Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (30 page)

Maria’s first public appearance in Italy since the Rome scandal was on April 9 at La Scala. The opera was
Anna Bolena
, and such was the hatred that had been stirred up against her since her “walkout” that in the square outside the opera house an entire company of armed police stood guard, ready to go into action if the anti-Callas protesters got out of hand. Inside, plainclothes policemen had been posted in strategic positions along corridors, and in foyers and boxes. But they could not protect Maria against the implacable indifference displayed by the audience throughout the first two scenes.

Then came the third scene and the dramatic turnabout. Piero Tosi was present: “As two guards came to seize her, Callas violently pushed them aside and hurled herself to the front of the stage, spitting her lines directly at the audience: ‘
Giudici! ad Anna!
 . . . 
Giudici
!’ [‘Judges! For Anna! . . . Judges!’]. It was not theatre anymore, it was reality. Callas was defending herself, all but saying, ‘If this is my trial, judge me. . . . But remember I am your queen!’ She dared her accusers and stared them down, dramatically surpassing anything she had ever done, singing with scorching brilliance. When the curtain fell, the audience went mad. Uproar, sheer lunacy. Then Callas swept forward for her bows, inflated with her power, her victory, her magnificence. And every time she came forth, she grew more, more, more. You could not dream what she did. It was a show within a show.”

The final show took place as Maria emerged at the stage door ready to leave the theater after the performance. She was dressed for confrontation: long, black chiffon dress, all her diamonds and a face stark white with the accumulated tension of the night. She expected to meet the hostile crowd that had been waiting at the square when she had walked into the theater before the performance. Instead the crowd was cheering. Word of her triumph had spread through the square as people left the theater and instantaneously, as if by a miracle, the crowd’s mood was transformed from anger to idolatry. Maria’s walk through the long loggia to the Biffi Scala where her car was waiting became the slow procession of a queen through her cheering subjects. The police who, guns at the ready, had been holding back the angry crowd only a short while earlier, looked on with stupefaction. Some even joined in the cheering. “After Callas drove away,” recalled Piero Tosi who had run to the stage door after the performance, “None of us could go home to sleep and we milled around for hours in a kind of shock and ecstasy.”

Maria herself was in ecstasy as she drove home. Nothing delighted her more than turning a predicted defeat into a glorious victory. But a gory sight awaited her at Via Buonarroti. The door, the walls, the threshold, the windows, the whole entrance and front of her treasured home, had been smeared with dung and covered with obscene writings. Just as swiftly as her magic had changed the crowd’s anger into cheers, the hatred turned her happiness into agony, her conquest into humiliation.” Is it all worth it?” was the question that once again rose inside her, demanding an answer. She was coming very close to the decision that it was not. What is more, the police seemed singularly unconcerned when Meneghini called to notify them, and there was precious little sympathy from La Scala.

Maria felt herself surrounded by hostility, envy and resentment. She was suffocating, and as soon as the last performance of
Anna Bolena
was over, she and Meneghini fled Milan for Sirmione, on the shores of Lake Garda, where they had bought a house earlier in the year. Meneghini had overseen everything, from the rebuilding and furnishing of the villa to the lawns, the hedgerows and the flower beds. Maria divided her time in Sirmione between her piano and Imogene in Bellini’s
Il Pirata
, her next role at La Scala. The night was her favorite time for work. She would lie in bed, score in hand, with Meneghini asleep beside her and Toy in her arms. This, as she said herself, was her happiest time, even happier than the glamorous first nights with all the anxiety that preceded them and the self-recriminations that followed them.

But another opening night loomed ahead. On May 19, Maria opened in
Il Pirata
. Ghiringhelli pointedly ignored her throughout the rehearsals, and despite the presence of sympathetic colleagues, Maria found the atmosphere at La Scala cold, artificial and tinged with hate. As she wrote in
Life
magazine: “If the theater of which you are a guest adds to the tension of a performance by continual harassment and rudeness, art becomes physically and morally impossible. For my self-defense and dignity, I had no choice but to leave La Scala.” Rumors of her decision had been circulating for months and intensified in the few days before the last performance on May 31. It was to be her 157th appearance at La Scala and, as it turned out, her last appearance there for over two and a half years.

