would have left the good Giordano openmouthed with admiration”; but this solace, like the applause of the night, was tainted for Maria by the echoes of the booing that went on long after the noise itself had stopped. She felt bitter, furious with the hooting and whistling that, as it did not take her long to discover, were led by the Tebaldi faction in the top gallery; but she felt even more furious with herself for having given in to del Monaco’s demand for the last-minute change.