In the final scene, Imogene, who knows that her pirate-lover must die, in her grief and fear sees in her mind’s eye the scaffold on which he is to be executed: “La . . . 
vedete . . . il palco funesto
” (“There, behold, the fateful scaffold”). By coincidence, “
palco
” means both scaffold and theater box in Italian. Maria seized the moment and the coincidence and with that dramatic audacity that was uniquely hers, she brought performance and reality together. She walked across the stage and with scorn in her eyes and a gesture of contempt, she spat the line “
il palco funesto
” straight at Ghiringhelli’s empty box. The allusion was impossible to miss, and the public, sensing that they were losing her, called her back time after time after time. Now it was Ghiringhelli’s turn for revenge. He gave a signal for the heavy safety curtain to be lowered abruptly, cutting off Maria from the audience, the cheers, the applause and the flowers with which her fans had wanted to shower her. “As I walked for the last time out of the theater that had been my operatic home for seven years,” remembered Maria, “they were standing out in the street throwing flowers for me. They had finally found a place where they could say good-bye.” Ghiringhelli retained his celebrated aloofness: “The prima donnas pass, La Scala remains,” was his laconic comment on Maria’s departure.

Breaking with La Scala was an emotional as well as professional uprooting for Maria. Ever since she first sang at Verona, married Meneghini and called herself Maria Meneghini Callas, she had been putting down roots in Italy. Her home in Milan and her country house in Sirmione nourished the roots, and her reign at La Scala was the taproot on which the life of the tree depended. Leaving La Scala was the first symbolic departure; it was to herald a series of exits at least as dramatic as any she had achieved on the operatic stage.

10

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
J
UNE
1958 Maria arrived in London to take part in the gala celebrating the centenary of Covent Garden. The Savoy felt more like home than Via Buonarroti, London more like home than Milan, Covent Garden a peaceful harbor after the cold, stormy sea of La Scala. The behavior of the management at Covent Garden could not have been more strikingly different from that of their counterparts at La Scala. Lord Harewood, part of Covent Garden’s administration since 1953, gave Maria his private office for her dressing room, thereby simultaneously keeping Maria happy and solving the appalling problem of dressing-room precedence for an evening which included, apart from Maria, Margot Fonteyn, Jon Vickers, Joan Sutherland and Blanche Thebom. The judgment of Solomon was that dressing-room number one—which by some historical accident is really number five at Covent Garden—should go to Dame Margot Fonteyn. So Lord Harewood’s office was cleared of all its usual equipment, a dressing table installed and the room filled with flowers.

On that night, June 10, 1958, Covent Garden shone with stars, but Maria outshone them all. She sang the Mad Scene from
Puritani
, and was called back eight times. After the show, about two hundred performers lined up to be presented to the queen. Maria, in a shimmering black sheath gown singularly inappropriate for curtseying, was among the first. When it was all over, she left the opera house, relaxed and glowing, for a late supper with Lord and Lady Harewood. As one newspaper put it, she was the star of the week. A few days after the gala she was being introduced to millions of viewers on the television program,
Chelsea at Eight
. She sang “
Vissi d’arte
” from
Tosca
and “
Una voce poco fa
” from
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
. “In the brief space of twelve or fifteen minutes, she showed what greatness is in opera,” wrote one television critic. “Television was made for things like that—and she was made for television,” said another. “She sang magnificently. She looked superb,” added a third.

Three days later the star of the week could be heard in a live broadcast of the first night of
Traviata
. The intermissions, for those who were present and no doubt for those at home, too, were hot with dispute. She was not in very good voice and the main subject of the disputes was how much these vocal deficiencies mattered. According to Peter Heyworth, not very much: “Callas’s understanding of this great part,” he wrote in
The Observer
, “finds its way into the smallest gesture and movement, into the nervous passage of a hand around the face, the terrible fragility of body that in the last act turns every movement into a labour, and the fearful abruptness with which the gaping image of death is all at once
there
in her staring eyes . . . And then Callas does after all sing. She may not on Friday have done so with beauty of tone, but in almost every other aspect it was a performance of outstanding distinction and musicality, full of detail that again and again illuminated the part as though for the first time.” But according to Philip Hope-Wallace the vocal deficiencies mattered a lot: “Some of us remained only fifty per cent enraptured. Personally I suffered much.”

The Callas controversy was still raging when Maria left London for Milan and from there for two months’ rest in Sirmione. But playing Chopin and Brahms in Sirmione, beautiful and serene though it was, did not satisfy Maria. Her persistent restlessness could not be assuaged by relaxing on the shores of Lake Garda in the company of a husband who was spending most of his time plotting her autumn and winter engagements. All was arranged: two recordings in London (which would become Maria’s recording headquarters after the end of her association with La Scala); a nationwide concert tour of America;
Traviata
and
Medea
at the Dallas Civic Opera. But one very obvious gap remained: the Metropolitan. Rudolf Bing knew that he wanted Maria for a series of twenty-six performances in three operas—
Macbeth, Tosca
and either
Lucia
or
Traviata
—but Maria seemed unable to decide exactly what she wanted from the Metropolitan.

She left for New York on October 7, with no decision made, and she left New York for Birmingham, Alabama, the first city of her concert tour, with everything still unresolved. The whole tour had been flawlessly organized by the Russian-born American impresario Sol Hurok, perhaps the most colorful and successful showman in a field which has always abounded in them; it was said of Hurok that he was to music what P. T. Barnum was to the circus. The first leg of her tour took her from Birmingham to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Montreal and from Montreal to Toronto. From Toronto she flew to Dallas. The Met season was about to begin, and still no decision had been reached.

On October 31, the opening night of her Dallas
Traviata
, she received a telegram of congratulations from Bing. “But why in Dallas?” was the question at the end of the good wishes. Perhaps Dallas had given her everything she could have wished for, and more: a new production of
Traviata
directed by Zeffirelli; a new production of
Medea
directed by Alexis Minotis, whom she herself had wooed into opera for the first time; Dallas had given her Jon Vickers, later one of the greatest Tristans and Otellos of our time, for her Jason; Nicola Rescigno, her favorite conductor of the moment; and unconditional enthusiasm and admiration combined with gratitude that her presence would turn a cultural backwater into the center of operatic news. This last was the key—the real answer to Bing’s question, “But why in Dallas?” Maria was tired of fighting, tired of being attacked and misrepresented in the New York press, tired of once again having to seduce the blasé Met audience into surrender. It is true that when she received Bing’s schedule of her performances she had valid objections to the way he had alternated Lady Macbeth, full of heavy dramatic demands on the voice, with fragile Violetta; but only a much deeper reluctance can explain her inability to decide what exactly she wanted from the Met and to communicate her wishes clearly through all these frustrating months of futile negotiations.

On both the first and second nights of
Traviata
, the Dallas State Fair Music Hall was filled with over 4000 adoring Callasites for whom Maria could do and sing no wrong. They loved the Zeffirelli production, which presented Violetta’s story in a series of flashbacks, and they certainly did not seem to care—or even to notice—that Maria was by no means in her best voice.

At rehearsals she amazed everyone, from Minotis to the wardrobe mistress, with her dedication, her stamina, her passion for work. Minotis remembers her once dropping in on a chorus rehearsal on her way to a party. Elegantly and elaborately dressed, she watched for a few minutes. “Then gradually she takes off her fur coat, throws away her hat, her shoes, the belt of her dress and within seconds she
is
Medea. That was Callas. Once she was in the surroundings of her art nothing else existed, nothing else mattered.”

There was real artistic fusion between Maria and Minotis. Married to the great Greek tragic actress Katina Paxinou, he found in Maria another great actress with the same powerful dramatic instinct. One morning in Dallas, he saw Maria kneeling, beating the floor in a frenzy to summon the gods, the very gesture that he and Paxinou had discovered in their search to recapture the movements and expressions used in the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. “How did you know?” asked the astonished Minotis. “I felt it would be the right thing to do for this moment in the drama,” was Maria’s answer. Her dramatic instincts went beyond logical explanation.